[Note: I started doing an annual recap back in 2010.You can find other years here: | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 2020 got skipped for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the pandemic.]
First, The Countdown...
I did this last year, and I liked it enough that I'm keeping it, updated for 2025.
16 years since I started these annual reviews. 15 years since I essentially dissolved my business and created Business Action Hero to find my way again. 14 years since my first book. 13 years since I started the 300 songs project. 12 years since my first virtual concert. 11 years since my last album. 10 years since I moved to Nashville. 9 years since I first hosted my annual Creative Freedom Retreat. 8 years since my last book. 7 years since we moved to Mississippi. 6 years since the Pandemic locked everything down. 5 years since we moved back to Nashville. 4 years since we moved to Indiana. 3 years since my back surgery. 2 years since I became the local host for Morning Edition from NPR News. 1 year since I started filming the Reality Show project and almost a year since we sold off everything, left Indiana, and moved to the Pacific Northwest.
Whew!
Last year, I remember saying I was curious about all the "hard" that I've navigated over the years. And that I expected 2025 to be "more promising, based on the awarenesses I've developed in 2024." It was more promising, but not in the ways I expected.
2025 hit like a Mack truck.
I don't think I'm the only one that had a surprising year in 2025. Things felt like they were changing by the minute some months. The new presidential administration came in like a wrecking ball, shaking snow globes, turning tables, and leaving a trail of uncertainty in their wake for many Americans.
And I do mean Americans... people of the North, Central, and South American persuasion were scratching their heads, locking their doors, and peeking through their metaphorical blinds to see what the new resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was up to next.
On top of the national (global?) upheaval, we had our own surprises in store. Jim was getting frustrated with the school gig in fall of 2024, and started looking for work again. He was invited to interview for a position with a university in Oregon, and flew out to visit the Pacific Northwest for the first time.
He fell in love.
We re-focused his job search to companies in the area. They all kept saying the same thing:
"If you were local..."
So, we made plans for him to fly out during spring break to spend some time scouting and interviewing. It quickly became clear that a week wasn't enough time to get the lay of the land, so he tendered his resignation, booked a one-way flight, and holed up in Vancouver, Washington to begin his search.
If you're keeping track, I'm still working at the radio station in Indiana while he's off on a wild adventure in the PNW.
The derailment never seemed to stop.
Typically, I start my year with goals in place and hit the ground running. But with everything going on with Jim's job hunt, running my business, and working at the radio station, I didn't get there. I had loose ideas of what I was driving for, but I didn't get goals shored up until the middle of the year.
January saw the launch of The Influencers and the feedback was very positive. I cranked out 3 episodes and was well into episode 4 when shit hit the fan about public media funding. March of 2025 saw the heads of NPR and PBS in congressional hearings trying to justify their existence. We all saw the writing on the wall. What had started as a fun "extra" (that became a family lifeline) was about to become a "sword of Damocles" hanging over our heads.
There were other issues at the station that made it hard to stay there. Not the least of which was unequal pay for equal work. University policy had been equal pay for equal work, so I filed a complaint. It was slow going. The heel dragging was almost as bad as the promised they'd made that they weren't keeping.
Then came the "demands" being made of colleges and universities by the new president's administration. Executive orders reversing and eliminating "woke agendas". We were told that, because we represent the station, we can't have public opinions, even in our off hours. That the best thing we could do is keep our heads down and our mouths shut. One staffer who showed up at a candlelight vigil for Palestine was reprimanded.
It was clear this wasn't going to change any time soon. I no longer felt like my work mattered or that I was safe to be on campus. So I put in my notice. And because my boss was a jerk (a story for another day), I did it right before pledge drive.
I'm lucky. I had the privilege to be able to walk away. There were plenty of other folks who couldn't.
They teased me with the idea that I could continue to produce The Influencers after I left, but their content director didn't reply to my messages, and they've removed every trace of the show from their website, so I feel comfortable saying that they we're blowing smoke to keep me quiet.
Clearly, I have a lot to say, but I won't because there are still some people there that I adore, doing great and meaningful work... nice work. And I want to remember the good more than the bad.
The Content Director once told me, "the station will look nothing like it does now come August." I don't think he knew how right he'd be. I left, two other personalities left. So did a producer, the head of marketing, and that staffer that got reprimanded. I just heard that their program manager is out the door, too, taking a job in Minnesota (stay safe, Aaron!).
So yeah, another year of big changes. If that wasn't enough, Jim took a hard fall that may have saved his life.
A broken neck? Naw. Cancer (and heart stuff).
Jim hadn't been in Vancouver, for more than a couple of weeks when he slipped on the stairs in his rental. He fell hard and nearly broke his neck. He managed to get to the hospital and had scans. Thankfully, not broken, but sprained a muscle that's still wonky. Oh, and they found a lump (that would later be diagnosed as thyroid cancer).
I wasn't able to be there yet because, I was neck deep in selling off or donating everything we owned that wouldn't fit in a 5x7 storage pod. We were already talking about leaving Indiana anyway, since we didn't have strong ties here. That was why we went to Louisiana back in December. With 47 coming into office, I wanted to live near a border in case we needed to flee.
Don't laugh. I have friends and family who have already left this country because it's gotten unsafe for them (and they were born and raised in the US). They're closer to the top of "that poem" than I am as a mixed-race black woman. So, I applaud their willingness to do the hard things that keep them and their loved ones safe. I'm a little envious, honestly. We have too many ties here to leave (yet). Still, I wanted to be that much closer if we needed to bug out.
When Jim fell in love with the Portland area, I was totally on board to move. I even have a few friends already in the area, so maybe I'll get to spend time in person with them!
So I'm doing everything I can to clear out the house in Indiana and get to Jim. We only had the Vancouver joint for a month, so Jim found another place for us in Portland... which happened to be just a few blocks from the ICE detention center. At that time, protesters were just a few people holding signs and milling around on the street corners. We were gone before the dancing frogs and pepper spray became a thing. According to our old landlord, it sounds like a war zone with all the helicopters flying overhead now.
What doesn't kill you...
Jim was taking every job he was offered... and that nearly killed him. TWICE.
Turned out that his A-Fib was also A-flutter. One could be fixed, the other needs ongoing management. Jim had four heart procedures over the summer. And those labor-intensive jobs were not going to work for him. He needed to find something more sedentary.
He was offered a job working in a school, but it didn't start until fall. We had an uncomfortably large financial gap to bridge. So we pulled from our savings and spent the summer just trying to create some stability for ourselves.
BEST DECISION EVER.
I felt a lot of guilt and shame about using our savings instead of trying to "work harder" in my business. Things had started to slow down after all the upheaval. I wasn't marketing nearly as much, Creative Freedom Season 8 was finally complete, and because of the public media funding cuts, my video editor decided to go back to school for an IT degree.
That left me essentially "empty handed" for a while, with time to slow down, step back, and think more about what we wanted this new chapter to look like. I was still filming the reality show this whole time, not sure what the heck was going to come of it, now that my producer and editor was going back to college.
Movin' on up!
We found a lovely top-floor, downtown apartment in Vancouver, Washington, with western views of the mountains, the Columbia River, and, if you squint a little, the St. John's bridge. My sister came down from Northern Washington and helped us move in. I hadn't seen her in years, so it was a wonderful mini-reunion. She even called on some of her local friends to help us, and gave us a jump start on building some local community!
We arrived with two pieces of furniture. Everything else we had to source, so we did. While we've spent a little more than I had originally budgeted for this move, I think we did well. I started a little victory garden on my balcony, with the help of my friend Dusti's new micro-nursery, Hearth & Hollow. No joke, it's January and I still have her cherry tomatoes growing in my office!
Leaving so soon?
By June, I was on a plane to New York City for Mike Ganino's Mike Drop Era Retreat. I'd helped him edit an early version of his book, Make A Scene, and snagged a spot at his event in NYC because of it - on the condition I could film footage for the reality show. He agreed, and I was on my way!
I hadn't been to an in-person event other than my own since before Covid had us in lockdown. I've been pretty gun shy about the way most of these events turn into pitch fests. I was pleased to see that wasn't the case with Mike. It was SO GOOD to be around people again, and I had an interesting a-ha that opened up a new direction for the second half of the year.
See, I had a trademark issue I couldn't get around.
While I was in the throes of moving and settling into Vancouver, someone completely unknown to me registered a trademark perilously close to my own Star Power Method. To be clear, this person doesn't know me, didn't steal my IP, and is doing something completely different than I am, but the names of our work were too close for comfort. She had filed her trademark for "S.T.A.R. Method" a year earlier, but the USPTO is running so far behind that they're only NOW reviewing applications from August of 2025. So I had no way of knowing that her trademark was already underway when I started using the language for my own model.
I didn't think I had enough traction to file the trademark yet, and I guess it's a good thing I didn't because it would have been rejected for being too similar and too confusing. After consulting my attorney, we agreed that it would be better to re-position and re-brand instead of trying to fight it.
So I spent the second half of 2025 trying to figure out what that might look like.
The Luxury of Time
Our financial runway gave us the luxury of time to think about things. I didn't put pressure on my business to try and create something from nothing. I didn't try to throw spaghetti at the wall. In fact, it felt like I wasn't doing much of anything where my business was concerned.
On one hand, I wasn't doing much. Marketing had pretty much come to a halt. I signed a couple of new clients during the year for some short-term projects, and released a client I'd been working with for several years. As the year clipped on, I recognized the same pull that happened the year I had back surgery and was laid up for 11 days: Something had to change.
Last year in my review, I mentioned that I had abandoned the idea that "if it's to be it's up to me." I recognized that idea was coming from a place of exasperation and frustration. From feeling unsupported, overwhelmed, and wondering when it would be my turn to have a moment's peace.
This year, I'm embracing that truth from a place of determination and clarity. Jim's health isn't likely to make a miraculous turnaround, and we'd been planning for his retirement for a few years anyway. We're still not quite ready for that to happen, but it's clear that any financial growth needs to come from me, my work, and ideally, my business. Once we settled into the Vancouver area, I finally had the mental and emotional bandwidth to re-shape the direction of my work into something that works for how I'm wired to work.
Thus, the trip to New York, and subsequent work with Mike to turn up the volume on my work as a speaker and author.
So, no Creative Freedom client retreat this year. That was a big chunk of revenue gone, but it also freed up my energy to vision out what the future of the company looks like.
And it looks less lonely.
As a Fusion Creative, I've spent a lot of my life trying to do all the things myself because it's usually faster. Even though I have adored every team member I've brought on, there's still an inherent slowing down on task completion because I'm waiting on someone else to do their part. Delegation, on one hand, is meant to free up your time to work on other things, but when the team breaks down, all that stuff rolls back onto your plate when you're running a lean micro organization.
2025 was the year I became the bottleneck again.
So I pared way down. When we finished Season 8 of the show, I didn't jump right into the next thing. I kept filming for the reality show. Kept working on my new talk. I kept on doing the unsexy basics to keep the lights on, but created as much space as I possibly could around me, my work, and my days. I now only see coaching clients once a month. That was a hard transition. Most of my Incubator clients are now in legacy coaching roles or have completed with my company. By the end of the year, I had my lowest monthly baseline revenue in over a decade.
But I had a hell of a lot more free time.
Jim and I took road trips. We went to the Tillamook coast, sampled fresh dungeness crab, and toured an air museum. A dear friend came to town and we took a road trip together to the Mermaid Museum in Northern Washington. And when Jim went under the knife for his cancer surgery, his care and recovery were the only thing on my agenda.
It was glorious. Not easy, by any means, but glorious. Using some of our financial runway to care for ourselves and our nervous systems was exactly what I needed to re-orient myself to our new normal.
Conditions For Success
I had been trying most of the year to get the course for my method off the ground, but I kept dragging my heels. I was still not clear what the new brand direction needed to be, and as the political temperature of the nation kept escalating, it got real easy to hide for a while.
But I kept feeling this tug to continue my work on the materials. Even if we didn't have the branding or re-positioning done, there was still something I could do to keep developing the materials.
That's when my friend rolled out her new community, We The Unruly. As I hopped into her space, it felt like a homecoming. A space where I could be fully held and fully seen - something I had tried to create for my own clients, but failed to find for myself. One of the offerings Jen has is a monthly workshop for the membership. As we talked, it became clear that Conditions For Success would be valuable to share.
So I did.
That workshop primed the pump and helped me see how to re-position all the work I'd been doing with the Star Power Method. Surprisingly, it didn't take a lot of work to refine the model to work with new positioning.
Or should I say, it hasn't yet required a lot of work.
In the process of teaching this workshop, I was able to see the deeper truth of the work I've been doing for 30+ years.
I help people make hard choices. High stakes decisions. The tough call.
And I help them do it in the way that works best for them.
A blessing in disguise
All the marketing I'd been doing around becoming a celebrity in your niche was fine. But in light of the current political landscape, it was coming off like I couldn't read the room. Never mind that my take on celebrity was different. Never mind that people actually had said to me that they wanted to become the Brene Brown (or Sherlock Holmes, etc.) of their industry. I mean, I never would have gone down that road if they hadn't!
The lesson here is that you can do customer research and you can get positive feedback that leads you to think you've got a tiger by the tail, but you still need a market big enough to make it sustainable for you.
I simply didn't have enough of an audience to make that angle profitable, nor do I have the time or resources to try and cultivate one anymore.
I can be relentless sometimes. I had tried for several years to build an audience around this angle, giving myself grace for the slow-going nature because of all the other things on my plate. But it was feeling like a slog (something I mentioned in the last episode of my show), so it was time to let it go.
I don't count it a lost investment. Not at all. Business is a series of experiments. This experiment taught me some great lessons and helped me get even clearer about what I'm here to do. It made some revenue, so it wasn't a total loss. It just wasn't the right wave for me to ride.
And I see the trademark issue as a blessing in disguise, because it forced me to stop trying so hard with something that wasn't working. Remember, I can be pretty relentless sometimes!
By October, I was throwing my hands up about goal setting. Things were too uncertain, too shaky all around, and decision making felt like it was being second guessed every other day.
It wasn't just me. You could see it in the business landscape nationally (and globally) as tariffs were in one day and out the next. Whole market sectors were rising and falling each quarter. Decision making felt like it was at the mercy of a three-year-old having a tantrum when anyone said or did something he didn't like.
That's when I realized I was born for this. High stakes decisions are my jam. Helping people see their truth clearly and make decisions that support that truth are exactly what I've been doing for decades. I just never positioned it that way.
So that's the work of 2026. And I'm not going alone.
Bet on Future You
Sometimes we teach the thing we most need to learn.
One of the foundational elements of the Courage part of my framework is to Refine Your Model - and specifically, to Bet on Future You as part of that refinement.
2025 opened my eyes to the fact that I had done everything BUT that for decades. I continually plowed my time, talent, and resources into everyone and everything around me, but not really into myself. A decade of marriage to a man who devalued my contributions at every turn (and literally told me I was ruining our family!) was finally starting to unravel after more than a year with an amazing therapist. I could see myself more clearly, and how I was the bolster of support for my clients, my current husband, my kids, and my business, but NOT me.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it. At that point, you have to make a decision.
I want to go all in on Future Me in 2026. Fully resourced, fully funded. No more settling or "making do". I'm making intentional investments in ME.
It still sounds a little selfish when I say it out loud.
But one of the things 2025 taught me is that sometimes getting exactly what I want is the very best thing that can happen. I'm still processing that truth. Because for most of my life, I was led to believe that simply was not true.
I'm still not entirely clear on what that looks like, but I've already started taking steps to connect to the brilliant people around me and put a new plan in place. I'm also clear that this is the "make or break" year for us. For me. There's no Prince Charming coming to rescue us and if retiring Jim is really on the table, then it has to be a pretty big year for me.
I've got new goals for the year and number one is the care and feeding of my inner child. I'm cultivating a full year of inner child nurturing that strengthens my emotional wholeness and self trust.
It remains to be seen how that will shake out, but if the start of the year is any indication, it will involve a lot of play, a lot of taking my time, and a lot of being present without trying to rush anything.
It sounds luxurious, and it is, but for me, it's also the bleeding edge of personal growth. To gift myself with bandwidth, runway, and spaciousness that I don't have to earn or work hard for. that is very much outside my current comfort zone.
Goal two is about leaning into luxury as a form of deep self-care. Making investments for the long term. Buying better quality, not for the name on the label, but because it's the best way for me to care for myself. I see this goal playing out more as the year progresses, but it's also about hiring the best people to support my growth - something I'm already working on.
Goal three is the first income goal I've had in a long time, and it's less about the number of zeroes and more about re-building steady, sustainable wealth that gives me the means to retire Jim and afford to lean into luxury experiences that honor my comfort, joy, and well-being.
Goal four continues my body's rehab journey and further works to build a loving, supportive relationship with myself. This is a recurring theme in most of my goals: everything needs to care for me on some level or I ain't about it this year.
Goal five is probably my favorite. Shonda Rhimes once tweeted "I do not follow trails of candy. I AM the candy." It has been a signal flare for me for a long time and this year, I'm claiming it. To remember that I am the candy and to carry myself as the source, not the seeker all the damn time.
My final goal for the start of the year is the same goal I had in 2024: to create joyful, meaningful experiences with my chosen family. This is a maintenance goal - one that still requires tending. It's not that I didn't hit this goal in 2024, it's that there's still more to do that's important to me. Who that family is has evolved over the years, and I'm excited to see how much fun I can have making memories with the cool people I adore in 2026!
We're already midway through January as I write this, because Jim and I started the year with whatever ick we brought back on the plane from Nashville. It's hard to predict how this year will turn out, but whatever comes our way, I'm not giving up on ME this time.
Theme song: Times Are Changing
And as I say all of that, it's not lost on me how EVERY year has turned out different than I imagined it. Mostly in good ways, often in hard ways, but always in ways I've been able to survive or even thrive in. I've never had a year kick off with so much uncertainty and instability n so many different areas of my life and work. But I do know that I was born for this. I was made for this, and we caan be sure there are plenty more changes coming down the pike in 2026.
With a little luck, we'll get to mid terms and the elections will bring a turning tide of hope. With a little more luck, we'll get through this year with some joyful high notes. It may not be easy getting there, but it'll be worth it.
2026 for me is about showing u as the resourceful beacon of ight I know how to be, and shining that light into as many corners as I can reach. I'm not for everyone, and that's okay. My hope is that my right people are watching, looking for me, and ready to draw near. That's why this year's theme song is from Built By Titan + Skybourne... and yes, it's also the theme song from the TV show, Bosch: Legacy.
Do you feel the air shifting? No silence on the street. Hear the caged bird singing. Let freedom ring.
