160. Guided Reflection: Close out 2025 with Clarity and Intention
What if you could close out the year with intention, rather than rushing ahead to the next? In this episode, I’m guiding you through a reflection practice that will help you honor the past year before stepping into the next. This isn’t just another end-of-year exercise. This practice will directly influence how you set your goals for the coming year by shaping how you see yourself as a business owner.
The exercise I’m sharing is a letter-writing practice to past you, reflecting on everything you’ve done this year with gratitude. We’re not focused on evaluating results or what you missed. This is about appreciating your growth, the challenges you overcame, and the person you’ve become along the way. By honoring your journey, you strengthen the identity of someone who shows up, creates wins, and evolves as a resilient CEO.
You’ll discover how the emotional state created through this appreciation will influence how you set goals next year. When you reflect this way, you’ll decide how you want to see yourself, which starts a ripple effect toward future success. This practice sets you up to set goals from a place of “I’m already succeeding” instead of “I’m not enough” or “I’m behind.”
If you've been thinking about working with me one-on-one, be sure to get on the private coaching waitlist! Click here to learn more about Design to Thrive and secure your spot to be the first to know when availability opens up.
What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
How to write a letter to past you that honors everything you’ve achieved this year.
Why celebrating yourself is key to shaping your identity and setting future goals.
The difference between setting goals from appreciation versus self-criticism.
How emotions fuel your actions and shape your business decisions.
Why subtle shifts are as important as big wins to acknowledge.
The power of choosing to see the best in yourself, regardless of the year’s challenges.
How strengthening your relationship with yourself builds trust and connection.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hey, designer, you're listening to episode 160. In this one, I'm going to be sharing a guided reflection practice that's going to help you close out the year and intentionally step into the next. This practice is so important because it's going to directly impact the way you set your goals for next year, and that's because of its influence on your identity and the way you see yourself as a business owner. In the lull between the holidays and the new year, this really is the perfect practice to ensure you purposely step into 2026.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place.
I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello, designer. Welcome back to the podcast. As always, I'm glad to have you here. It is one of those times when I am working ahead on things to prepare for my time off, and my assistant and my podcast producer. Everyone's going to be out of office. So, I am zooming ahead in my mind, but am here recording this podcast.
When it airs, I'll be in Costa Rica with my family and our friends who are also staying with us. And I'll probably be playing on the beach, doing some yoga at my favorite studio, or eating all of the fresh fruit because that's definitely one of my favorite things about traveling to warmer climates in the winter, being able to get really delicious and fresh produce.
But as you are listening to this now, when this is released, we are at the end of the year, and I want to offer you a short practice that is really an opportunity to celebrate, reflect, and close out this year by checking in with yourself and your business before you move full speed ahead into the next, because that is often what happens.
I'll guide you through this, and you can listen to what I share here as I explain it. See what comes to mind while you're listening, or you can take this to your journal. And it can take as little as five minutes, or you can use this as an excuse or opportunity to take yourself on a little date and get away from the holiday chaos and really linger with it.
If you've been around for any length of time, you've probably heard me talk about the importance and immense value of evaluation. We're going to be doing a thorough evaluation of your business last year in Create Your 2026 Roadmap. This is the annual workshop I host where we map out your entire year from a strategic planning lens, and that's all supported with coaching from me, that also acknowledges that it's so much more than just the logistics of planning that you need. It's also the mindset and emotional resilience required to achieve great things and stretch yourself, and go for things you've never done before.
Enrollment is open, so I want to make sure that you know that you can still sign up. All you have to do is go to desiid.com/2026roadmap and save your seat there. It's happening on January 9th and 16th. It's two parts, so we'll do the planning live on the call during the first session, and then we'll come back together a week later while you've had time to kind of sit on your plan, marinate, think of questions, "oh, but what ifs," all of that good stuff that definitely comes up whenever we set a goal. And then we'll have a coaching call where you can get my personalized feedback and also be supported in the community of peers. It's only $87, and I'd love to see you there.
Now, I say that because we're going to be doing that kind of evaluation in Roadmap, and the practice that I'm sharing with you here is a little different in that we're less focused on evaluating the specific results you did or didn't create. Like I said, we'll do that in Roadmap, but rather, it's about honoring you as a business owner. All the work that you've put in, the ways that you've stretched yourself, the times you chose to pick yourself up and keep going, the moments that you really shined over the year, and the person you became through all of these ups and downs and highs and lows.
So here's what I want you to do. I want you to write a letter to past you, reflecting on this last year with gratitude and appreciation. Past you being the person who set out on January 1st, 2025, almost twelve months ago with dreams and goals and ambitions. Before you zoom into becoming that next best version of you, past you deserves some credit. Now, they definitely didn't do everything perfectly. They probably missed the mark at times, and maybe they overcommitted once, twice, or many times. And yet, I bet there were also some amazing things past you did, too.
Please hear me when I say this. Do not let what didn't happen negate all that did. You can decide right now to end this year grateful for all that was. All that was in terms of what happened and didn't happen, where you hit the mark and where you fell short. And also know, in this process, you have the power to choose to make even more good things happen in the coming year, and that is going to start with this appreciation and gratitude to past you.
So often, we look back at the flaws or the gaps, and of course, this is coming from a perfectionistic image of how we should be or what we should achieve in a very linear and black-and-white sense. But when we do this, there is so much that we miss.
If you haven't been practicing mindset work, and honestly, even if you do practice mindset regularly, like I do, and what I teach my clients to do, it's pretty easy to slip into that falling short mentality and forget that in many ways we succeeded. And that's simply because of the way that the brain is wired. It's looking for danger and wants to keep you safe, and it has a negativity bias. So, we have to actively work to see what went well and where we did do a great job.
Even this past week, I noticed this type of thinking popping up for me, thinking, "Oh, I haven't done enough this year," or "I haven't been meditating as much as I should be," those kind of things, all in the line of not enough.
But actually, I heard myself talking this way, and what I realized is I have fully settled into the pivot I made at the beginning of last year, recentering private coaching in my business. And I look back at the tracking I've done for my meditation, and I actually want to count up the actual number of days. I think that would be really interesting, but at first glance, I think I've meditated more times and more consistently and for longer periods of time over this past year than I ever have before.
Both of these goals for me required a lot of internal reflection and taking action even when I was uncomfortable. And so, hey, thanks, past me, for showing up and doing the work, even when it felt wobbly. I'm grateful for you. And I know that's a little weird to say, but I really want you to consider that there is so much to be proud of in this past year, whether you can see it right now or not. If you gloss over these types of things or even if it's just because it's so far in the rearview mirror, you just aren't thinking about it anymore.
In Create Your 2026 Roadmap, we'll tap into the power and wisdom of future you. But right now, this is all about past you. I'm going to give you some prompts, and you can write your own letter to past you. And you can think of this as things that you did, ways you showed up. Maybe you honored what you wanted or upheld boundaries in a different way. Look for, of course, the big things that stand out, and those are amazing. And also look for the more subtle shifts, because the subtle shifts are what add up to the big things, so they are just as important.
You can start this letter going, "Dear [Name]," so "Dear Desi," or "Dear Past You," or anything that really feels kind and gentle, like you are writing a note to your son or daughter or maybe another special person in your life. All right? I'm going to walk you through some different lines with prompts, and you can write your own letter.
Dear [Name],
I'm here to tell you thank you.
When I look back on the last year, I'm grateful for how you...
I'm proud of...
You helped me...
What you didn't know then that I know now is this:
As we move into a new year, I want you to know how much I appreciate you being there with me.
Who I am today (you can name some qualities you appreciate about yourself or the ways that you've grown) is because of you.
And then sign it with love, appreciation, admiration, whatever words connect with you, and your name.
And that's it. Like I said, it can be quick, you can take a long time with it, somewhere in between. And I know that this might feel a little uncomfortable to honor yourself in this way and sort of shine a bright spotlight on you. And that's okay. Most of us were not taught to so boldly celebrate ourselves, our efforts, and the qualities we possess that really make us who we are and contribute to the beautiful business we've built.
And many of us were also not taught to live in the gray zone. What I mean is, you weren't taught to have that cognitive flexibility that's required when black-and-white thinking shows up. So it's never that if you didn't win, you lost all year. It's also not if you won, meaning you hit your goals, that you didn't lose at all. There's so much that unfolds over the course of twelve months, and you can choose to see the best in you, whether it was a year of highs, a year of lows, or a completely mixed bag, which frankly, is what I'm hearing from so many of you. And I mean, honestly, it often is a mixed bag.
After you write your letter, I want you to reflect on how you feel in that moment, reading that back to yourself. And also how that emotional state that you experience might just influence how you set your goals next year. One of the things that I talk about when I teach the self-coaching model is emotions are fuel. They fuel our actions or inactions. So, what do you think? If you're feeling a little bit more positive, if you're feeling warm and kind to yourself, how might that influence how you show up in the business, how you decide what to do next, how you decide what's possible for you?
Honestly, the longest, most constant relationship you have is always going to be the one you have with yourself. And in writing this letter, you are practicing strengthening that relationship. You are building trust and connection.
If you listen to the last episode, I talked a lot about identity and how we have different floors and ceilings and how that relates to what we believe we're capable of. And what's happening here in writing this letter to yourself is that you're strengthening the identity of someone who creates wins, is resilient in the face of challenges, and is a designer CEO that is always evolving and forever will be growing. That's pretty powerful.
This identity, this self-concept that you're reinforcing by doing this letter at the end of the year, it is cultivating the set of beliefs that are going to drive the way that you make your 2026 plans. When you look back in this way and intentionally decide how you want to see yourself and what you want to believe about yourself, it is deciding which first little pebble you are going to pick up and drop in the pond to start to create the ripple effect that leads to future you, the future you that you will create in 2026 Roadmap, and you will create over the next twelve months.
So not only does this letter feel really nice, and it feels good to give yourself this space, it's also going to help you set your goals from a place of "I'm already doing well," "I'm already succeeding," and "I'm just going to create more of it," instead of deciding what you want to aim for from a place of not enough, too far behind, and self-criticism. I really want you to consider what it is like to, you know, even make a to-do list from the place of "I'm doing well," "I've got this," versus "I'm behind." Okay? And that's just for one day for a to-do list. So think of the impact of this shift on an entire year's worth of planning towards a goal you want to work to.
That's what I have for you today. I hope that you do this. Take the time, whether it's listening to me sharing those prompts and just letting the answers self-populate in your head, or writing your letter with pen and paper.
I'll be back in January, which is crazy, right? Next year, with a new episode. And I'm going to be talking all about a really important but very much overlooked component of setting goals that align with your capacity, your project loads, your real life, and the mental and emotional bandwidth you have to give at any given time throughout the year.
Using the concept that I'm going to teach you about in the next episode really is the difference between finding a sweet spot for what you want to accomplish, what you can accomplish, and making consistent progress versus overloading yourself, whether it is you kind of know that's what you're doing, or it happens in the background without so much awareness. And of course, what happens then is you achieve far less. So you definitely want to listen to that one. Make sure you're following the show.
The next episode is the perfect lead-up to Create Your 2026 Roadmap, and it's going to help you really dial in how you plan out your next year, which is what we're doing in the next workshop, based on each quarter of the year. And as I say that, dialed in, I also want you to know the way that I do teach this is there is flexibility, there are opportunities to readjust your plan. That is absolutely expected that happens. But this is a roadmap and an anchor for your entire year that you can revisit and reconnect with as you progress towards your goals.
And if you haven't signed up for Create Your 2026 Roadmap, do that now. A little end-of-year gift to your future self who will be oh-so-glad you gave them a place to be on January 9th and 16th to reflect and, of course, decide what is next on purpose.
Until we talk again in early January, I want to wish you a beautiful end to your year and a smooth transition to the next.
Thanks for joining me for this week's episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit DesiCreswell.com, where you’ll get immediate access to a variety of free resources to help you take what you learn on the podcast and put it into action. And if you love what you’re hearing, be sure to rate, review, and follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I’ll talk to you next week.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place.
I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello, designer. Welcome back to the podcast. As always, I'm glad to have you here. It is one of those times when I am working ahead on things to prepare for my time off, and my assistant and my podcast producer. Everyone's going to be out of office. So, I am zooming ahead in my mind, but am here recording this podcast.
When it airs, I'll be in Costa Rica with my family and our friends who are also staying with us. And I'll probably be playing on the beach, doing some yoga at my favorite studio, or eating all of the fresh fruit because that's definitely one of my favorite things about traveling to warmer climates in the winter, being able to get really delicious and fresh produce.
But as you are listening to this now, when this is released, we are at the end of the year, and I want to offer you a short practice that is really an opportunity to celebrate, reflect, and close out this year by checking in with yourself and your business before you move full speed ahead into the next, because that is often what happens.
I'll guide you through this, and you can listen to what I share here as I explain it. See what comes to mind while you're listening, or you can take this to your journal. And it can take as little as five minutes, or you can use this as an excuse or opportunity to take yourself on a little date and get away from the holiday chaos and really linger with it.
If you've been around for any length of time, you've probably heard me talk about the importance and immense value of evaluation. We're going to be doing a thorough evaluation of your business last year in Create Your 2026 Roadmap. This is the annual workshop I host where we map out your entire year from a strategic planning lens, and that's all supported with coaching from me, that also acknowledges that it's so much more than just the logistics of planning that you need. It's also the mindset and emotional resilience required to achieve great things and stretch yourself, and go for things you've never done before.
Enrollment is open, so I want to make sure that you know that you can still sign up. All you have to do is go to desiid.com/2026roadmap and save your seat there. It's happening on January 9th and 16th. It's two parts, so we'll do the planning live on the call during the first session, and then we'll come back together a week later while you've had time to kind of sit on your plan, marinate, think of questions, "oh, but what ifs," all of that good stuff that definitely comes up whenever we set a goal. And then we'll have a coaching call where you can get my personalized feedback and also be supported in the community of peers. It's only $87, and I'd love to see you there.
Now, I say that because we're going to be doing that kind of evaluation in Roadmap, and the practice that I'm sharing with you here is a little different in that we're less focused on evaluating the specific results you did or didn't create. Like I said, we'll do that in Roadmap, but rather, it's about honoring you as a business owner. All the work that you've put in, the ways that you've stretched yourself, the times you chose to pick yourself up and keep going, the moments that you really shined over the year, and the person you became through all of these ups and downs and highs and lows.
So here's what I want you to do. I want you to write a letter to past you, reflecting on this last year with gratitude and appreciation. Past you being the person who set out on January 1st, 2025, almost twelve months ago with dreams and goals and ambitions. Before you zoom into becoming that next best version of you, past you deserves some credit. Now, they definitely didn't do everything perfectly. They probably missed the mark at times, and maybe they overcommitted once, twice, or many times. And yet, I bet there were also some amazing things past you did, too.
Please hear me when I say this. Do not let what didn't happen negate all that did. You can decide right now to end this year grateful for all that was. All that was in terms of what happened and didn't happen, where you hit the mark and where you fell short. And also know, in this process, you have the power to choose to make even more good things happen in the coming year, and that is going to start with this appreciation and gratitude to past you.
So often, we look back at the flaws or the gaps, and of course, this is coming from a perfectionistic image of how we should be or what we should achieve in a very linear and black-and-white sense. But when we do this, there is so much that we miss.
If you haven't been practicing mindset work, and honestly, even if you do practice mindset regularly, like I do, and what I teach my clients to do, it's pretty easy to slip into that falling short mentality and forget that in many ways we succeeded. And that's simply because of the way that the brain is wired. It's looking for danger and wants to keep you safe, and it has a negativity bias. So, we have to actively work to see what went well and where we did do a great job.
Even this past week, I noticed this type of thinking popping up for me, thinking, "Oh, I haven't done enough this year," or "I haven't been meditating as much as I should be," those kind of things, all in the line of not enough.
But actually, I heard myself talking this way, and what I realized is I have fully settled into the pivot I made at the beginning of last year, recentering private coaching in my business. And I look back at the tracking I've done for my meditation, and I actually want to count up the actual number of days. I think that would be really interesting, but at first glance, I think I've meditated more times and more consistently and for longer periods of time over this past year than I ever have before.
Both of these goals for me required a lot of internal reflection and taking action even when I was uncomfortable. And so, hey, thanks, past me, for showing up and doing the work, even when it felt wobbly. I'm grateful for you. And I know that's a little weird to say, but I really want you to consider that there is so much to be proud of in this past year, whether you can see it right now or not. If you gloss over these types of things or even if it's just because it's so far in the rearview mirror, you just aren't thinking about it anymore.
In Create Your 2026 Roadmap, we'll tap into the power and wisdom of future you. But right now, this is all about past you. I'm going to give you some prompts, and you can write your own letter to past you. And you can think of this as things that you did, ways you showed up. Maybe you honored what you wanted or upheld boundaries in a different way. Look for, of course, the big things that stand out, and those are amazing. And also look for the more subtle shifts, because the subtle shifts are what add up to the big things, so they are just as important.
You can start this letter going, "Dear [Name]," so "Dear Desi," or "Dear Past You," or anything that really feels kind and gentle, like you are writing a note to your son or daughter or maybe another special person in your life. All right? I'm going to walk you through some different lines with prompts, and you can write your own letter.
Dear [Name],
I'm here to tell you thank you.
When I look back on the last year, I'm grateful for how you...
I'm proud of...
You helped me...
What you didn't know then that I know now is this:
As we move into a new year, I want you to know how much I appreciate you being there with me.
Who I am today (you can name some qualities you appreciate about yourself or the ways that you've grown) is because of you.
And then sign it with love, appreciation, admiration, whatever words connect with you, and your name.
And that's it. Like I said, it can be quick, you can take a long time with it, somewhere in between. And I know that this might feel a little uncomfortable to honor yourself in this way and sort of shine a bright spotlight on you. And that's okay. Most of us were not taught to so boldly celebrate ourselves, our efforts, and the qualities we possess that really make us who we are and contribute to the beautiful business we've built.
And many of us were also not taught to live in the gray zone. What I mean is, you weren't taught to have that cognitive flexibility that's required when black-and-white thinking shows up. So it's never that if you didn't win, you lost all year. It's also not if you won, meaning you hit your goals, that you didn't lose at all. There's so much that unfolds over the course of twelve months, and you can choose to see the best in you, whether it was a year of highs, a year of lows, or a completely mixed bag, which frankly, is what I'm hearing from so many of you. And I mean, honestly, it often is a mixed bag.
After you write your letter, I want you to reflect on how you feel in that moment, reading that back to yourself. And also how that emotional state that you experience might just influence how you set your goals next year. One of the things that I talk about when I teach the self-coaching model is emotions are fuel. They fuel our actions or inactions. So, what do you think? If you're feeling a little bit more positive, if you're feeling warm and kind to yourself, how might that influence how you show up in the business, how you decide what to do next, how you decide what's possible for you?
Honestly, the longest, most constant relationship you have is always going to be the one you have with yourself. And in writing this letter, you are practicing strengthening that relationship. You are building trust and connection.
If you listen to the last episode, I talked a lot about identity and how we have different floors and ceilings and how that relates to what we believe we're capable of. And what's happening here in writing this letter to yourself is that you're strengthening the identity of someone who creates wins, is resilient in the face of challenges, and is a designer CEO that is always evolving and forever will be growing. That's pretty powerful.
This identity, this self-concept that you're reinforcing by doing this letter at the end of the year, it is cultivating the set of beliefs that are going to drive the way that you make your 2026 plans. When you look back in this way and intentionally decide how you want to see yourself and what you want to believe about yourself, it is deciding which first little pebble you are going to pick up and drop in the pond to start to create the ripple effect that leads to future you, the future you that you will create in 2026 Roadmap, and you will create over the next twelve months.
So not only does this letter feel really nice, and it feels good to give yourself this space, it's also going to help you set your goals from a place of "I'm already doing well," "I'm already succeeding," and "I'm just going to create more of it," instead of deciding what you want to aim for from a place of not enough, too far behind, and self-criticism. I really want you to consider what it is like to, you know, even make a to-do list from the place of "I'm doing well," "I've got this," versus "I'm behind." Okay? And that's just for one day for a to-do list. So think of the impact of this shift on an entire year's worth of planning towards a goal you want to work to.
That's what I have for you today. I hope that you do this. Take the time, whether it's listening to me sharing those prompts and just letting the answers self-populate in your head, or writing your letter with pen and paper.
I'll be back in January, which is crazy, right? Next year, with a new episode. And I'm going to be talking all about a really important but very much overlooked component of setting goals that align with your capacity, your project loads, your real life, and the mental and emotional bandwidth you have to give at any given time throughout the year.
Using the concept that I'm going to teach you about in the next episode really is the difference between finding a sweet spot for what you want to accomplish, what you can accomplish, and making consistent progress versus overloading yourself, whether it is you kind of know that's what you're doing, or it happens in the background without so much awareness. And of course, what happens then is you achieve far less. So you definitely want to listen to that one. Make sure you're following the show.
The next episode is the perfect lead-up to Create Your 2026 Roadmap, and it's going to help you really dial in how you plan out your next year, which is what we're doing in the next workshop, based on each quarter of the year. And as I say that, dialed in, I also want you to know the way that I do teach this is there is flexibility, there are opportunities to readjust your plan. That is absolutely expected that happens. But this is a roadmap and an anchor for your entire year that you can revisit and reconnect with as you progress towards your goals.
And if you haven't signed up for Create Your 2026 Roadmap, do that now. A little end-of-year gift to your future self who will be oh-so-glad you gave them a place to be on January 9th and 16th to reflect and, of course, decide what is next on purpose.
Until we talk again in early January, I want to wish you a beautiful end to your year and a smooth transition to the next.
Thanks for joining me for this week's episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit DesiCreswell.com, where you’ll get immediate access to a variety of free resources to help you take what you learn on the podcast and put it into action. And if you love what you’re hearing, be sure to rate, review, and follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I’ll talk to you next week.
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