Groundhog Day Resolutions 2026 Kickoff Part I: Review of 2025

⊕ show captionJanuary 2026 started ominously with catching COVID-19 for the first time. I’ve been wiped out for three weeks with an additional cold I caught from visiting family. But will this stop Groundhog Day Resolutions from start? NEVER! Instead, I’ve amended this year to allow final declaration of my goals on Valentines Day! I shall ‘Be Mine’!

It is that happiest time of year, Groundhog Day! The most famous prognisticating rodent, Puxsutwawny Phil, saw his shadow, which means there will be six more weeks of Winter. However, with Groundhog Day Resolutions (aka GHDR) we can enjoy the certainty of setting goals and reviewing them monthly.

For those of you who are new to Groundhog Day Resolutions as a concept, it’s simply a way to remember when to review the goals you have set at the beginning of the year. I chose February 2nd because I’m in no shape to plan anything on January 1st. After that, your review days are on the “double-days” of March 3, April 4, etc. The last review day is December 12.

There is no mandated system or review format; you simply remember that you made goals and have the means to review how you did each month. GHDR is designed to be flexible and accomodating!

New for 2026: Longer Planning period

Since I am recovering from complications from COVID at the moment, I’m behind on my planning since I can’t stay upright for very long. In the spirit of accomodating my own needs, I’ve added a new optional kickstart option that February 2nd is simply the BEGINNING OF PLANNING and you have until Valentine’s Day on February 14 to make a promise to yourself. Love yourself!

For today’s post, I’ll startwith a review of 2025, I see the year as having four distinct acts of evolution.

Act 1. Testing “Values-First Productivity”

February-April

• I defined initial values of “honesty, transparency, authenticity, and equality” as the values I would emphasize over logic and productivity.
• I defined the starting hypothesis for 2025 as “will meaningful conversations lead naturally to creative independence”?

These values changed month to month. I also was dealing with burnout, anxiety for flying to Taiwan for six weeks, and the sudden loss of my car.

Act 2. Defining “Sentiment-based Communication”

May

• The Taiwan trip gave me insight into how to mask my transgender and cultural discomfort by simply being “genuinely present” and letting my warmth for people show through the language barrier.
• This lead to my theory of sentiment-based communication as being the fundamental way that people talk to each other in non-hierarchical situations.
• I reframed my starting hypothesis to a simple question, based on a narrative trick from film director Stephen Chow: A film must answer a question. The answer can be complicated but the question must be simple.

These two insights helped me reframe my understanding of myself with respect to other people, kicking off months of personal review. I also acquired a new vehicle after many weeks of anxiety taking a chance on purchasing it on the Internet after researching options. The result was fortunately good!

Act 3. Reconciling Cognitive Differences

June-July

• I finalized my core values as “authenticity, transparency, and curiosity” as how I want to express myself in the world.
• After experimenting with sentiment-based communication in public, I accepted that the way I think and express myself is really quite different, and that I could accept that without feeling defective.

This was also the month when my long-time freelance contracts officially expired with no followup, due to the drastic change of the science funding landscape due to the US administration change.

Act 4. Massive Career and Personal Goal Changes

August-December

• August was “The Month of Change”. Not only did contracts close for the foreseeable future, but I also decided that I had reached a stable point in my gender transition journey and stopped therapy. I also made a commitment to shift my career ambitions back to restarting my design business and blogging routine. Many weeks were devoted to examining past patterns and defining future plans based on my last self-assessment in 2018.
• September was “The Month of Motion”. To restart my design business and related concerns, I had to shed a decade’s worth of rust from my media production skillset. I ran several production tests. A key concern was simply mustering the motivation to face this daunting task.
• October through December was “The Month of Building”, applying the materials created in the prior months as a “30 day building challenge” to make and share something on every week day. With breaks and personal days, I finished just a day or so before the final 12/12 GHDR Report.

Act 4 is quite a break from the previous acts that concerned themselves with defining what was important to me and why in previous acts. The start of Act 4, though, is when I had no more contractual obligations, freeing me to pursue a business strategy and production while managing my emotional dysregulation. It was a good trial run that I think went well.

As I said in my 1212 Report and the 1313 Postmortem, I actually felt really good about the end of the year. I had more confidence in my ability to execute and make progress across many projects. I had new tools and concepts that helped me push forward, building on many years of prior experiments. That said, I recognized that there were some deeply-buried issues:

• Latent anger about how my cognitive differences required sentiment-first communication over direct sharing of ideas
• Latent anxiety about rejection and having to provide value to be considered worthy of acceptance kept me in a constant state of uncertainty

These two issues have been conditioned my entire lived experience. I developed a pragmatic life philosophy based on increasing my public value while using complex systems to reduce uncertainty. What I had not accounted for was the immense emotional labor this puts on me, and how it drains my energy to be genuinely cheerful and also productive.

In 2026, addressing cheerfulness is shaping-up to be my Groundhog Day Resolutions goal. It’s an extension of my 2025 opening question about values-first productivity being worth pursuing…I felt it was more in alignment than not. The 2025 experience has increased my confidence in living by my values and trusting that my logical/analytical skills still function to keep me out of trouble.

For 2026, I have to address the underlying hurt so I have the courage to express those values without anxiety or need for external affirmation.

But that’s the topic for the next post! I’ll be officially locking down my goals for 2026 by Valentine’s Day.

INDEX of GHDR 2026 POSTS