Small Business Growth Tools | Sales, Marketing and Mindset Strategies for Christian Women in Local Business · Lindsay Fletcher | Christian Entrepreneur | Sales & Relationship Marketing Coach for Local Small Business

98. The BEST way to review 2025 & Plan for 2026 in your small business & life

December 16, 2025·13 min·1 clip

Our brains strengthen negative memories as a safeguard, but we must force them to remember the good.

Host Lindsay Fletcher, a business strategist for Christian women, presents a year-end reflection exercise to combat negative memory bias. She explains that the human brain is wired for survival, prioritizing and strengthening memories of negative events through amygdala activation and trauma responses. This neurological tendency means we often forget the good moments, especially after a difficult year. Fletcher instructs listeners to review their phone photos and calendars from 2025 to document all the positive events they have likely forgotten. She models the exercise by sharing personal highlights from her own year, including a family trip to San Antonio and the Alamo in January. She recalls speaking at a local women's conference for 200 attendees and praying over their seats. Other memories involve watching her children play basketball, softball, soccer, and football, and family time in the hot tub playing 20 Questions. She mentions professional moments like conducting sales training for a home builder and negotiating better pricing for another business. Personal joys included discovering country artist Zach Top at the Houston Rodeo and becoming a "plant lady" with a lemon and lime tree. A key insight was realizing that photographic evidence contradicted her internal narrative of not spending enough time with her kids. Fletcher argues that dwelling on such false narratives is a tactic to foster guilt and diminish gratitude. She emphasizes that this review is a crucial prerequisite to setting faithful goals for 2026, advising listeners to ask God for direction on services, clients, and simplification. The process revealed to her how much "good" she had documented, despite not being a prolific photo-taker, and helped her recognize a year of God's provision, protection, and grace. The episode is conversational, instructional, and deeply personal, blending neuroscience with faith-based encouragement and practical life advice. Christian women entrepreneurs feeling discouraged by their year or struggling with guilt over work-life balance would find this episode profoundly uplifting. Listeners seeking a highly tactical, data-driven business planning framework might find the approach too subjective or emotionally focused.

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