Episode 12: Setting Goals For The Year Ahead
In this episode, Rob and Brent discuss their intentions and goals for 2026, focusing on themes of health, balance, and personal growth. They reflect on the past year, share their adventures planned for the upcoming year, and emphasize the importance of building a community through the Midlife Circus podcast. The conversation highlights the significance of setting intentions, being flexible with goals, and fostering relationships.
Links, resources, books mentioned:
The One Word That’ll Change Your Life - John Gordon, Dan Britton, and Jimmy Page
(This post includes affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we may earn a small commission if you purchase through these links—at no extra cost to you.)
Topics we are covering in this episode:
Reflecting on the past year helps set intentions for the new year.
Choosing a one-word theme can guide personal growth.
Health encompasses physical, mental, and relationship aspects.
Setting goals should be flexible and adaptable.
Quality time with loved ones enhances relationship health.
Adventures can be both personal and shared experiences.
Building a community can provide support and connection.
Intentions for the year can be documented and revisited.
Creating a balance between work and personal life is essential.
Transcript:
Transcript Disclaimer - May contain the occasional confusing, inaccurate, or unintentionally funny transcription moment. It’s all part of the show.
Lena: A new year doesn't need a total reinvention. It needs intention. Today on Midlife Circus, Rob and Brent talk about setting goals for the year ahead without the pressure, the guilt, or the burnout. From choosing a simple word to guide the year to balancing health, relationships, adventure, and ambition, they share how they're designing the year ahead and what's coming next under the tent. Before we begin, remember to follow Midlife Circus on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen, and join us in the Midlife Circus community on Substack.
Let's get started with setting goals for the year ahead.
Rob: Happy New Year, Brent. I'm so looking forward to 2026, and that's really what today's episode is about. Brent and I are going to give you some insight into how we approach the New Year, so how we go into the calendar year by setting goals, setting some purpose, identifying what adventures we might take. We're going to share those with things with you that we do on the personal side, but we're also going to give you some insight into what 2026 will bring for the podcast and what we're really excited about in 2026 that you'll all get to experience alongside of all of us throughout the year. Before I jump into the, typical start of our conversation with a question, I actually want to give you some insight into some new things that are happening with us.
And actually, today is our first episode of the new year, on the first Wednesday of the new year, which coincides with the availability of our newsletter, which we started back in December. So our newsletter is up and running as of right now. It gives it'll give you some background on previous month's episodes, so it'll give you little bit of insight as to what the previous month's episodes were, as well as a link to access those, episodes, as well as some behind the scenes information on Midlife Circus podcast. So just some behind the scenes information we want to provide to all of you, our great listeners. You can sign up for this newsletter on our website, midlifecircus.fm, or just actually hot off the presses, you can actually subscribe to us on Substack.
And we'll be talking a little more about Substack later on in today's episode when we get into the podcast. So, Brent, what resolutions do you have for 2026?
Brent: There's a lot of them, which is super fun. Of course. This is one of my favorite times a year. I love the reflecting back on the prior year, and I also enjoy looking ahead. But there's one theme that I'm focused on in 2026 is healthy.
So if I were to say a resolution, and if I were to put it in a singular state, healthy. And that crosses all aspects of my life, whether it's relationships, physical health, mental health, financial health, but the theme here is healthy.
Rob: Nice. So does the OMI that you have and you're currently suffering from caused you to follow that healthy trend as you're thinking into 2026?
Brent: Yeah, so those of you that don't know what an OMI is, that's an old man injury. Unfortunately, my lower back is in recovery mode, we'll call it that. But during the holidays, I kind of tweaked it a little bit and I'm just in the slow recovery. That's part of it. But a lot of times for me, when I think about the key theme is I like to look ten years out as well and say, what do I want to be doing in ten years and what could I do today to help me be able to do that in ten years?
And it's just about my health. And if I'm healthy today, I believe that I'll be healthy ten years from now, if all goes as planned. So that's a big part of it, but yes, that was some inspiration was having a nagging back injury that just doesn't seem to want to go away.
Rob: Yeah, and I noticed you didn't share with the audience how you had that back injury occur. I wasn't doing deadlifts. I think it was putting up Christmas decorations. Not lights up on the house, but it was like stocking on the mantle. Is that what did it?
Brent: It was getting all the box out of our crawl space for all the Christmas decorations, but then we had this really big rug that we wanted to move around the house and, it was in our crawl space as well and trying to get it out. I was just pushing and pulling with one of my kids and all said it was just a little too much. It's a patient's thing. So let's move on from the back injury because it's something that is obviously top of mind for me, but for the sake of our conversation today, we can move forward.
Rob: So much like you, Brent, I don't do a resolution on an annual basis. Something I've been doing for quite a while is actually a one word theme for the year. So similar to you just mentioned healthy as your kind of theme or focus for the year. I have a one word theme that I've been using as an approach each and every year for roughly the last thirteen years now. This approach comes from a book I read, and I think I gave you this book a handful of years ago.
I may have given this book to you ten years ago because it's had such an impact on me. The book is the, the one word that'll change your life by John Gordon, Dan Britton, and Jimmy Page. Great quick read. I think it actually I read it every year to help set a context for my one word theme for the year. So I reread it every year.
It takes me through a process. It's a much more formal approach that I take with trying to find my word and let my word come to me and create a theme for the year that I try and live by in multiple areas of my life. And so for 2026, my word is going to be balance. And there's a number of reasons why the word is balance. First and foremost is I I've historically been of the mindset that you can never find balance in life and that you'll pendulums, kind of like a big pendulum, you'll swing from different parts of your life when you're overweight certain parts of your life based upon the season that needs it.
So while I was working and working crazy hours and starting a career, the pendulum was all the way over on work, there was very little adventure, very little hobbies, very little recreation or friends interaction. As I started training for major endurance events, that became the big pendulum swing, and a lot of my mental energy went towards getting ready for Coconut or a 100 mile race or a big mountain bike ride that I was going to be doing. And so it end up pendulum swinging quite a bit. And I started feeling myself in the last couple of months as we're building out this podcast, pendulum swinging back towards a lot of my emotional energy and physical energy almost tied exclusively to doing this podcast. And I wasn't going out for bike rides as much as I wanted to, or I wasn't running or going and doing adventures because I was really excited about what was happening with this podcast, and I want to devote my energy to this.
And I was following what I was excited about versus trying to actually figure out a way to squeeze it in to different parts of my life. So still go on the runs or the mountain bike rides or taking the van trip or sneaking off and going skiing in the middle of an afternoon on the weekend. I want to start doing more of that going into 2026. So the first one is just trying to actually get out of that pendulum cycle and really get stuck into a world where I can actually balance and have all these different parts of my life coming together. The other one, you talked about healthy, is for me balance is the physical part of being balanced.
And this summer, I think I mentioned this on the podcast, Tara and I finished climbing all the fourteeners, and there's one pretty technical one. And for the first time in my life, I felt as if I couldn't trust my physical body to be able to do it effectively, and I was a little thrown off by, by, the heights and the risk exposure that we had. And so I didn't want to actually fix the balance that I have in my body. You know, it's really important as we age is being able to balance and not having old man injuries where I trip and fall on the ground and hurt myself pretty dramatically and really just physically work on my balance, which ends up being a lot more core, which I hate working on is my core and back and things like that. So more weight training, a little bit of core and back.
That's really what balance is. The other part of it is to help physically get my balance back where I want it to be.
Brent: When you think about balance, one of the things that a friend of mine taught me several years ago, because I always had this big challenge of just, as you described in the pendulum, I would just go all in on one thing. And for me, for most of my professional career was work and it would just be out of balance with everything else. It would be heavily weighted on the work side. So he started to teach me the concept of being congruent and really having that flexibility where you're really intertwining or really weaving things together in your life, and as you described, allowing for flexibility. And so it's not, I'm just going to work all day and then I'm going to go do another activity.
It's, I might work for a couple hours and I might take a break and go do something else for about a half an hour or an hour or go for a run or a bike ride or whatever it might be. But it's not so focused on just having these big massive blocks of time creating flexibility. For me, I would find that the word balance creates anxiety if I try to put too much structure around it, meaning an equal part this and an equal part that. It's much more around flexibility. And that's just a mental state.
Like if you feel like you're in balance with your relationships, the relationships with your work, relationships with the people around you and so forth, that's a state of mind. But he taught me this way of looking at it that helped me through the journey because I was stuck, meaning so focused on one thing that I couldn't bring a whole lot else in. Now he said, Well, what if you create a little bit more flexibility? You might still get a lot done, but if you're creating flexibility and you're providing those moments and time to do other things, then it feels like you're a little bit more balanced. So that was something that helped me.
It might As you navigate 2026, it might be something that you can adopt that might help you through this part of your journey.
Rob: That approach actually has been helping me. When I go through this process, I start around Thanksgiving and sometimes the word comes to me really quick, which this year it did. Other times, it's taken a really long time to get to the word. This one came quick. And so as I started to think about balance, I thought of it more as, like, go with the flow.
So I don't have to have these big blocks or structure as much as I am right now, and I probably could have even gotten away with this while I was working. And so an example would be is I was hard in front of the computer in the last month working on some of our social media content and getting that all ready to go. And Tara, my wife, would say, hey. I'm taking the dog for a walk. Do you want to come?
And rather than what I used to say was, hey. I could do it in about two hours. I actually immediately stopped and just went for the walk. I just left everything up. I left everything logged in.
I figured, I'll just come back to it when I get back, and I'm going to go for the walk right now, especially since we've had some unseasonally warm weather. I want to take advantage of that. And what I found is that walk actually gave me a better presence when I came back in front of the screen and actually was quicker and more effective in getting things done. So I wish I'd done that a little bit more while I was working. Much like you, it was blocks.
Like, I can't do that. I have in two hours, I could go do that. I need to finish this one activity and be a little more flexible and saying, you know, I don't have to finish this right this minute. I have all day. I can go into the evening and finish this.
I'm going to go for the walk today right now while I can, or I'm going to go do my run right now while it's sunny outside, and I'll come back to doing this later. It definitely has helped me.
Brent: What is your general process as you approach closing out the prior year? Because I think that's, for me, that's always been a healthy part of reflecting backwards. What was your word last year? Do you recall?
Rob: My word last year, I have to look it up. It's I wrote them all in the back of the book. Last year was forward.
Brent: Very cool.
Rob: And so it's interesting with the word. Sometimes you forget about the word and then you realize that you've been living it anyway, even though you forgotten about it because you set it as an intention for yourself for the year. And for me, forward last year was about moving my life forward, quit looking backwards, quit regretting things that I did or did or didn't do, and focus on now where do I want to go, and let's go aggressively towards a forward direction versus looking in the rearview mirror. So that was last year's word.
Brent: From an outside eye looking in, I think you totally owned that because you took on new challenges, but you explored new opportunities as well. I mean, this this podcast came into play roughly mid year, a little bit before mid year 2025. And that was you and I both looking totally forward. It was like, well, this could be something completely new. It wasn't even on the radar for either of us at the beginning of the year.
And I go back even looking at my word for 2025 was creator. This podcast to me is all about creation. When I saw that word, I look back, I'm like, oh my gosh, like, look at all the things that were created in 2025. That's super fun. It's cool to hear your word came to you pretty quickly too.
Rob: Really quickly this year. I knew I'd felt that I was living out of balance and I felt like I was starting to overweight different areas of my life that I wanted to get away from falling into those old traps.
Brent: For me, the word actually didn't come to me as quick. It wasn't injury related. It was much more of, I've been so good for so long of putting out goals that are very business oriented, very big achievement oriented. And it was at one point in time in my life, there was financial goals and that dominated that year. I want to do really well in my earning years.
And then other goals were the accumulation of stuff, whether it's the house, the car, other years was really family oriented as it related to the stage of my kids and where they were at and activities they were doing. This year, I challenged myself saying, what if I create one word that is not financially driven? Now I can say financial health, but I don't really intend this year to be about some of the more material things. It's all about my mental and physical health and relationship health. I'm really focused on this bigger picture theme.
And it was something I have to challenge myself on because I get really good at going back to my professional life for goals, objectives, key performance indicators, how am I going to measure this? This year- Oh, we're
Rob: KPIs for your healthy word for the year, exactly.
Brent: Yeah, so this year it is about health, but I could take the health and really dive into it to say, I've done a pretty good job the last couple of years on my sleep health. And that's been really important to me. It's been a big part of my journey, but one area that I always want to focus is on nutrition. And I think I can do better on that, but I'm going to take a different angle on it. I'm going to leverage AI to help me understand the intake and what does it do.
So what kind of energy does that bring to me when I eat that type of food? And I want to use it as an experimental period of time to really understand the intake of food and what I'm eating and how is it impacting my overall performance. I'm doing this as a creative project. It's fun to me to learn about it that way. If I take this much protein and this much fiber and there's standards out there, But I also believe that everybody manages a little bit different based on the stage of life that they're in, the amount of activity they're doing and so forth.
So I'm going to play around with that more to come down the road, but that's part of this healthy thing of what can I dive into a little bit deeper that I've probably avoided? And I think it's important point in time to do. I eat pretty healthy, I'm not worried about that, but could I change the mix maybe the time of day I eat something versus another time of day? And is it going to help me throughout the day to have better energy? It's a big curiosity for me.
So I'm willing to give it a shot. I think this is my year, Rob, that I'm going to actually dive into this. Every year there's a health goal, something related to this, but it's so nebulous that it doesn't, it's like this unachievable thing.
Rob: Now you have the word. It's the word. It's the theme to be healthy.
Brent: Yeah. Yeah. I'm excited about it. So it's been fun for me because I'm trying to move away from my KPIs mentality.
Rob: Nice. Now I want to go back to something you said you said very briefly, it has to do with some of our earlier episodes. Kind of a flashback to the deal friends and real friends, as well as to a recent one that you shared about being low lonely at different points in your life. You mentioned relationship health. So as you said healthy as a word, you said healthy relationships.
Tell me how you thought about that and what do you how have you defined it? Are you maybe not KPIs, but what's your intention and what are you going to try to do around healthy relationships?
Brent: One of the things that I try to do at the end of the year is I do this exercise reflecting backwards to say, going into the next year, what do I want to do more of? What do I want to do less of? And when it comes to relationships, I really learned a lot about myself of the more of, spending quality time with the people that I love. And that has to do with my family, it has to do with my friends. And I did a few adventures this past year with some friends one on one and they were exceptional.
One friend and I, we went to Moab for three days and we did all sorts of activities in Moab. We hiked and we went biking and we just had a blast, but it was that one on one quality time. I want to do more of that. And I really enjoy that. You and I have done stuff like that together where we go off and we did this great fishing trip, what, two or three years ago to the Green River in Utah.
And we had so much fun for two or three days. I love that. So I want to do more of that. I find with my kids and the stage that they're at, the quality time seems to be less and less available. So when it's there, I want to take advantage of it.
So part of it is being present when I have that moment in time with them. So to me, relationship health is so important and it's truly appreciating the people that are your real friends and the ones that you truly enjoy spending time with, take advantage of that time. So that's the piece that I find is really important for me and that relationship health and keep fostering those relationships because it only gets better the more energy you put into it. And you see it, the reciprocal nature as well. I'm having a ton of fun with it.
That's something I want to do more of in 2026, and it just brought a ton of joy to me, and hopefully the people on the other side will say the same in return.
Rob: I'm sure they will. I know they will. I'll say it from my front. So when I started off the episode, Burn, I talked about kind of our excitement around this time of year because we get to set intention and really approach the next year. It just it's such a weird thing.
It's just a random date on a calendar, January 1, but a new year starts, everybody makes a big deal about it. And so we all fall into that trap of let's focus on the next year being a better year than the previous year. I think there's a lot of great things that happened in the previous year, so I don't like looking at that way. But you said you get excited this time of year because of this. How do you approach the end of the year and then going into the next year?
So you don't set a resolution, but tell me a little bit more about how you approach the upcoming year from a goals, thinking about adventures, and we'll get into the detail of what you have on the radar.
Brent: The last couple of years, I've done a personal retreat, a solo retreat, and I use it more like 30% looking backwards and 70% looking forward. This year, I went to Zion National Park just by myself, for two days, and I did a ton of hiking, and I just think about the year ahead. I do my best to be present in a beautiful place like Zion. For those that haven't been there, I highly recommend it, it's amazing. And what I try to do is to say, looking back, what am I proud about?
What activities did I do? What relationships did I foster and so forth? Then I carry those into the next year. And that's really where this healthy thing came to me. I love being active.
I realized what I was doing. I was hiking 15 to 17 miles a day for two days, back to back, so 30 odd miles. And I had the ability to do that without any struggle. And to me, I want to maintain a healthy lifestyle to be able to do things like that, but also do it with other people. So that was how it percolated to the top was being healthy to me, affords me the ability to do the things I love with the people that I love.
And that's so important. So that's the genesis of how I came about that theme. And then I start to outline some of the key activities that I want to do, trips and kind of adventures and so forth, but it really percolated into this healthy thing. How do you do it?
Rob: Yeah, so I start the one word right around Thanksgiving. Usually it's the week of Thanksgiving, I reread the book, I sit, I just reflect, I go on runs, and I just think about what my word might be for the year. And then as we get close to the end of the year, and sometimes it's just before year end, sometimes it's just after the new year starts, Tara and I have a have an approach. We call it our annual retreat, is what we actually formally call it. We have a document that we follow, and this is something we actually took from Tara's parents, my wife's parents that have been doing this.
I got to say, Brent, I think they've been doing it for forty plus years, and I think they have this in notebooks originally going back to when Tara was a young girl in terms of how they approach the year and really thinking about we all built business plans when we were in business and in leadership and either running a business or being a leader and having goals and things like that. But taking that business plan you would have normally done from a business standpoint and applying all the features of that to a personal life. And so we formally sit down, Hurt, my wife's parents, they do a retreat. They go somewhere every year and I think a couple years they got like a conference room at a hotel, so it wasn't even in their hotel room. They reserved a conference room to have a very formal meeting setting in, you know, a look backward on the previous year, but then really intentional about the following year.
And so Tara and I did that just this last weekend. We go through a formal document, and we actually look at last year's document because we used the prior year as the template for the following year. So we're always looking back one year, reading that, and then updating things in the document. And then a new thing we did this year for the first time is we have eleven years worth of these documents that we can go back and revisit. And we actually went back and looked at our ones from eleven and ten years ago, and a new process is we're going to actually read one from ten years back.
So what were we doing ten years ago? The one ten years ago for this time, we were in New York City, so we did it as a retreat. We went someplace. We were in a hotel room in New York City. We saw a Broadway show while we were there.
We documented all of those things for what that activity was, but we really start building out what is our current state of affairs, what have we done for the last year, and then what do we want to go and do, and what are some of our goals for next year. But it's a formal process for us.
Brent: What's fun about that for you guys is how you adopted it from your in laws. And so there were some best practices and that's like a family tradition. I think that's really cool. And it's a way to carry on something that worked really well for them. The way I look at that, what I find fascinating is you're just setting your intentions and you're saying, what do we want to do?
What is the structure of the actual document like? I'll walk through
Rob: the document. So we document, so where were we at at the time? Where do we live? Where were we at when we actually did this retreat? So what was our experience in that hyper moment of this annual retreat, this annual meeting?
And then what were the major events that took place last year? And we do this in combination with looking through our van journal. We keep a journal of every night we slept in our van. We also do this in a combination with reviewing every single photo that we took in the last year. So we actually get fun reminiscing on the photos, but what were some of the big events that we did in 2025?
What were those big things that we just, just accomplished? So for last year, it was like Cocodona for me. We went to Europe for a two week vacation. We finished all the fourteeners. So what were some of the big events that happened over the year?
We then go into a financial statement, and we're not going into the weeds on every single account, but really building up our net worth what it is. So we have what is our home, so where do we live, what is it worth, and what do we owe on our house, so any asset or liability associated with it. We then go through what was the income for the year. This year is pretty easy since, I left a formal employment. It was not a lot of work to actually generate what that income statement looked like.
We then go into our, investment accounts. So what do we have set aside right now both in taxable and then retirement accounts and roll all of that up into a net worth statement for the year. And we keep that net worth statement as a rolling statement. So we just have can look as I'm looking at it, it goes all the way back to, 2014. What was our net worth?
And looking at that, how has that changed over a period of time? So that's really the financial stuff. We don't go into the weeds. It's really driving what is a net worth statement and then forecasting out a future goal of what we want our net worth to be in a year, five years, ten years out. What do we want that net worth to look like?
Which this year, it was pretty difficult to come up with that given this new stage of life where we don't have as much income coming in. And, trying to figure out what our net worth might do is really not something we can control anymore as much. It really is market dependent. So that's a little more nebulous goal than I'm comfortable with at this point. We then go into a lot of personal stuff.
Everything I just talked about is kind of just like, let's get the document filled out. Let's talk about what it is. Let's talk about the numbers and how do we feel about that. But then we get into a really structured conversation, which I look forward to every year. It's not the best conversation every year just given some of the topics which we'll discuss today.
We always end on a high note, but we actually want to recap kind of the current state of affairs in a number of areas. So the first area we actually address is our family. So let's talk about our family. So both of us have our parents are still alive. So what is our parents' health like?
What have they been doing over the last year? What do we want to try and do with them over the next year or two or three? So we kind of set some intention and goals around our family, our siblings. It's just a a capturing of state of the affairs for our overall family, but also a little bit of what do we want to do more intentionally as we go into 2026 around our family. The next section is our health, and this is both our current health.
So what is our health status as of today? So it's for me, includes what my cholesterol level was because, unfortunately, I keep having trouble managing that, and it's mostly diet. I got to get back on a very healthy plant forward diet or plant focused diet. So I keep that information in here. But then also just the things that happened throughout the year that either helped our health or hurt our health.
So I slipped and fell on the ice in February, and my shoulder was pretty messed up. And it's finally the place where I'm able to lift weights again. So that's pretty exciting for me. So I both put into the document that I fell and slipped on ice and hurt my shoulder pretty bad, and now I'm actually recovered with the help of a, specialist. There's really a statement of health right now.
We then go into a relationship conversation. So Tara and I sit and talk about, well, how would we rate our relationship over the last year? What are some of the highs? What were some of the lows? And what can we learn from those lows?
And how do we move forward? What are some of the areas we want to focus on moving forward? Any major purchases in the prior year, that goes back in the financial statement too. Travel. So what was our travel over the previous year?
But also what are some of our ideas for next year's travel? So what are some of the trips we both have on the radar already today? And what do we want to add to the to the radar in terms of trip opportunities and adventure things? My learning list is next. And if you're interested in this, we recorded an episode of my learning list a while back.
You can go back and listen to that. And then we finish it off kind of with an exciting thing of setting goals for the year, both a remembrance and a documentation on what were the life list items that Tara and I created. So our phrase is life list and rather than bucket list, so what did we do last year that would be a bucket list item for most people? Let's keep track of those things in the last year. And then what are some of the things we did to help other people accomplish their bucket list item?
So the bucket list is a big thing for us. It's really exciting when we have years that we helped a lot of people accomplish their bucket list items. And then what are we thinking about in the next five, ten, fifteen years? So it is a formal document, but we keep track of it every year. I have files for every previous year that we'll go back and revisit from time to time.
We don't pull it back out in the middle of the year like you do with a typical business plan. We don't pull it back out and try and play catch up. It's really set the intention and live the year and go enjoy the year and then look back with some surprise that look at how much we got done at that period of time.
Brent: Seems like there's a lot of information in there. How do you manage it if it feels like it's creating anxiety? Because part of life is just living life, And then there's part of life that's setting these intentions, but does it create anxiety? Because sometimes when I try to do too much around my own life plan or family plan, just have too much on my list of all the things I want to do. And I feel like I'm playing catch up from prior years and I'm trying to plan a lot for future years.
And then I step back from all of it. I'm like, am I living in the present right now? Or am I stuck in the past or trying to plan for the future, but not understanding the current state? So how do you navigate that? Because to me, how you describe that, it could create a lot of like to dos.
I need to fix my health. I need to work on a relationship. I need to focus on our finances, I need to do these 18 adventures, I need to do this, that could create that. I don't know if it does, but I'm just curious.
Rob: It doesn't create it for us at all, because we give ourselves the grace of, we don't have to do any of this stuff at any point in time. So there's items in on the list of things we'd like to do that have been on the list for eleven years, and it has to do with getting a permit. So an example of that is the wave in Arizona. It's a hiking trail in Arizona. That's been on the list for the last eleven years and probably even prior to that.
We give ourselves grace. We can't control some of these things. My health. The cholesterol has been an issue. If I go back every single year, the cholesterol has been something.
And at some point, it becomes a more higher priority. So that's an example. This year, I'm truly trying to figure out a way to fix that and get that really under control. So that that one took a priority. However, there's other things on this list that may not happen this year, may actually never happen.
It's really a goal of trying to do something because if we don't have anything written down, we're not going to do anything. And we do it in combination with having a calendar. So we start blocking out potential dates in the calendar in advance. Not all of this stuff is in our control, so some of the vacations are. Some of the big vacations are in our control.
We just got to schedule it. But there are things that we have that are permit regulated. There are things that if we don't get this permit, we're going to do this trip instead. So we try and block things overlapping on the same week. That one will take precedent over another given the availability of the opportunity.
But it it's not at a place for us where we where we hold ourselves to everything we wrote down like you would in a business plan for work. This is really just what do we want to try to do for the year, and then let's move forward. And how do we do more of these things on an ongoing basis or on an annual basis? Check off more of these items. Or this one's been on the list for five times in a row.
We haven't done it. Is it still important for us to go and do? And maybe it removes itself from the list at some point.
Brent: And you also acknowledge there's a few on the list that are a priority. Yes. So when you talk about your health and you talk about if your cholesterol is not at the level you want it to be, because if you don't solve some of the things on the list, then the rest doesn't matter. Exactly. And those are the ones that we need to always be ultra aware of is there's the leading ones that need to be taken care of.
And if we don't have those fixed, then there's problems elsewhere. That's a really cool process. I appreciate you sharing the in-depth view of that because you've done things that we all try to do. For me, as an example, I try to do them a little bit separate, but it'd be nice if I saw it in one picture. So like the finances, the relationship, the adventures and so forth.
But if you consolidate it down, then you can see how they play off each other. In the example, if you want to do a really big trip, and I know you and I were trying to plan to do a ski trip to Japan this year with a group of friends, but the cost was through the roof that would clearly impact the financial plan. And so we just said, let's pause on that. And there's probably a better way to do it a little bit more efficient. We're still going to do it someday, it's just a matter of how we do it the time Yeah.
We do So
Rob: The biggest, most fun part I think that I look forward to is the conversation it causes Tara and I to have. So my wife and I sit and we have a conversation. We go slow. A lot of times it's over a glass or a bottle of wine. We're relaxing.
We are documenting this conversation, but it's really about the back and forth as we talk about what we want as individuals, but also what we want together.
Brent: Yeah. I like that. I find for me, I think there's a reality that we need to share with everybody. This doesn't mean that you guys spend three days on this.
Rob: This is a conversation. It's a conversation that we have in a day.
Brent: And the first one's always ten or fifteen years ago. The first one takes the longest because you're starting to build out the format. But then a lot of that stuff you're just updating. I can go back and look at my goals planning as example. And I've been pretty consistent with tracking it for, fifteen, twenty years, let's say.
And I even can go back, Rob, I found this recently. I have a cocktail napkin that I put together my goals. I went on a road trip with a buddy in college. We were just about to graduate six months later. We just, on a whim, said, let's go watch the national championship football game in Arizona.
And we just we just got in the car and went. And we didn't even have tickets. We said, we'll figure it out. And we got to see the game, and it was ton of fun. I think it was a national championship.
It's a big game anyways. And then we went to Las Vegas for New Year's, and we had a ton of fun. And I remember he and I sat in a bar and said, what are our goals? And we were having beers, and we were just riding on cocktail napkin. And it is hilarious what my goals were.
I want to read the Wall Street Journal because I want to be so smart every day. And I I want to have this much money in my bank account every year. And it was just the funny stuff, and I I saw that cocktail napkin. I'm like, I guess I've always been very goal oriented, but to have an art like an artifact like that just made me laugh more than anything to see my the mindset of a 22 year old versus me today at my age in my fifties. I'm going to bring
Rob: you a frame so you could put that up in your office. I think that's awesome.
Brent: For sure. Well, I don't know, Rob. Like, I have to go back and look at it in detail because do I really want to share that with my children who are approaching that age? Because is that what I want their goals to be? I don't know.
But there's reality with that.
Rob: So up pretty well for you, ended up
Brent: pretty well for you. I'll just turn it over. Yeah. Yeah. I'm enjoying it.
Rob: So as you think about this year, Brent, what are the big adventures on your horizon? So we I know we talked about kind of having intention for 2026. Let's talk about some of those big items that you have on your list that you want to do in 2026.
Brent: There's two that come to mind because last year, I did the surf camp to Costa Rica with my family, and we had so much fun. So going into '26, we're actually organized a larger group, and you're a part of it. We've other friends a part of it, and we're all going to Costa Rica for a week long surf camp. And how we are so excited about this is we're doing it with a broader group of friends. We had so much fun last year.
And I know that was on one of your lists of things that you want to learn is surfing. So we can hopefully check that off. There'll be video proof one way or another, Rob. So did you do it on your own or not? I'm really excited about that.
So that's one adventure that fuses multiple things together for me, which is like the ideal vacation. I get to be very active. I get to be with my family. I get to be with my friends. I get to eat really well, and it's just fun.
So there'll be a ton of laughter, a ton of enjoyment. So I'm really excited for that. So that's one adventure that is scheduled. Another one is I have a good friend that I worked with years ago, and he and I like to go fly fishing together. And we've done a few cool destination fly fishing trips over the years.
And he approached me about this time last year with this idea to do this trip in Mexico, and we ended up not doing it. We did a different one. But then he approached me again last fall and said, hey, do you want to try this one? And we both said yes. And it's in a very remote location in Mexico.
It's about four hours from Tulum. It's a combination of a car ride, a boat ride, and it's really off grid. I'm excited for that trip for a couple different reasons, is it's unique in the sense of it's only a few fishermen throughout the week that are in these huts, and it's one gentleman that runs the whole thing, and they cook all the local, not even local, like seafood and things like from local catch or daily catch, not from what we catch because I'd put too much pressure on us to actually catch our food, but it looks really cool. And it's fun because it's so off grid. And I love those trips where it's an adventure in itself.
So there'll be a lot of planning going into that one. So that really gives me two big trips in the first half of the year. I haven't really thought much of the latter half of the year, but those are two things that are on the radar that I'm super excited about.
Rob: How about you guys? Well, real quick. I'm happy to hear you're going to be eating fish on that trip because I think the last time you did one of these really remote trips, it was bologna sandwiches for the week. I think that's what you ended up had. Bologna sandwich or a peanut butter sandwich were, like, your options for almost and Power Bars, I think was your only food for like
Brent: a week. Yeah. There's one location that we go to and they've got problems with a parasite in the water. So the seafood that's caught really close to the shore is usually has a negative effect to humans. And so you get sick if you eat the lobster and you get sick if you eat certain seafood.
And so it was really restricted. So I ate peanut butter sandwiches, rice, and a couple of potatoes and then power bars or, you know, like some sort of protein bars. So it was, when we got back to the mainland, that was in a place called Christmas Island, which is halfway in between Fiji and Honolulu. So it's really in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Middle of nowhere.
Super remote. And when we got back to the Hawaii, because that's a stopover, it's like, what are we going to eat? Because it was it was pretty sparse. And it's proven over and over again. I've been to that place multiple times.
If I attempt to eat some of the seafood, I'm going to get sick. And that's the last thing you want to do. You're in a destination place. It's really remote. You get sick.
You don't fish for a day or two, and it's just not fun. So, I avoid it, but my diet definitely takes a hit. I don't mind peanut butter sandwiches, but twelve days of them for two, at least two of the meals, it's okay. But, hey, we're living we're surviving. That's not a problem in life right there.
It's just part of the overall experience as we'd like to say.
Rob: Absolutely. You probably forget about what you ate every time you catch a fish out there or hook a fish at least. You're not keeping any of it.
Brent: The fishing is so good. You're willing to sacrifice other things because it's one of the best fisheries in the world. So it's really cool. What adventures do you guys have in store for 2026?
Rob: Oh, Costa Rica. And hopefully, can check the box that I can surf. Now I'm not going to be a great surfer, but can I surf? That would check the learning box for me. So looking forward to that.
We have a trip to Iceland coming up here in just a couple weeks in the middle of winter. Our goal was to try and see the northern lights since we hadn't had a chance to see them yet. That was a bucket list item that we actually accomplished this year. Happenstance, we had them at our hometown, so we're able to go outside and see the northern lights for the first time. We had a whole trip booked around it, so now we're going to do other things, and hopefully, we'll still see them while we're there.
And then we have a bunch of rafting trips that we have permits and application for, or we'll be applying for them here pretty soon. So some rivers that are a little harder to get to, a little harder to get access to. Some of only allow two boats or two groups to start every day. So it's really limited in the volume of people that go down some of these rivers. But this year, we added a backup to it, doing some pack rafting instead.
Hopefully, we'll go back to the Marshall Wilderness, which we did this last summer and do a tenting, backpacking, floating trip in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. And then I'm looking forward to a couple of motorcycle trips that I'm taking, one with my brother. We try and do this now every year where he and I just go out in the woods and ride motorcycles across the state. And I have another friend that I'll be doing one with hopefully on the East Coast this, this coming fall.
Brent: I'm glad to hear that that's on your list. Because I know every time you come back from the motorcycle trips, you're really excited to share what you did, where you went, the experiences that you had. I remember the picture you sent me when you were on it. Two moose were hanging out in your camp for a night. You were solo, right?
Rob: Solo, yeah, and I had a couple bull moose fighting for the cow in my camp in the middle of the night, which, caused me not to sleep very much. But the highlight of the trip, I would say, is going out with my brother. It's just he and I get to spend one on one time with each other, which we just started doing a couple years ago, I look forward to it every time we get a chance to go do something like this.
Brent: That's great that you're doing that. That's super fun. So let's transition. One thing that I think would be super fun to talk about is what's coming up in the new year for Midlife Circus, the podcast.
Rob: Yeah. We had a quite a few things on as we started putting this list together, and we're only going to give you listeners just a handful of them. We're going to keep some as a surprise or some that I would say maybe are in development that we're not ready to share just yet. So there's some surprises coming and then also some new developments that we want to dovetail a little bit. But I'll give, I'll give a couple of them right now, Brent, and then, I'll turn it over to you to give, an update on Substack and a couple other ones.
Guests is something we're going to start working towards having join us on the podcast in 2026. Doing this podcast, it it's a lot harder than I thought it was going to be when we started this process back in May. I know we've deleted episodes that we didn't think were very good, And so we held off on bringing guests to the table just so you and I can figure out if we can do this together, just the two of us, before we brought somebody else to the table. And we are committing to bringing guests to the table in 2026, whether it be an author from a book that we've recently read or someone we admire, another podcaster that we get excited about listening to that we want to have join us because a topic is really, really hits the mark for our audience. And it could be a friend of ours that's doing something epic that we want to share with a bigger, broader population.
So guests are something we're definitely going to be bringing to the table in 2026. And the other one is, having video production. So we do shorts. You can access our shorts on YouTube. You can access our shorts on Instagram or Facebook.
We're all the social media platforms. We have very short clips that are on video of us doing, our podcast. Our goal in 2026 is actually get into a full video of our podcast, so having full video production of our podcast. And it may just be as simple as you and I like we are in two separate locations or as complex as you and I doing it together in a singular location. So, again, trying to go back to as we started doing this was focused on how can we just develop our chemistry.
Let's add layers of complexity over time, and video was a layer of complexity we weren't ready to start with that now I think we're ready to push out there a little bit. It'll be a few months before we start doing the video production. And the last one I would say that I get most excited about that we're going to we are definitely going to be doing in 2026 is recordings in the field. So Brent and I, as you've been listening to the podcast, we like to adventure. We like to go out and have experiences, whether it be on a motorcycle trip or a ski trip or rafting or even just a hike out in the woods, but taking our podcasting equipment with us and doing some recordings while we're out either doing an adventure or when we're back at camp from an adventure.
And so recordings in the field will be things like that, where we're out doing something in the community, doing something out having fun, and recording an episode outside. It could also be while we're having an experience. So Grant and I being guinea pigs for some life experiences that we can share with all of you and recording an episode around that experience so we can give you real time insight as to some of the things we're going through right at that moment. So there's some of the big ones I'm excited about doing in 2026. Bryant, what about you?
Brent: Well, one that's really big for us that we're super excited and we're in the early stages of developing is building the Midlife Circus community and people with similar mindsets, those of us that are in our midlife and we're navigating all the circus activities associated with midlife is we've started to build our community on Substack. So you can find it on the Midlife Circus. That's all you have to do is search it out on Substack. And it's really a place for people to check-in and talk about episodes, to talk about some of the upcoming events, to talk about themes that we're hearing. Our newsletters always can be posted on Substack as well as it'll be distributed via email if that's your preference.
That was always part of our vision from the beginning is can we create a community of like minded people that are navigating life in a similar stage? And whether you're age 43 or you're age 65, you kind of fit right within our window, as we like to say Gen X or Gen X adjacency. So that's part of the community and we're not going to make it a static community just pushing content out, it'll be a place for conversations. And so we're learning from a lot of other really good Substackers, I'd like to call them that are doing exceptional work on Substack and we liked that space. But we spent a lot of time determining where that community should sit and we think Substack's a great place for it.
So we're excited for that. The second thing that we're doing, we've talked about Costa Rica is we're not necessarily piloting a destination retreat with our friends, but we're going to explore what would it look like to do a midlife circus event at a place like a surf camp. Rob and I will talk about it when we're in Costa Rica, but we've had this vision for a long time. Do we want to do retreats? And do we want to bring people together in unique locations and really blend a lot of our interests being in the outdoors, trying something new, but being in conversation with people that are going through life at the same stage that we're at.
So we're going to explore that idea, not a 100% committed to it in the sense of like we are going to do it, but we're going to be in a place that will help us think creatively about that. Like Rob said, is we've got things in the field that we're trying. We're trying to do guests, videos, a lot of things are coming in store, and we've got a few more tricks up our sleeve that we're not going to announce yet that we're really excited about. I have to ask you a question, Rob, and I want to be a part of your journey, and this is my serious question of the day, is how can I help you maintain balance? Because everything that we're doing in Midlife Circus could be a lot because you and I know it's a throttle and we could just turn the accelerator and just go for it.
But how can I be a partner with you to ensure that you are maintaining balance? Because I'm a big part of that as it relates to midlife circus. So I'm just curious if there anything I can do to help you through that? Because we both have this mentality to say, let's go for it. And it may not be healthy for either of us.
So I'm just curious if there's anything that comes to mind that I can help you.
Rob: You're actually asking me a difficult question. You actually preface it. I'm asking a difficult question as we get to the end of our recording. So I appreciate that. Thank you.
I'm going to remember this for future episodes, and I'm going to drop a ball on you late and see how well you handle it. I would say that what you just shared, Brent, the experience piece, I think, is going to help. And so I know I'm my best self when I'm out doing different things and experiencing different things. So not just the Costa Rica thing, but as we build our community, I know that's the real big thing about the experience that we want to bring guests along is continue to build out our community of midlifers that are going through these experiences. I get energy from those types of interactions.
And so that will be balanced for me even though we're maybe working in the podcast. I'm going to get balanced from that interaction. While I consider myself an introvert, I also get energy from being around people that are somewhat like minded, that are exciting, that are forward thinking and forward working and looking. And so I'm looking forward to that as a piece of it that'll help with the balance. Beyond that, it's going to be a go with the flow and figure it out, and you'll probably see it that I'm stressed out.
You'll see me every day for an entire week if I'm up at 03:00 in the morning doing something on the podcast because I don't function late in the afternoon. I wind down pretty early mentally. And so if you start seeing me consistently early, week after week after week, you'll probably realize that maybe I'm overweighting that area.
Brent: Now that's helpful. And I mean, that there's joking aside. Right? That that is something that I can help be a part of. Because we both know we if we get cooped up doing the video of just this in the same location, the same time, then we're both starting to steer away from the things that we truly love, being outside experiences with other people.
And that's hence why we're actually introducing experiences, field trips, things like that, because it explores our curiosity, but it gets us out and about. So that's a big part of it.
Rob: And it's easy to get excited because the feedback we're getting, Brent, too. That's the other piece about this. So it's easy to want to go all in given the feedback that we're receiving from people that we know, but also feedback we're getting from people that we don't know. I got a great message through a direct message on Instagram from a listener named Mike who retired or didn't retire necessarily. He left his previous job, and he's in this kind of liminal space where he doesn't know what's going to be next.
And he listened to our podcast on his drive from Florida back to Alabama. He just shared with me in a really long, really nice message about how he took information from our podcast and was going to be able to start applying it to his life. So when you hear messages like that, it gets me excited to want to do more of this. I know you've gotten a couple of responses as well from some people.
Brent: Well, it's been amazing. I think one that sticks out for me, and it was important for me to hear it. And I appreciate people sharing their support for me when we had the episode on navigating loneliness. And that was something that I shared my experience of loneliness in midlife and what I was going through over the last couple of years. And I had people I didn't know reach out on some of the social platforms.
I had friends that I've known for years reach out and it was just nice that people listened to it with a very human side to it to say, I heard you. And the biggest compliment is, I heard you and thank you for sharing. Because it meant that they were listening and it meant that you and I put something out there. There was one person in particular that did share quite a lot of, this was an important message for me to hear. And then I've also shared it with a few others and that's why we're doing this.
So that was really important part of just the process. It was hard for me to do that episode because it's just that vulnerability, but that's not just one episode, we're hearing others saying very positive things and we're just excited and that's why we started this to not only share our own experiences for others to relate and say, Hey, this has been great for us. We appreciate the feedback. We're always open to it. As Rob alluded to, we're on all the socials.
There'll be a place specifically in Substack that if you ever want to comment specifically on an episode or create a conversation, we're here to interact and be a part of everybody's journey as we all navigate this together.
Rob: And the reaction on that episode, you talked about loneliness, all of them have gotten a reaction, but that episode seems to have gotten the most reaction. I know my good friend Elena shared that with a lot of different people through her network. That's my last request for our audience is if something's resonating with you from this podcast, please share it with other people. As Brent mentioned, we're trying to build a community in this space, build a community of Gen Xers who typically don't talk about issues that we're going through. We tend to internalize and just manage them ourselves.
Men in particular don't talk about what's going on emotionally for themselves and really just giving a place for people to hear and listen to our stories, listen to our mistakes, listen to our successes, listen to our chaos. We want to create a community of people that might be experiencing these things and can share them more readily with the people in their lives. So really give a platform and a context for people to actually grow from what they're hearing from us, but also learn and think of opportunities to move forward. And as I think back to just wrapping up today, you can make 2026 the best year possible. You don't have to go into the detail that I went into with building out a very formal personal and family plan and a retreat.
It can just be creating a one word theme for the year and living with intention for the calendar year. Think about what's going to work and really think about how can you make 2026 your best year possible, if not better than just last year in itself. So thanks for your time and attention today. And, remember, you're the director of your next great act.
Lena: That's it for this episode of Midlife Circus. Visit midlifecircus.fm for show notes, transcripts, and all the latest happenings. And be sure to join us in the Midlife Circus community on Substack. Follow Midlife Circus on Apple podcasts, YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss your next great act. Quick reminder, the opinions and stories shared here are personal reflections, not professional advice.
This show is for entertainment and inspiration only. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you under the big top next time. Midlife Circus is a Burning Matches Media production.