The Annual Review

There is a dissonance I see every year, both personally and professionally. On the one hand there is the cynic’s view of New Year’s Resolutions: “Why are you waiting until January to make a change? Today is as good as any.”

On the other hand, there’s the reality of the calendar.

Technically, the cynic is right. My younger self would have been firmly in this camp, maybe not so much now... You don’t need a specific date to change your life in any meaningful way. But practically, you cannot rebuild a car engine while driving 70mph down the motorway, not matter how hard you try. You ideally need the vehicle to be stationary.

For most of us, late December, once Christmas has cleared, is the only time the car actually stops.

Christmas, by nature has a slower pace to it. It’s reflective. You have downtime, recovery, time spent with family and loved ones, and crucially—you aren’t in the middle of the usual work-life cycle. The emails slow down, the school runs pause, commitments slow, and the meetings disappear for now.

Therefore, this period is actually the ideal time to complete an Annual Review. Not because January 1st is some magical date from which all our dreams and goals will sprout, but because you have the cognitive bandwidth to actually think past tomorrow.

But if we want to avoid the failure rate of typical resolutions (40-80% of individuals have already “failed” by by mid-February…) we need to stop making “wishes” and start conducting an “audit”.

Phase One: Data Over Feelings

Most individuals set resolutions based on how they feel in the moment. You feel heavy after a food-splurge at Christmas, so you resolve to losing the weight in the new year. You feel broke after buying gifts, so you resolve to be better next year at saving ahead of time.

As a coach, I know that feelings and emotions can be fickle; data is not. To even attempt to organise your life across the pillars that are key to you—Training, Nutrition, Health, Finances, Work-Life Balance—you must start by first reviewing the “receipts” from the past 12 months.

We need to answer the following: What were my goals, and what was my actual performance against those metrics?

Don’t guess. Don’t say “I went to the gym a fair bit”. Open the IFT Coaching App and check how many sessions you had logged month-to-month.

Ask me to run a report on Calendly for your attended/missed/rescheduled sessions across the year.

Check your lifting numbers. Did you hit a PB? What was your body fat percentage compared to this time last year?

Review the financial accounts. Don’t just say “I want to save more.” Look at your month-to-month earnings versus your spending on things like essential commitments, non-essentials, savings, education, or continued personal/professional development.

When you look at the cold, hard metrics, you remove the emotion and the possible recency bias. You get a clearer baseline. Once you have the data, you can begin to ask the important questions.

Phase 2: The Upstream Analysis

This is likely where the vast majority of resolutions end up dying. We usually try to fix the result (the symptom) rather than the actual behaviour (the cause).

We need to analyse your strengths and weaknesses to answer one specific questions: “What are the upstream behaviours that are having a disproportionate impact on my results?”

These are your “levers”.

The Sleep Lever: For example, your review might show that you're actually up 5kg from this same time last year. The typical resolution is “Eat less, move more”. But looking deeper you might begin to recognise that weight gain is downstream from the fact that your OURA Ring is telling you you’ve averaged 5 hours of sleep a night in 2025.

Lack of sleep leads to snoozing the alarm.

Snoozing the alarm leads to missing or rescheduling your morning session.

Fatigue leads to greater sugar cravings and lowered willpower in the evening.

In this case, the goals isn’t necessarily “dieting”. The goal is “lights out by 10:00pm”. That single lever has the potential to fix the training frequency and nutritional adherence needed for the goal body composition change.

The Recovery Lever: Perhaps you missed your running PBs. You might think you need to run harder next year. But a review of your training logs in Strava or Training Peaks might show that you ran during what should have been recovery weeks, when rest should have been priority, or you ignored minor niggles until the point they now became injuries.

The issues wasn’t a lack of effort; its the lack of discipline applied to recovery.

The lever wasn't a lack of intensity; its periodisation of training volumes and sticking to the plan long-term.

Plan 3: The 90-Day Horizon

Finally, we have to talk about time. The standard “30-Day Challenge” is hugely popular as a marketing tool, but rarely is it effective for deep change. 30 days is enough to start a routine, getting over the initial friction and starting to clear the immediate barriers to success, but it’s not long enough to immerse yourself in a process.

To truly change a physiological marker (like fitness) or a behavioural marker (like spending habits), you need a quarterly mindset. You need >90 days.

This allows you to move past the “white-knuckle” phase of January and into the gene realm of habit development. It allows for the inevitable bad days without derailing the whole project (eg., “don’t fall off the wagon two days in a row”).

The Bottom Line

Regardless of whether you believe in “New Years Resolutions,” the value of an Annual Audit is undeniable.

Having a time in the year where you sit down, slow down, and review the receipts gives you clear guidance to start the new year. It allows you to benchmark your progress and, most importantly, helps you stop “drifting”.

Don’t spend another year going through the motions, flicking from one goal to the next without commitment. Use the quiet remaining days of December to find your levers, set your metrics, and build a plan that actually sticks.

So what’s your goals for 2026?

AK.