What I’m Saying No to After the Past 30 Days (My January 2026 Recap Ritual)

[00:00:00] So I wanted to try something new this month. For context, and I’ve spoken about this on the channel before, every month I do something called a recap ritual. Actually, I do it every day, the end of every week,
the end of every month, every quarter and every year. And it’s a concept I’ve spoken about in the recap ritual video here on my YouTube channel, and it’s also featured in a chapter of my upcoming book, the Five Overwhelm Culprits™, which is coming out in May.
Now, many years ago, I’ve been in business for now, for going on eight years. I used to share my monthly recap rituals. Actually, at that point in time I did it quarterly but I used to share my quarterly recap rituals very candidly via a live stream. I would do it either on LinkedIn or YouTube, but they were very well received.
So I figured 2026, the year my book coming out, what a better time for me to re-implement this and give you a little bit of insight into my own world, personally as well as professionally.
This is a very [00:01:00] transparent process and I could walk you through exactly what happened in January.
The process is, I’m gonna be talking about what went well, what didn’t go well and what will I be doing differently next month. That is the entire recap ritual process. Just those three questions, it’s super simple, and so today I figured why not? Let’s talk about January.

Corrie LoGiudice-1: So I track everything for my recap rituals in a custom made notion dashboard. Here’s an example of what mine looks like. I always title mine the year as well as my word of the year. This year, my word of the year is worthy but either way, my version is highly customized.
However, you could get a version of this with my design, your 2026, like a CEO Instant Access workshop. I actually provide you with this, dashboard so that you could build out a recap ritual that works great for you. We’ll link to that in the show notes, but it’s very [00:02:00] simple the way it works.
I have one place for each month where I keep track of all of my goals. So I’m gonna be going over this upper section right now that talks about the winnings and learnings, just so you have an idea of how they work, should you want to design this kind of template for yourself at each week,
this is where I do my weekly recap. And I’m not gonna show you all of my weekly recaps ’cause really we don’t need to know it because I’m talking about my high level overview of the month. But every single day I go in whatever week I’m in and I list what went well, what didn’t go well, what will I do differently next time.
And then at the end of the week, I look at over for the course of the week and I decide overall, what went well this week, what didn’t, what will I do differently next week? And then I take that into mind when I move into the following week from week one into week two. Okay, so at the end of the month, I go through the whole process, which I’m going through right here.
All right, so let’s cover what went well and there was a lot that went well this month. This is a month for me to celebrate. So for me personally, I invoiced my largest ever virtual [00:03:00] event. And that’s in terms of the total invoice amount that I charged, as well as the audience size. It’s over 2,500 people virtually, which is huge for me.
So that was a huge personal milestone why I went on the list. I also, this month invoiced my largest ever in person speaking rate. This was a huge win for me, I’ve actually been working towards this for several years at this point. There was a lot that went on behind the scenes in terms of updating my branding, updating my reel, changing my positioning, and overall it finally paid off this month, first month in 2026, where I invoiced my largest ever speaking rate.
Super exciting for in person. As a result of all this, the biggest win for the month is January 2026 was my highest earning revenue month in my business to date. I have been in business over eight years at this point and I did as much this month that I did [00:04:00] in some past years of my business, which I’m like in amazement in a way, but at the same time, also not surprised because I have done so much money mindset work, which I’m sure I’ll be talking about in, I talk about it all the time in terms of my own personal development but the thing that was amazing for me was when I realized it instead of it freaking me out,
’cause in the past the idea of that used to scare me. I was just kind of like, “Of course, yes, that makes sense because everything you’ve done to date warrants that.” right? You are worthy. Hence my word of the year. So I was super excited about that, so that’s a big win. I also completed on average two to three speaking discovery calls a week, and I am booked into February as well.
So my overall business pipeline is really, really healthy and my highlights for this don’t even include my coaching clients at the moment, which I do have several on retainer right now. So overall, my pipeline is super healthy and that’s something I’ve been working [00:05:00] towards for a while. Other wins include, I was booked to be a guest panelist.
That’s something new for me, i’m usually booked as a keynote or as a workshop facilitator, but I got invitations to speak on panels regarding women’s leadership, regarding AI and leadership, regarding diversity, equity and inclusion. So advancing underrepresented professionals within the workplace.
So I received, two different panelist invites, which is going on my speaking calendar in the next couple of months and I am really pumped about that because one of the things I love is just sitting in answering questions. It’s like my happy place, I love doing Q&A’s as part of my speaking events.
So to be able to be a panelist was really, really exciting for me. Another big win, and this was something me and my team had worked with for a while, most of last year, was starting to create more digital products and services. Things like instant access workshops, like the Design your 2026 like a CEO™ Workshop.
I have different AI tools, [00:06:00] I have workbooks, I have all sorts of stuff now. So this month we received entirely passive income from digital products that we didn’t promote. And I hit my goal that I had set for the month too. So I just willed it into the universe. I was like, I would love to make, this much money and it happened.
Which is pretty darn cool. I also this month, and this was a big project for me, I made some improvements to my coaching containers to really enhance their experience. It was important to me that my clients are not only getting the results that they’re looking for, that they have enough structure within the container and support to be able to track what they’re doing and be able to really have visibility and clarity regarding what they’re doing.
So some of the changes that we made were mostly regarding asynchronous coaching. That is something I do offer all of my clients at the moment in addition to their regular, zoom coaching calls with me. They also have access to me, it used to be through Voxer, but now [00:07:00] we’re gonna use a different platform for things that pop up between their sessions.
So we created um. some really, really nice frameworks to help make the asynchronous more efficient so that folks would use it more. ’cause ultimately they will get better results when they are utilizing all of the resources in the coaching container to them and not just relying on the calls themselves.
So that was something I was very excited to roll out. Then also probably my biggest project for the month was submitting my developmental edits to my editor. I had actually received these right before the holidays ended and my company went on break for two weeks. So I really wasn’t able to dive into this until the beginning of January and I had to focus on it for like two weeks straight to go through the entire book, get all the developmental edits back.
I turned it around, I was super excited about that at the time that I wrote out all of this in my recap ritual, it was in copy editing but now [00:08:00] it’s actually back to me already. I just got that. So now I have to go through it again and then return it to my editor next week, and then it’s gonna go to type setting.
Either way, The book is completely on target, it’s beautiful, it’s coming out amazing. It’s getting great feedback, from my editor and the production team at the publisher and I am really stoked about it. I also received a beautiful forward from my book
from my early business mentor and author, mentor Shannon Kaiser. So Shannon, if you’re watching this, thank you again. It was so wonderful to get to see how other people view you, outside of yourself. And that’s exactly what Shannon’s forward did for me. It helped me see different things about how I lead myself, about my values and put to words things that I don’t see as easily as the people around me do. So that was really quite a treat.
I focused on a new set of health and self-care protocols, so for a little bit of [00:09:00] context, I partied a little too hard around Christmas and New Year’s back in December and decided, you know what, going into January, I’m going to go back on the whole 30.
I’ve been doing the whole 30, it’s a diet elimination program I’ve been doing it for over a decade. It works really well for me. In particular, apparently I have a body that hates inflammation, but either way, I was like, you know what? Let me try this out, I feel like garbage. Let’s start off the new year on a new note.
So I really focused a lot of this month on making sure I stayed compliant to the program and I ate really super squeaky clean foods. I have not eaten gluten, I’ve not eaten dairy, sugar, alcohol, legumes, soy, like none of that. Not even grains, which before I used to eat gluten-free grains. I haven’t even had that and truth is I feel amazing,
my energy is up. I’ve also made some really interesting comparisons, looking at it in regards to how I show up each and every day and that’s something I actually am talking [00:10:00] about. I just started a brand new substack where it’s an experiment where every single day I’m doing my standard journaling. So what I used to do writing in a book every day, I’m doing that journaling, but I am videoing myself instead.
So I’m doing a loom video, then I’m exporting all the transcripts and then I’m utilizing AI at the ends of the month to look and see different patterns, trends and things that I might not notice looking at it on a day-to-day basis. It is fascinating what the AI picked up in regards to how I show up as a result of how I take care of myself using these health and self-care protocols. So overall, that’s definitely something I’m carrying with me into February. It’s working amazing and if you’re interested in that experiment that I’m running go head over to Substack. We’ll make sure that we include it in the show notes. We’d love to see over there.
All right, another thing to celebrate is the systems and processes I put in place last year in regards to communications and SOPs for my team. I mean, really, team Corrie Lo is functioning like [00:11:00] a straight up machine, so I had a lot of growing pains in my business last year. We went from a two person team, me and one va, which went that way for over a year that we then went to three contractors and myself. So we are now a four person team, we grew very fast. A big portion of that growth happened in the end of last year and it really required a lot from me in terms of structuring my communications in my business, being really specific with my standard operating procedures and making sure that everything that we do in the business is documented. It’s in our Asana system and we have clear communication channels between Asana and Slack to know how to communicate with everybody and to do so efficiently. Even though we are not working synchronously, because we are in multiple different time zones across the globe, so that was very important. But it allows us to have a flexible work environments. We all work part-time hours, [00:12:00] including myself and we are rocking and rolling, man. So that was something I am super hyped about.
And then, last but not least, my publisher’s PR team reached out to me to set up a call to discuss our book launch strategy from March. I’m so excited that my publisher did actually bring on a PR team specifically for promoting my book. I’ve done a lot of my own PR over the last several years in my business, and I already have a lot of stuff on my calendar in terms of speaking engagements and things like that to promote the book.
So I’m very excited for this call, it’s gonna happen the second or third week in February where I’m gonna get to sit down with this team. We’re gonna overall strategy and that I’m gonna have something actually locked down in Asana for my team and I to refer to so we can actually implement it March through May when the book goes live. So I’ve been waiting for this person to contact me and to say they were ready to go and I am so, so, so, so, so excited for it.
Alright, so that was a [00:13:00] lot of stuff that went well. Let’s talk about what didn’t go well. Because truth was, if you don’t have the good with the bad, you really don’t have any perspective or context as to how life can be.
’cause if life was awesome all the time, it’d be pretty damn boring. I’m not ashamed to admit this because I think it’s important that people who want to start a business know this. I started the month and the year for that matter, it was like January 1st where I looked at my business checking account and there was $0 in it, zero. And while this is something that really didn’t go well, ’cause you don’t wanna get to the point where you have $0 in your business checking account. That said, it was a really good lesson for me because It really taught me that a lot of the money mindset work I’ve done over the last couple of years, it’s really helped because I didn’t have a nervous system reaction to it.
It was just like a, “Oh okay, that sucks.” And I knew I had other money coming in. I had revenue coming [00:14:00] in to help with it and obviously it’s not at $0 now so it all worked itself out, but that’s a huge part of one of the lessons that I learned in 2025. If I had to look at that whole, what went well, what didn’t go well, what would I do differently, one of the things I was carrying into doing differently in 2026 is making sure that I’m working my cash flow a bit better. Last year things got really tight in a few different instances because I was growing very fast and then I would have months where, you know, speaking is a very seasonal business, so the revenue is going woo.
So it’s stuff that I’m learning to learn to manage a little bit better. So going into 2026, that’s a focus for me. I thought it was a really fascinating and beautiful sign from the universe that it was like, okay, we’re gonna zero you out you’re gonna start from nothing going into this year to really anchor this for yourself but then, like I said, it was entirely temporary. I ended up billing my highest revenue month ever in my business. So the fact I had [00:15:00] $0 at the beginning of the month did not really mean the end of the world at all so that was something that didn’t go well that I learned something from.
Next is at the beginning of the month when I started my whole 30, I had some pretty terrible health issues that went along with it. So the first being I had a migraine that lasted about a week and I think a big portion of that was because I had withdrawn from so many foods I normally don’t eat that I’m intolerant to.
During Christmas, I went to town on gluten, dairy, sugar. I typically try not to eat those foods because I don’t feel well and they cause a lot of inflammation in my system and withdrawing from them the first two weeks or so of January was absolutely awful, so I had a week long migraine, I had another week where I had a stomach bug, there was the flu and colds and all sorts of stuff going through my house between my kids and school. So that was really challenging to try to keep everything going. And again, mind [00:16:00] you, I run my business, my team runs my business on all part-time hours, so we don’t have a whole lot of time to do what we do and to be sick during a portion of it didn’t really make it that much easier.
Another thing that, and I’m really curious for anybody watching this who has a presence on LinkedIn, if you’ve seen the same thing. My LinkedIn content performance took a completed total nose dive. So it used to be that, even back October, November, my account on LinkedIn was going viral multiple times over.
I had multiple a hundred thousand view posts and things were going great and my system was really locked in and we were creating, content on a daily basis that was getting high visibility. January, it’s like it fell off a cliff, so I went from having like over a hundred thousand views to having, if I’m lucky, 3000 views.
Now I know there’s a lot of people out there that would love to have 3000 views. It’s not about the views, it’s about what I had designed and the systems we were running, being designed for one algorithm and then the algorithm changing. And I’m gonna share about what we’re doing to counter this going into [00:17:00] February in just a minute.
Another thing that went not so well is I wanted to take care of projects after I got my manuscript in the first two weeks. That was the top CEO priority for me. I had wanted to take care of a bunch of projects that were on the back burner forever. I figured those two weeks were a really good time for me to take care of things that were important, but I could kick the can down a road for a while because other stuff was more important.
Every single time I went to do something for these projects, there was some kind of a tech hiccup or some kind of a roadblock that would have me spending an hour on said task and then I couldn’t get any further and then I just had to abandon it. So that was really frustrating to devote that time to it and get absolutely nowhere on it.
And then lastly, and this happened more towards the end of the month, I got really frustrated with my screen time and how I was willingly spending hours on my phone when I wasn’t working. I would just from two o’clock when my kids would get home from school to 10, when I went to bed at night, I was in like a Facebook scroll hole and I don’t know why.
So [00:18:00] it really affected my mental health, especially with everything going on in the world now in the news. Finally I figured this past week enough was enough and I’ve started utilizing my brick more. I think I’ve talked about the brick on another episode, so I’ll make sure I mention that again and we’ll also link to it in the show notes and I’m gonna cover that in a second on what I’m doing differently going into February but that was definitely something that impacted me.
All right so, this actually just happened right before I went to go shoot this, so I had to add it into here because it is still within the month of January. On my invoices, when I invoice anybody, speaking, client, coaching client, whoever. The address that I have on there, it was a PO box, and I don’t know what happened with the US Postal System, but they shut down my PO box.
So I just learned this morning that one of my clients sent me a fairly large deposit via check that I was supposed to receive today via my PO box but now got returned back to the sender. So that was number one, embarrassing. And number two not something I ever [00:19:00] wanna deal with again. So I already went through my systems and I made sure that, number one, my address is correct on all my invoices.
And number two, I now have information in my invoices for a CH if people want to pay me that way, but you don’t know unless you have an issue like this happens sometimes right? So not gonna stress it.
All right, so let’s talk really quickly about what I’m gonna do differently next month. So one of the first things I’m definitely gonna do is my health and wellness protocols, so everything that I did in January. Which I’m super proud of myself, I worked out 19 times I set the intention to work out five days a week. There was one week I did four ’cause I was feeling really bad because of the migraine, but I still got some kind of movement in 19 days this month. So basically five days a week.
So I plan on continuing that into February. What I’m doing is working really well. I just love Peloton, so I just wake up, I do 20 to 30 minutes of that and then I’m done for the day. That and lifting and I’m also gonna continue with my whole 30.
So I’m gonna keep eating the way that I’m eating [00:20:00] through, I have a planned vacation in February, I’m going away for spring break, with my kids, which is gonna be awesome. We’re gonna Florida someplace warm, so I figure let’s continue the whole 30 through then at least and then I’ll start just before then adding some of these foods back in so that I don’t have to be so strict while I am on vacation and learn how to better balance that.
So that’s gonna be one of my goals going to February, is learning how to take these new protocols that I’ve been testing that work really well and being able to figure out what my limits are and expanding them as I move forward.
I’m also gonna test a strict no screen time outside of business hours schedule using my brick. So if you’ve never heard of a brick, it is a little magnet. You put it on your fridge and you can scan your iPhone to it and it’ll block you out of apps based on what you said. So I have mindset that anything that’s work related, so email, social media, things that I compulsively check because I want to see what the status is,
it locks me out of it. So I have it set up now and I’ve done it the last couple of days. [00:21:00] It’s really helped my mental health a lot. Where at two o’clock when I pick my kids up, it locks me out automatically and then it doesn’t reopen me until about seven o’clock in the morning the next day. Right around time when I’m gonna start to work again.
So I’m gonna continue that. I have a set number of hours that I set as my smart goal to have my phone bricked, so we’ll see how it goes and especially with me being on vacation part of the month. That should be an interesting experiment.
Also already set up to test new content strategies. So I’ve already gone ahead and I’ve identified what’s changed in the LinkedIn algorithm, what improvements I can make in my overall workflow and processes, what we could change in the content.
And I have about two weeks worth of content scheduled for February. I’m very curious to see how it performs and when and if it performs well by the way, I’m holding no expectations whatsoever, I’m just gonna see, what happens. But under the assumption that it does do really well, I’m gonna go ahead and then from there, create SOPs and [00:22:00] systems and we’ll actually build it into the workflow, which is going to help my content assistant be able to best leverage the changes.
And then from there, once my speaking deposits roll in, ’cause again, this is a really big speaking revenue month for me.
Once those deposits roll in, I’m gonna plan my business runway way better going into 2026. So I don’t have $0 in my account again, and I don’t run into the issues that I ran into in 2025, so lesson learned there.
So as you could see, this is one of the reasons why I do a recap ritual. It makes it very easy to see, especially when you look at what didn’t work well, what is working really great because you have the context, ’cause you’re listing it on a regular basis of all the things that are going great.
So you could double down your focus on what that is going into the next month and you can make necessary revisions on what isn’t and you could always be testing and trying new things to see what works best for you. So it’s an amazing framework, if you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend it.
Again, we will link to my [00:23:00] episode on the recap ritual, specifically in the show notes and I will again next month, do another recap ritual for the month of February and let you know what has changed, what happened, what worked, what’s didn’t and we’ll take it from there.
So I’d love to know if you are doing your own recap, what would you be doing differently next month? Go ahead, drop it in the comments, send me a dm, I’m most active on LinkedIn. I would love to hear what you think.
And that’s it for now, back to our regularly scheduled content starting next week. I hope you have a great day and I’ll see you on the next episode.
Thanks for checking out the next step with Corrie Lo. If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend, subscribe and leave a review. Together we’ll transform overwhelm into action and we’ll keep taking the next step towards competent leadership. See you next time.