Pedal Over the Medal

Invitations to Reflect for the Year Ahead

Sunrise stroll, on the last day of 2025: spotted a lone boat-man cutting across golden water.

Everyone is talking about self-improvement. But I’m more interested in self-understanding.

Because how do we build a life that feels like home, one we’re proud of, if we don’t know what safety, joy, or honesty feel like in our own body?

I read a lot of self-help books on my healing journey, only to realise that healing has never been about fixing myself.

It’s been about listening the language of my body; tracing the patterns programmed by my upbringing, naming what hurts and what heals, and break the harmful patterns.

Self-reflection isn’t something we do only at the start of the year, it’s a practice, a willingness to turn inward with honesty.

My mantra for 2026: PEDAL over the MEDAL.

Achievements are not real success. How much we expand in the process is.

The real work was never about reaching a finish line. It was about paying attention to the inputs in the process: the small, daily choices we can control.

• Being honest about what we can and can not hold.

• Choosing presence over proving.

• Returning, again and again, to what feels aligned.

The outputs will follow. They always do.

My wish for you as we step into 2026:

May you fall in love with

the process you’re in.

May you listen to what your body

is telling you; not just your busy mind.

May you focus on what you can control.

And may you expand as you walk home to yourself.

Questions to Reflect for the Year Ahead

- When I reach the end of 2026 and look back, what would need to happen for me to say: "this year was a success"?

- Instead of adding more habits, what is the 1 habit that, if I stopped doing it, would create the most space in my life?

- If someone I love might not be here by the end of 2026, what moments would I choose to prioritise now?

- If I could tend to just 1 area of my life this year, which one would ease everything else?

- With the knowledge I have today, what lesson would I tell my past self (knowing it likely still applies)?

- If a very effective CEO were running my life, what is the 1st thing they would simplify or retire?

- Which relationship (or friendship) is asking for more presence this year, and how will I protect space for it?

- What fear feels HUGE when I imagine the future, but would feel small on my last day on earth?

- What would my 80-year-old self wish I did more of today?

- How do I want to begin my mornings in 2026, and what will I do to protect that choice?

- What 3 words will guide how I live this year?

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On Limits, Love, and Radical Honesty

It takes a great sobriety to know our depths and our limits.

— Maria Popova

Rather than numbing ourselves (pretending we are unhurt, untouched, endless) maybe the wiser thing we can do is be radically honest with ourselves.

To accept that our lives unfold differently: imperfect, unfinished, shaped by intention and accident, by love and lost, by choice and chance.

None of us arrive exactly as planned.

And yet, beneath our wildly different lives, we are moved by the same currents: the same hopes and fears, the same longings and untamed desires.

We keep learning the same lessons; just through different people and different seasons.

I’ve come to believe that what we are really moving toward is not perfection, but alignment : between who we are and who we’re meant to be.

A release from the constant inner negotiation with what society demands we become.

Perhaps—somewhere between now and the last day of 2026—something miraculous happens. And for me, it’s not the grand achievement.

It’s love. The love that matures us, that teaches us how to belong to ourselves. Love that guides us into accepting our own shape, our own depth, our limits, our callings.

The mind can be a lonely place; strange, complicated, often overwhelming.

And yet, it is also where meaning is made.

Where truth is found or lost.

Where the past and future touch in a single living moment.

Isn’t it miraculous how one inner world can reach another; ease someone else’s loneliness, ripple forward into a future we will never see?

And maybe that’s why our devotion matters.

Why we write, create, build, reflect, and listen.

Because even now (especially now) in our reflections, something meaningful is happening.

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To everyone who has supported me on this journey from my work at the intersection of climate X economy X fighting against injustice at Women’s Lantern, to my upcoming book The Homecoming (about the art of healing, reclaiming your body & voice) : thank you.

Thank you for giving me your most precious resource: your attention.

Thank you for allowing me to do work that feels deeply meaningful, work that comes from the heart and returns to it.