By Jodie Cook, Senior Contributor. Dec 22, 2025, 10:00am ESTDec 22, 2025, 03:27pm EST
Summary
How to use specific ChatGPT prompts for a thorough 2025 year-end review. Honest reflection on challenges, successes, relationships, and outdated habits. Identify resilience, understand patterns, express gratitude, and audit their social circles, ensuring an intentionally designed and clearer path forward into the new year.
Most people sleepwalk through December. They make vague resolutions, forget them by February, then wonder why nothing changed. Your year deserves more than a half-hearted glance in the rearview mirror. You owe it to yourself to dig deep into what happened. The wins. The failures. The people. The patterns. What if you entered 2026 with absolute clarity on who you are and where you’re headed?
These ChatGPT prompts will help you review 2025 with brutal honesty and set up your best year yet. Copy, paste and edit the square brackets in ChatGPT, and keep the same chat window open so the context carries through.
Review your year with ChatGPT: prompts to make 2026 unstoppable
Know your pain tolerance
Making waves in business is difficult. The thing that separates winners from quitters is the ability to keep going when it gets tough. You’ve already been tested this year. You got through moments that could have broken you. Write a list of those moments and feel grateful you’re still standing. The only certainty about 2026 is that more challenges will arrive.
“Based on what you know about me and my business, identify the moments that tested me hardest in 2025. Ask clarifying questions if required. Then help me reframe each challenge as evidence of my resilience. Create a ‘pain tolerance inventory’ that documents: the challenge faced, how I responded, what I learned, and how this prepares me for similar situations in 2026. End with 3 statements I can use to remind myself of my strength when things get hard.”
Identify your peaks and valleys
Your year contained extremes. Moments of pure triumph and moments of real struggle. Most people blur these together and miss the lessons hiding inside each one. Notice what stands out. The highs of the highs and the lows of the lows. Marvel at the spectrum of human emotion you’ve experienced in twelve months. Get ready for another rollercoaster year.
“Guide me through identifying my 3 best and 3 worst moments of 2025. For each moment, ask me follow-up questions about what led to it, how I felt during it, and what happened next. After we’ve explored all six moments, analyze the patterns. What triggers my best performance? What situations drain me? Create a one-page summary I can reference when making decisions in 2026.”
Thank the people who showed up
Your success was never solo. Behind every win stands someone who helped make it happen. List out the people who contributed most to your year. The ones who gave advice, opened doors, believed in you when you doubted yourself. Go through that list and make sure everyone knows you appreciate them. Gratitude builds your tribe and strengthens the relationships that matter most.
“Based on what you know about me, help me identify the people who contributed most to my 2025. For each person, create a personalized thank you message that: acknowledges their specific contribution, explains the impact they had, and expresses genuine appreciation. Make each message different in tone and length. Some should be texts, some emails, and one should be a handwritten note. Ask for more detail if required.”
Face what needs to change
You will be trapped in some outdated habits. Following routines that stopped serving you months ago. Probably owning clothes that don’t fit. The version of you that started 2025 is different from the version ending it. Your systems should evolve too. Get ChatGPT to tell you what it thinks based on your conversations, then add your own observations. Radical honesty unlocks radical progress.
“Based on what you know about me already, identify 5 things you think need to change in my life or business. Be direct and specific. After sharing your observations, ask me to add my own. Then for each item on our combined list, suggest: why this change matters, what keeping things the same will cost me, one small action I can take this week to start the shift, and a bigger move to make in January.”
Audit your inner circle
Find the people in your life you’ve outgrown. The ones who drain your energy when you’re around them. The ones you’ve simply grown apart from. This is uncomfortable but necessary. You don’t owe anyone a spot in your future just because they were in your past. Just because you went to high school together doesn’t mean you have anything in common now. You don’t have to make a big deal of it. You can just be happier by quietly stepping back from relationships that no longer serve you. New friends, colleagues, and business partners are waiting to meet you.
“Help me conduct an honest audit of my relationships. Based on what you know about me, ask targeted questions to identify: people who consistently energize me, people who drain me, and people I’ve simply grown apart from. For the draining relationships, suggest graceful ways to create distance without conflict. For the energizing ones, suggest ways to deepen those connections. Then help me identify 3 characteristics of the new people I want to attract in 2026.”
Make 2026 your breakthrough year
Stop sleepwalking into January. You now have the tools to reveal fears that hold you back, celebrate wins that prove your capability, thank the people who matter, face what needs to change, and upgrade your circle. Five honest conversations with ChatGPT could reshape your entire trajectory.
The best year of your life is intentionally designed. Start the process now and enter 2026 knowing exactly who you are, what you want, and who’s coming with you.
Story originally featured on Forbes.com
Jodie Cook
Senior Contributor | Entrepreneurs
Founder of Coachvox AI – create an AI version of you. Forbes 30 under 30 class of 2017. Post-exit entrepreneur and author of Ten Year Career. Competitive powerlifter and digital nomad.
Follow me on LinkedIn. Check out my website or some of my other work here.
