Ep #117: How to Close Out 2025 Strong & Clear Your Path for Next-Level Income

Hey, Coach. Have you noticed? It is officially goal-setting season, but while everyone else is rushing to map out their best year ever, I want you to pause, because the fastest way to sabotage new goals is to stack them on top of unprocessed disappointment from this past year's goals. I'm Kendall, and today I'm teaching you the money feminist way to close out your year. This is a simple process that releases guilt. It clears emotional clutter and aligns you with the identity that actually contributes to you creating wealth. And plus, I've loaded up this episode with coaching questions that reveal where you actually grew this year, because that growth is what expands your income. It's all here for you in this episode of The Money Coach School Podcast. Let's dive in.

Welcome to The Money Coach School Podcast. To really excel at coaching women, you have to be skilled, confident, and even fearless at money coaching. If you're passionate about women holding genuine money power and love supporting women entrepreneurs, then this is the show for you. Now, here's your host, money feminist Kendall SummerHawk.

Hello, beautiful coach. If you're a perfectionist, a high achiever, or a woman who feels disappointed when you don't hit every single goal, this episode is going to feel like a deep exhale, because the truth is, ambitious, sensitive women, we don't miss goals because we're not capable. We are more than capable. We miss goals because we've been taught to evaluate ourselves through the lens of performance instead of through how we shifted at the identity level, which is the very thing that drives our income.

And today, we're doing the emotional prep work that clears your runway for a financially expansive 2026. And by the way, I have a powerful episode coming up very soon for you on extraordinary money goals. These are goals that grow your income, your identity, your emotional capacity all at the same time. But before we go there, we need to do the work here today, which is preparing the emotional soil those goals will grow in because new money goals cannot grow in old emotional soil.

All right. Now, if you haven't already, go ahead and click the follow button. I'm your money coach, and every new episode is here to strengthen your coaching, your cash flow, and your clarity in your relationship with money.

So, let's talk about the emotional goal prep, why it matters so much for you creating wealth. This time of year, everyone is bursting with planners and frameworks and systems and templates, but hardly anyone is talking about the real force shaping your upcoming income. And that's the emotional residue you carry into the new year. We don't want that, but let's be honest. Unprocessed disappointment, it becomes a money ceiling. Unspoken shame? Yeah, becomes money leaks. Guilt from unmet goals becomes hesitation, and hesitation is incredibly expensive.

Women don't struggle with goals because we lack discipline. We struggle because we've never been taught emotional money leadership, the ability to navigate our emotions with the same authority we use to navigate strategy, for example. And that's exactly what today's episode gives you. So, before we set extraordinary money goals for 2026, we're clearing your emotional runway here today so that your next financial season has something powerful to take off from.

All right. Now, I have to confess something. I have a love affair with goals. I am absolutely obsessed with goals, truly. Not because they make me more productive, which they actually do, but because I believe they make us wealthier. I believe that goals stretch our identity, meaning that they challenge you to evolve into the woman who can hold more money, more visibility, more leadership. I believe goals organize your creativity. I know I am a hyper-creative person. I mean, just like off the charts creative. I'm always creating something. And without goals, creative women like myself, like you, all of our ideas get scattered, and then scattered ideas, yeah, that creates scattered income. And I believe that goals create possibility, which is like one of my all-time favorite words ever. Possibility is one of the most financially expansive emotions that a woman like you can feel.

Now here's the part most ambitious, sensitive women never say out loud. The struggle isn't setting the goal. The struggle is holding it. When you set too many goals, which is what I'm guilty of, or you set the wrong goals, you create emotional clutter. And emotional clutter becomes financial clutter, which brings us into the goal prep that we're going to do here today, because that's what this episode is all about is your goal prep.

So here is my money feminist goal prep process. Goal prep includes reviewing your year, but not the way the world teaches women to review. This is not a performance audit. Oh my God, you don't need more of that, right? Think of this as an identity expansion. We look back only to extract the emotional strength and clarity and capability that you want to take with you into your next level of income. So we don't review to evaluate, we review to evolve.

So, there are three steps. Step number one: Close out what didn't happen. List the goals that you set for this last year, which would be 2025, that you didn't hit. Like you just didn't hit them at all, okay? So go ahead and list them even if you still want some of them to go forward into the next year, 2026. And I want you to please hear this. This is not an invitation to start getting all judgy on yourself. This is about emotional completion.

And so, to do that, for each goal that didn't happen, I want you to find out why. And usually, it's one of these four reasons. Reason number one is, did you truly want this goal, or did you think you should want it? Like it sounded like it would be a nice thing, but there was really a lack of connection to it. Reason number two: Were you emotionally resourced for it, or was the timing just really misaligned? Reason number three: Were you clear on what success even would look like? And reason number four: Did you simply not follow through because the actions never made it into your weekly calendar, your daily calendar?

Now, as I go through these questions each year, I actually love it because I can literally feel the guilt melt off my shoulders. It's like my nervous system relaxes. It unclenches. I stop making myself wrong, and I start seeing the truth with compassion and clarity. And every time I'm reminded, this is where money confidence grows, not in perfection, but in understanding ourselves.

All right, step number two: Close out what did happen, even if it was incomplete. So the first step is about the things that just didn't happen at all. This step here, step two, is about things that happened, but not quite to completion, not to total fruition. So let's talk about the goals you did move forward, even if they did not land exactly as planned. So these are the ones that women often tend to dismiss, but they actually carry the most valuable lessons.

So I want to walk you through three coaching questions that show you just how much power and progress is actually hiding inside these imperfect wins. Coaching question number one: What skills or abilities did you gain by putting energy into this goal? So for example, one of my goals this year was to create a lead magnet funnel that would flow into sales of one of my certification trainings. We had a very specific number we were aiming for, and we didn't get anywhere near it. Nowhere near those sales.

But honestly, once I stepped back, I realized how much I actually gained. I actually have a great funnel that I can tweak and improve, absolutely. But I gained a much clearer understanding of what makes a lead magnet convert. I gained the skill of promoting consistently without overthinking it. I gained the creation of assets that I can now use and have been using in a multitude of places. And it reminds me that goals build capability, and capability always builds income.

Coaching question number two is: What did this goal symbolize for you? You know, goals are never just goals. They represent something deeper for us as women. So for me, using that same example, that lead magnet to sales conversion goal wasn't just about numbers. I mean, obviously, the numbers are important, but really it symbolized a number of things. It symbolized expanding our reach, our enrollment, and our visibility. And the beautiful part is we did expand in all three of those things, even though the final sales metric didn't match up to where I wanted it to be for this last year. It's a reminder that the meaning behind the goal often delivers the real win.

Coaching question number three: Did you succeed in a way the original goal just didn't measure? Traditional goal culture, very masculine-oriented goal culture, wants everything to be black or white. It either happened or it didn't. But that's not how women are wired. The money feminist viewpoint invites a deeper conversation. So for example, where did you expand this year? Where did your identity shift or strengthen? What new part of you came online that's actually going to support bigger income next year? That's the kind of progress that actually builds wealth. And if I go back to my lead magnet conversion project, you know, I'm confident now building funnels. Do they need to be tweaked? Yes. Funnels are never one and done. They don't work that way. And I have the assets to do that, and I have the strength in my determination to do that. Like I am absolutely 100,000% — I love that number — convinced that we will make this funnel, we will improve it and hit our goals in this next year. I have that sense of conviction. And that's really the strength, that's the identity shift that I made because of that project.

All right. So that leads me to step number three, is to honor what happened because of the goal. So even the goals that didn't land the way we imagined still create momentum. And here's a different example, very personal for me. I had set a health goal earlier in the year that was probably pretty unrealistic. The goal was something like, I wanted to be in the best physical shape of my life. Now, my hormones, I'm a woman of a certain age, they're not going to allow that to happen, and that's okay. That goal was unrealistic. And so I did not become the fittest version of myself in my whole life, but here's what did happen.

I resolved some major hormone issues, which so I feel so much better. I raised my average step count. It's not a super high number because some days I'm like 8, 9, 10,000, other days I'm at 4,000, but I average 6200 steps a day for the whole year. I love that. I restarted doing Pilates twice a week. I doubled my protein intake, which is huge. It actually completely changed my eating. I am vegetarian. I've been a vegetarian for a gazillion years, most of my life. And so getting protein can be challenging. And I also, I eat organic, I don't eat out, I don't eat processed food.

And so my health and nutrition, or health through nutrition, I should say, is really, really important to me. And so to double my protein intake was fantastic. And now it's just like a habit. I love it. And I got stronger. I'm consistent in my strength building. I love it. So no, did the goal land perfectly? Absolutely not. But did it transform me? Absolutely yes. And you know what? Better is an accomplishment. Better is an emotional expansion. And emotional expansion always becomes financial expansion.

So the coaching question I have for you on this is this one. Where are you better, expanded, or improved compared to who you were at the start of the year? That answer reveals your emotional return on investment.

So to wrap up here, before you rush into the excitement of a fresh year, which is lovely and exciting — I love this time of year, absolutely adore it — I want you to give yourself 20 minutes with this process that I just outlined for you. Not because you should, but because your next financial level depends on the emotional clarity you carry into it. So a quick recap here. Step number one is give yourself permission to release the goals you didn't hit, like just didn't hit at all. Unmet goals don't diminish you, not at all. Releasing them creates space for goals that actually fit the woman you are now.

Step number two: Close out what did happen, even if it was incomplete, because progress you didn't measure is actually still progress. And when you see it clearly, your confidence expands. This is how you reclaim the truth of your year instead of letting just pure numbers write the whole story.

And step number three: Honor the goals that shaped you in ways that a spreadsheet can never capture. Women, we evolve inside of ourselves before our income reflects it. So your growth counts and it will compound. And let yourself feel the truth of this. You are wealthier in identity, wealthier in clarity, wealthier in emotional maturity, and have a wealthier capacity than you had 12 months ago. And that's not small. That is not accidental. That is not invisible. That is power. Specifically, it is your money power.

And so now, as you begin visioning into 2026, don't choose goals that keep you comfortable. No, no, no. I want you to choose the goals that call forward your next identity, the goals that feel like power, because 2026 is not the year that you simply set goals. It's the year that you become the woman who can hold them.

And in this upcoming episode on extraordinary money goals, I'm going to share with you exactly how to choose the goals that stretch you, strengthen you, expand your income, and upgrade your identity that you use to lead your financial life without the hustly kind of pressure, but with the kind of pressure that turns a piece of coal into a diamond because you are that diamond. You are doing more than just preparing for a new year. You are preparing for a new financial self. And I cannot wait to walk you into that future.

All right. Thank you so much for your commitment to this deeper money work. I so love and appreciate you for that. Be sure to share this episode. You can tag me @kendallsummerhawk on Instagram. And let's prepare you for your most financially expansive year yet. All right. I'll see you next week in another episode.

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