S3 E22 Soft Launching into 2026

As we step into 2026, many of us are carrying more than we expected — fatigue, overwhelm, heartbreak from the news, and the leftover weight of a busy holiday season. If you’ve been wondering, “Why am I so tired?” or “Why can’t I find the motivation yet?”, this episode is your reminder: nothing is wrong with you. You’re human. And you’re allowed to begin this year gently.

In this conversation, Sophia invites you into a softer start to January — one rooted in rest, nervous system regulation, and honest capacity. She shares personal stories from the last few weeks, what it looks like to process heaviness without shutting down, and the surprising ways our bodies mirror nature’s winter rhythms.

You’ll learn why you don’t need to “hit the ground running,” how to choose the one habit that will support your energy this season, and why most goals don’t require a full year — only the moment you finally decide they matter.

If you’ve been craving permission to slow down, breathe, recalibrate, and still believe in beautiful things for the year ahead, this episode will land like a balm on your heart.

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Have a topic you would love to hear Sophia address on the podcast? Send your ideas to hello@sophiahyde.com

Transcript

Sophia Hyde (00:01.518)
Hi, welcome back guys. This is my first episode of 2026 and I'm so excited to be here with you. Full disclosure, I did plan on having one more at the end of the year, but life lifed man. Once the kids were out of school, we got hit with illnesses across the family and we had travel and it was just like, woof, I had to give myself permission to let some things go.

And one of those things had to be that another episode wasn't going to drop to the second week of January. So here we are. I hope you guys had a beautiful break. For me personally, we did Christmas here. We ended up not gathering with family because my three different households on my in-laws side came down sick. And then my daughter on Christmas even ended up with throat. And...

So we ended up just having the four of us at home with a quiet Christmas day and we ate random leftovers and then drove down to Florida where I had my 20 year high school reunion, which was amazing. So good, so, good. And then a week with family, did the D-Dawn, that's my maiden name, we did D-Dawn Christmas and...

Lots of fun with cousins, aunts and uncles and all that good stuff. And then we drove back and now I'm solo parenting for the month of January. My husband is shooting a feature film down in Key West. And if you're new to my podcast and you don't know this about my life, this has been my entire experience with motherhood. My husband is a cinematographer. so he's, hey, you guys want to giggle? Here, I'm going to give you guys a laugh.

What kind of feature is he shooting? It's like a question you get a lot, right? And so he's done documentaries, dramas, kids films, like all sorts of things. But one of the things that he's done a few times is horror films because they're done. A lot of them are done at an indie level. And me and him actually don't like to watch horror, but, you know, he knows what he's doing. He can shoot whatever he can create, whatever kind of emotional experience the director wants. Right. So he knows how to shoot horror. Anyways, he is in Key West shooting. Get ready for this.

Sophia Hyde (02:19.598)
a horror comedy about a lesbian pirate ghost. And so that is the reason I am solo parenting for three weeks so that he can film that. It makes me giggle every time I say it. And I'm sure it'll be great for those of you who like indie horror films. It's like a whole niche genre, like as popular as the women who love watching the Hallmark movies in December that are the same plot over and over again.

Anyways, I digress. That's not the point of this episode. The point of this episode is to talk about soft launching into January. We have around these parts, these parts, if you're listening to the Favorite Self podcast, you are amongst people and a community who have unsubscribed from hustle culture. The way that I operate around here, the way I lead this community is that we believe

that we will achieve our dreams and our goals and do really cool shit in the world, but we will not burn our bodies out in the process. We will have rest and pleasure and joy while we create our favorite lives. We do not have to choose. And so in these parts, in this little corner of the internet, I'm going to talk about what it means to soft launch into January. Now,

I do want to let you guys know that I actually recorded this episode last week, planning, knowing it would drop on the second Tuesday, whatever that date is, don't know, the 13th. And then the world kind of did some stuff. And so I felt like I needed to rerecord this and just address it, talk about the elephant in the room.

So if you don't follow me on social media, I already made a little bit of a post about this, but yeah, I have a lot of clients who over the last week have been like, Sophia, I'm so tired. I'm so exhausted. I don't have the energy. I can't find motivation. Welcome to being human. Welcome to being normal. Let's talk about this. Okay, now.

Sophia Hyde (04:36.621)
If you saw the post that I made, I'm just gonna repeat it just a little bit, which is the day in the days following the murder of Renee Good, was moving on to take care of my kids, do my job, all this stuff, then my body was really storing a lot of stress.

And so I shared in this post like how I personally handled that and how my husband, even though he was away, still supported me through that, which was like reminding me to make sure I'm working out and moving this stuff through my body. And I did a meditation and I felt like a heaviness in my heart and my chest. my gosh, they were so heavy. It felt like a weight was sitting on them. And so I did a meditation where I went in to just like look at that. And sometimes guys, what we got to do, I know this is so black and white, but you just, you have to actually feel those feelings.

You cannot keep scrolling the internet and just be like, swipe, swipe, swipe, watch a woman get murdered at gunpoint. Keep swipe, swipe, swipe. Your body cannot hold on to that. You cannot just be like, today's another Tuesday in the world. Just going to keep going about my business. This is not effing normal. OK, we have to address that. That's not normal. So what I recommend is to stay in tune with your body.

ask your body what it needs. I felt a real like heaviness in my chest. So I laid down and one of the things I did was I actually felt the feelings. I asked my body what emotion is this? And then I would feel it. And then what other emotions are coming up? And what are the thoughts that I'm thinking? Like why am I feeling that way? So I think the biggest emotion that kept coming up for me was actually rage.

It was rage. So I had to like actually give my body permission to feel the emotion of rage. And I just sat there and I laid in my bed and I felt the emotion of rage. Which then, and then I like, what am I thinking? And I was just thinking like, God, this is not okay. And you know, I'm just going through these thoughts and I'm going through the feelings and I just laid there and let my mind process what it needed to process. Let my body process what it needed to process. There was anger, there was sadness, there was grief. Like there was all these emotions and I just...

Sophia Hyde (06:55.197)
sat there and allowed them to move through my body like waves. And ultimately on that particular day where I landed was that I didn't want to be alone. And I'm solo parenting right now and I got these two kids and I was like, I work from home and by myself, I'm like on Zoom calls and emails and whatever. And I was just like, I need to be in community. That's what I need. And I went and made a poster.

and went and sat with my community at a peaceful protest and just held my sign with a friend. And it said, honor good, choose love, not hate. That's what I held. And I'm not saying that that's what you need to do. I'm not saying that's how you need to respond to this moment in history. What I am recommending is that you don't power through

your days and your weeks, pushing all of this down and ignoring it and being like, I live in a bubble, everything's okay, it's not affecting me, so I'm just gonna keep doing everything. You don't need to put your life on pause, you don't need to stop achieving your goals and doing your work in the world. But...

If any part of you feels heavy right now, welcome to being human, welcome to being normal, welcome to having empathy. And now is the time to just like let your body do what it needs to do. I made sure to prioritize my workouts. I made sure to go on walks. I've actually scheduled a walk with a girlfriend for this week. I don't even know that we're going to talk about current events. Maybe it'll come up. Usually her and I just talk about books and fictional characters because we like to read the same kinds of novels.

That's probably what a majority of our conversation will be about, but there's just value in taking care of our bodies and moving the stress through. And so the reminder, the point of the post was to remind you that there's six ways to move stress out of the body. And that is hugging, laughing, crying, moving, creating, and breathing. For my artists in the world, if you're listening to this and you are somebody who likes to paint or draw or write music or poetry or journal,

Sophia Hyde (09:21.727)
There's never been a more important time for you to do that, for you to process and to write and to create like the world needs what you have to offer. And even if you're not even doing it for the world, do it for yourself just to move that energy out of you and into something else. OK. So I I wanted to just open with that because you are not listening to a podcast led by somebody who just keeps.

coaching through as if we can just ignore the news. That's something that several mentors and people I really admire in the coaching industry, they just don't acknowledge the news. That's what the hell they teach success is they're like, you just tune it all out and you take ownership of your life and you control what you can control and you just focus on yourself. I'm like, and both. Like I'm gonna, I'm not gonna doom scroll all day. I'm not gonna be over informed because I can't control those things. And also like.

I'm not gonna put my head in a bubble, stick my head in the sand and pretend like this stuff isn't happening all around me. So there's that. Now let's talk about soft launching into January. Back in the day when I was participating in that Hustle Culture energy, I had heard from an author that I really admired and he had.

said that he uses the week between Christmas and New Year's every year to do his annual planning and hits the ground running with his goals January 1. And I followed that for a while. And then about five years ago or so, I realized, no, that sucks. We're not doing that. We're not doing that. So what I do now is the week before Christmas in January is rest. It is for family. It is for doing nothing.

And then when I go into January, I actually don't go in with a mindset that I have to hit the ground running. I think of it more as like a bridge, a launch pad. Well, no, launch pad's too harsh of a word. Like a runway, like a ramp. I ramp into the year. And there's a few things happening here. One is we have to recover.

Sophia Hyde (11:36.398)
from the burnout that the holiday season causes us. There's a lot of overstimulation, there's events and people and the mental load and all the gifts you have to buy. There's just so many things to think about if you're traveling. It's just a lot. And so I find my body needs time to recover from everything that November and December asks of me. In addition, it's also peak winter. And I found that there's a lot of value in following the lead.

that nature provides for us. And what do the trees do in the winter? I recently learned that the reason that the leaves fall, it's actually because the leaves recognize when the temperature starts, or the trees recognize when the temperature starts to fall, that they can't keep everything on the tree alive. It's a conservation of energy. So they drop the leaves so that

they can protect their resources and their energy on like the roots, the trunk, the branches, and preserve themselves. That way come spring and summer, then they can bloom again and then they'll have the energy to keep all of the plant alive. And I like to think about ourselves as humans as that too. Like we have our own winters where we need to release, we need to let go. That way we can

take care of ourselves and prioritize ourselves and be ready to bloom when it is that time. And for many people, the winter is a time to go slower. So I like to use January as more of a pause. I'm still making progress on my goals, guys. Actually, my numbers, they look really good for January. I'm not like not in business. I'm not like pressing pause, but I'm also not going very hard. I think of January as a time to

What needs to be true for this year? What foundation do I need to lay? What version of Sophia can the rest of this year build upon? And that's what January is for. I'd like to remind you, if you've been listening to this podcast for a long time, or you've read my book, or you've attended any of my events, there's a few messages that I'm constantly repeating, and I'm gonna regurgitate them again for you now.

Sophia Hyde (14:01.149)
when we're setting goals, it's important that they're in all areas of our lives, not just like finances and career, right? And so some of that is self-care. And I think January is a great time for self-care, to be looking at those self-care goals. Reminder, self-care is energy management. Okay, so we look at those things, but the way we achieve our goals is through changing our habits. And the way that you change your habits is to just focus on one at a time. So one of the things I'm constantly teaching is,

to go hard or hard, I don't really know if that's the I wanna use, but like to focus your energy on only one goal at a time. And if you do one goal at a time over the course of the year, you can achieve way more than if you try to tackle all your goals all at the same time. And in my opinion, January is a great time to look at the goals in your self-care spoke of how do you restore your energy, right? What depletes you, what restores you.

and ask yourself what restores my energy and how can I create habits of giving myself more of that this year? For me personally, one thing that's been kind of crazy is I've been getting like nine to 10 hours of sleep a night. And what's bizarre about that is my body for most of my adulthood naturally wakes up about seven and a half hours after I have fallen asleep. So I've been texting with my husband and being like, dude, what is this? Like I keep.

BT dubs I haven't used an alarm clock in like How old's my daughter 11 12 years? I have I haven't used an alarm clock. I my children had been my alarm clock for the last decade of my life and also I have just created a lifestyle for myself that I Don't know I just I get to do I get to spend my time the way I want to right so I've had I'm having to use one now because

Brandon's not here to make sure the kids get to school on time. But what has been normal for the last, how long have I lived here, seven months? Is I've been just waking up naturally and I typically wake up between like 5 a.m. and 6.30. At some point in there I wake up and then I have like my quiet time where I might read, drink coffee, do whatever I want before I have to like start my day beyond for the kids.

Sophia Hyde (16:27.881)
So a lot of times I wake up before the kids and this week I've been sleeping in all the way until it's time to like start getting ready for school, which is way more of an urgent way than I like to. I like to like start quiet and then get moving. But this week my body has been sleeping nine to 10 hours and so I told Brandon that I'm like, what is this? I am not waking up early right now. And he sent me this article he had found on how

Humans have like our own version of hibernating and when it's cold outside your body actually like wants more sleep And it's like a cyclical rhythm and I I was like, my gosh That's happening to me and it's not happening to him because he is down in Key West where it is warm So his body has not told him it is time to hibernate But I am up here in some cold weather with these short days and my body is like yes more sleep more restoration This is the energy of January in my book

Now, when what I mean about like soft launching is just because I'm getting more sleep, giving myself more compassion to, you know, get through what is happening, like carry what is happening in the world alongside my own personal life. One of the things that has been true is the hours that I do work, what am I doing with them?

Right, so I am prioritizing the things that are most important. You don't have to work 50, 60, 70 hours a week to also find success. And so I am prioritizing myself, my body, my needs, and then the things in my work that are the most important. Another thought I wanted to share with you guys today was to...

redefine, I want to challenge you with this thought, to redefine what it means to have a strong start. And one of those things is like right now when I think of strong start, you think of like taking action and going hard, right? But what if you would write a new definition of your own success that it honors, it honors your ambition and also honors your rest.

Sophia Hyde (18:45.919)
And so a strong start doesn't have to be about speed or going hard. It can look like having a strong foundation underneath you. So what do you need in your life to feel stable, to feel safe, to feel sustainable? And these are questions that we want, when we think about them, we want to think about like our nervous system. What does our nervous system need to feel safe? How do we create that feeling? What does it look like to regulate? Which is what I was sharing at the beginning of this episode, right?

the ways that we can move stress out of our body. Those are all good things to be doing. And also there's other ways to regulate your nervous system. Like things like I enjoy a hot bath or laying under my weighted blanket. For me it's heat, so you can use like temperatures. Other people like cold things. They might do like the cold plunges and whatever works for you, right? But what are ways you can support your body and your nervous system so that it feels safe and regulated?

Also, ask yourself when you think about starting strong, think about your capacity for this season in your life. One of the things that we can do that harms us is to compare ourselves not only to other people, but also other versions of ourselves, a version of you in the past that might have had more capacity. So for example, I've had years where I...

did a lot in one year. I think last year, moving my family and growing my business, right? I did a lot last year. But let's compare it to 2018. In 2018, at the end of 2017, I was six months into a new job I had taken on and also got unexpectedly pregnant. And then going into 2018, I had this new job where I was still drinking water out of a fire hose, major mental load, and I was pregnant. And then in 2018, my husband booked five feature films.

which means he was just gone all the time and we had a four year old. And so my, I had one goal for 2018, one goal. was survive. Understand that starting in 2011 is when I started making vision boards and starting in 2016 is when I started looking at all the different spokes on my wheel. Like I am Mrs. Like set all the goals and do all the things.

Sophia Hyde (21:07.469)
And in 2018, I was like, we've got one goal here, guys. Survive. Get to next year. And we did. We did survive that year. And honestly, that was all I could handle, was taking care of my kid, going to work, and being pregnant. And then, know, life throws a curve ball and my son ended up, you know, in the pediatric ICU for 11 days, right? Like I didn't plan on him to catch.

RSV is an infant, right? And so like that year was just like, if we can just get out of this alive, truly. And we did, we did. And hell, we saved up. We kept like saving money through all that stuff in case something did come up with a pregnancy and we needed our emergency fund. And when we ended up not having to use the emergency fund, we threw it at the debt and I finished 2018 getting to pay off all the debt that we finished off like.

some student loans and credit card stuff. And so that was cool. It was like, wow, I wasn't even going to expect myself to achieve any big goals this year. And we still did, but I wasn't even trying. I just was like, get through this year, right? Okay, so what is your capacity right now? This is a year for me personally, I actually think I have a really big capacity. I think actually, now that we're moved, we're settled.

business grant. actually think this might be my kids are old enough that they don't need my body to keep them alive. I think this might be one of my biggest capacity years I have had since before I had kids. Right? And so I have some big goals and just because I have big goals and a lot of capacity this year doesn't mean that I need to stress myself out starting on January 1 because suddenly the calendar turned to pages. It doesn't even make sense. Right? So

That leads me to the next point, which is instead of putting your concentration on the execution, like the action, the things I'm gonna do, pause, which I love January for a good pause, pause and make sure it's coming from the right intention. Am I going the right direction? Is this where I wanna be going? Which is why I love, if you haven't bought my vision board course yet, it's a mini course, 27 bucks, but this is where intentions really come down. What is my favorite life? What do I want for each area of my life? And then,

Sophia Hyde (23:22.829)
I'm dreaming and setting the goals and visualizing what I want for those areas. Am I attaching the right habits to it? What's gonna get me there? What are the thoughts that are gonna support me? I highly recommend getting your hands on that if you haven't already because this is how we lead through Intention and if you have done that and you do have those things set What's the one habit instead of trying to tackle all of it in January? What is the one habit or the one goal that feels really good?

to build your foundation on right now. so closing out, let's just think about moving into this year. Here's a couple of thoughts I wanna lead you with. One is instead of asking yourself, what do I wanna accomplish this year? Ask yourself, how do I wanna feel while I'm building this life? How do I wanna feel? And then what needs to be true in my life to be able to do that?

A version of you that is well rested and stable is going to be able to accomplish a lot more. I skipped over one of my notes, which was, I wanted to share with you guys something you may not know, which is most goals that people set for their year when they sit down and do an annual goal, most goals that people set on an annual basis actually only need 90 days to get done.

So whether you do it in this quarter, the second, the third, the fourth, your goals are gonna get done when you decide that you're gonna go after them. Also, just as a reminder, you've probably heard me say it before, how many days does it take to create a new habit? There's no fucking answer. It's however many you decide. Sometimes a goal or a new habit takes one day because you've just decided you're gonna start doing this thing and you commit to it and you jump back down. And other times they're harder and you have to experiment.

and you thought in a couple of weeks you could have this new thing happening in your life and you just keep realizing like that you're not setting yourself up for success and so you're like maybe it's gonna be at this time of day maybe it's gonna be at this location maybe I gotta adjust this and it takes you like four months to finally figure out what needs to be true for me to consistently do this habit so some require some experimenting for a while and other ones are just one decision away that's it right there is no science to how long it takes to create a habit and so the same thing goes with your goals they don't all need this year they just

Sophia Hyde (25:49.761)
they're gonna get achieved when you decide that that's the number one one and you're gonna move it to the top and then everything else in your life is gonna come along and support it.

Okay.

I'm gonna finish out with just some thoughts that I want to send you guys. Your dreams are so valid. Your rest is also productive. You can take a nap and still get cool shit done in the world. Okay? And your own pace is allowed. There's not a right speed.

I probably should have said this at the beginning, but you know what? If you woke up on January 1 super motivated and you got all your rest in already in December and you are ready to go hard and run a marathon out the gate starting on those first couple of weeks, then go for it, girl. You do you. I'm happy for you. I'm just recording this episode to give permission to the people who need to give themselves a little more grace and compassion.

I hope this episode serves you and that you kick off this year in an amazing way, but in a supportive way. Sending you guys love and wishing you the happiest of New Years. Bye bye.