2025: A Year You Can (and Can’t) Control
How to take control this year
Happy New Year! I hope you all are enjoying your holidays. Whether you traveled, enjoyed the festivities in your own backyard, or enjoyed the comfort of your couch (like me), I hope you’ve found your reset button as you enter this new calendar year.
I’m super excited about this new year primarily because (as some of you already know) my wife and I are pregnant with our first baby!
As you can imagine, this news brings with it a mixture of joy, nervousness, excitement, and emotional insecurities. So, a new year is a great time to Come ALIVE (Activate my “daddy” growth mindset, Listen to my wife’s needs, Internalize my intentions, Visualize validation for myself, my wife, and our baby, and Execute my dad and husband duties).
At the start of a new year, we’re accustomed to resolutions, vision boards, and goals for the new year, and they are good. They help provide us with direction and intention, no matter how big or small that change of direction or purpose is. As you identify your goals and resolutions, I want to remind you to identify your controllables and uncontrollables. Without identifying these, we can fall into the quitter's abyss and give up before February.
Reflecting on my controllables and uncontrollables helped relieve some of the internal anticipatory stresses. I realized I was stressing about things that haven’t even become a reality yet, and I felt more equipped to handle those stresses if they should come.
One of our worst flaws is believing we can control everything and everyone. On its face, most of us would disagree with that statement. We know we can’t control everything and everyone, yet we act as if we believe we can. If you don’t believe me, take a trip to Manhattan a week before Christmas or New Year’s Day.
My wife and I visited Manhattan for our baby moon and Christmas getaway. The number of people packed into subways, trains, streets, and buildings could drive the most patient person insane. We met my sister and her family in Times Square for a nice Christmas dinner and then walked through Bryant Park and to the Rockefeller Center to see the lovely Christmas displays. The crowds were packed close, shoulder-to-shoulder, for about six or seven straight blocks.
Trying to keep everyone together (there were six of us) while making sure not to lose my pregnant wife, who was struggling to keep up physically and emotionally, was a feat. People were pushing and shoving, walking fast and slow; some would stop in the middle of the sidewalk. It felt like a Christmas frenzy. I felt out of control, and I did not like it. But after taking some deep breaths, remembering who and what we were celebrating and the family I had around me helped me reevaluate my controllables.
When we believe we can control the uncontrollables, that belief drives us to become angry, divisive, impatient, lying, hateful, self-serving, fearful, and quitting people. But we don’t have to become that. We are better than that because we all have our own set of controllables. Here are some of mine for this year:
Controllables
The love and attention I give to my family
The intention I come to work with every day
My response to hate, negativity, and disappointment
Prayer life and reliance on God
Community
The intention in my physical health (flexibility, hydration, food)
My intention in reading
My intention in writing
How I respond to my fandom
Uncontrollables
Community (the world I live in)
Injustice
How my family receives my love and attention
My family’s health
How my athletes/students receive my coaching/instruction
How leaders lead
How many subscribers/readers to TMMC I have
How my teams play/perform
These are just a snapshot of my controllables and uncontrollables; honestly, they don’t change much yearly. But revisiting them often helps me remember to live in this world and not to try to control it.
Now, I want you to identify your controllables and uncontrollables. Then, put them in a place where you can see them often (maybe a nightstand, bathroom mirror, in your car, locker, or office desk) to help you put your life, goals, resolutions, and mission in perspective.
You can take control of your life in 2025, just probably not in the way most of us believe. Start by identifying what you can’t control and then ignore them as much as possible while focusing on your controllables. Happy New Year, and I hope the best for all your visions, missions, and goals.
One last thing: If you’ve benefitted from or enjoyed reading The Monday Morning Coach in 2024 and have the means, may I ask you to become a paid subscriber this year? Preparing these posts weekly is a labor of love, but it does take time away from my family—and with a baby on the way, I’d like to ensure I’m making the best use of my time for them. As a benefit, should I have enough paid subscribers, I plan on making more frequent posts for paid subscribers and more engaging content. Regardless, thank you for taking the time to read and making yourself a part of my community.