How to close 2025

As your life coach I feel like I owe you a good talk about how to plan for 2026. What energy should you invite into your new year? How will you move past obstacles and get the results you want in the new year? Plot twist! I'm not going to talk about that at all, because there's something much more important at play.

If there's one thing I want you to take from 2025, it's nothing. How you get to a good start of 2026 is by getting complete closure from 2025, so you're not burdened by the past. Every day is a fresh opportunity to be a new you, and in fact every moment is a fresh opportunity. But what keeps us at bay? The lingering we do on what lives in our unconscious. It keeps us stuck in the past, making it impossible for us to fully be present in the now. Apply the same logic for the year 2026 and you see what I'm talking about.

The key word I want you to keep in mind is "closure".

Let's talk about how we commonly think about this word. We most commonly associate closure with relationships. Actually, do we? Maybe this is just how I think about that word. Whether it be a romantic relationship or a familial relationship, we don't want to end things on a certain note so we make an effort to adjust it and amend it. Boom! Closure.

So what is this certain note that we dislike? I generalize it as, you haven't resolved your feelings. Earlier this year I was invited to a coaching space called Creative Self Mastery where I had the chance to speak with a gentleman who was able to get closure with his mother prior to her passing. It's such a blessing to be able to get closure with someone while they're alive, because the alternative is... The person passes and you can't ever talk to them again.

I've seen numerous cases where people can't let go of the departed. Some times it's out of love, they can't let their loved one go. Other times it's out of spite, they have nowhere to point their anger to. Unfortunately this leads to years and years of unresolved, unclosed emotional experiences that take its toll harder and harder over time.

One of the most common cases of relationships that can really benefit from live-closure (closure while alive) is marriage. So many people cannot express how they truly feel with their spouse and it leads to this ironic consequence of needing to hide yourself in front of the person who knows you most intimately. Again, this is obviously stressful to the psyche.

How does one get closure anyway? If we're not talking about Billy's Buddhist coaching, it generally looks something like 1) make up your mind and have resolve about what you need to say 2) calmly go talk to the person and say what you need to say; emotional outbursts like exploding isn't quite closure 3) walk away knowing you said everything that needed saying.

In this case is talking about it important? What if the other person isn't willing to receive what I have to say? We have to understand that talking is a means, it's a tool to help you observe and live through the inner experience that wanted to resolve itself. In other words, talking is a means of practicing mindfulness.

I'll give you an example. This year I closed my relationship with my grandma. She passed while I was in high school, it's been two decades since it happened but I had been carrying around the grief of her passing for all of my life.

This wasn't particularly pronounced in my life until last year, when I was posed this question in a Buddhist training: how are you your grandma's grandson when she doesn't exist in the world?

On one hand, I am obviously my grandma's grandson. It's in my DNA and I literally wouldn't be here without her. But on another hand, my grandma doesn't exist in this world anymore. She has the same status as a fictional character or an imaginary animal. Something that feels so real, that's so probable; but not physically present in this world.

I had been sitting with this question for an entire year. I couldn't accept this simple fact that she was no longer present in this physical truthful reality. Acknowledging her non-existence felt like the worst betrayal of her love I could ever do. Because she is real to me, I can feel her touch like I'm still attached to her side in the small room she lived in in Daegu.

But in this year's Buddhist training I realized that this was the time to let her go. There was an opportunity for me to sit down in front of other people, be witnessed, and calmly live out my emotional experience as I intently observed it.

I kneeled in front of an alms bowl filled with water, and I started talking to her. I told her that I'm so grateful to be her grandson and that I had struggled a lot after her passing. But in the end I know that she loved me so much, and it would hurt her to know that I am suffering because of her. Hell, I even remembered her saying that she should die soon because she was done with all the things she set out to do in life. She didn't want to be dead weight, she never intended for her love to be a burden in my heart.

I felt my eyes well up and my voice tremble, but I didn't stop to give in to the emotion. I just noticed it come up and carried on with everything I wanted to say. I told her (more like I shouted into the room) that this goodbye, the goodbye for good, is way overdue and that I will happily move on from the illusion of her that I had been holding on to. I yelled with a particular glee, like saying goodbye to someone I'm really happy to send off to the next chapter of their life: "Goodbye, grandma!".

This doesn't really change anything in the physical truthful reality. My grandma had passed long long ago and this didn't briefly bring her back to life and take her again. But what's different is what's inside of me. There is no more suffering, and more importantly there is nothing that I have to carry with me into my future days. I can still think and remember my grandma, but I don't have to suffer because of it.

I want you to close your 2025. This means, really think back on how your year has been and what needs to be resolved in order to close your year. To help you with this, I have one question for you: Why didn't you do the things you set out to do this year?

This question is not meant to be a judgmental question. It asks you to actually look at the reason why you're blocked in your life. Some times the reason will have nothing to do with you. For example, you wanted to be a gold medalist but since this isn't something you can control unless you pay someone to fix a match, that might be a good example of how your goal was outside of your control.

But the core important matter is on the other side: reasons that 100% have to do with you. Why didn't you advance in the direction you wanted to? Why didn't you take the steps? What stopped you in your way? Because if you don't figure these things out, it is highly likely that they will continue to impede your life in 2026. Why wouldn't they?

You may find reasons like "it was too hard" or "I stopped being interested in it". But those aren't real reasons why because it's 100% possible to do hard things, it's 100% possible to do things you're not interested in. Again, the point isn't to push you into this robot that only does. The point is I want you to be the owner of your life. When you decide to do, I want you to be able to do. But in 99% of cases we decide to do but we can't because of reasons that live inside of us.

These reasons need to be closed. Maybe you won't close all of the reasons, actually scratch that -- it is likely you won't close all of the reasons. But if you are serious about moving the needle forward in 2026, even if you close ONE reason for good with the end of 2025 you won't believe how much you'll move forward in 2026.

Explore this in my 1:1 coaching, I'm taking clients for my 3 month program. Book time for an intro call here, or email me at billy@julylifecoach.com.

In video format, should you prefer it that way: