2026 Reset
Goals, Journals, and the Year's First Read

You survived. Take credit and be proud.

Nicole opened on two deliberately sparse slides: 2025: You Survived, followed by Take Credit and Be Proud. The restraint is the point. A job search — especially one that carried into a second year — takes an emotional toll that a clean January calendar can silently erase. Before introducing any tools, Nicole invited attendees to acknowledge what it took to get here.

This isn't throat-clearing. It's the baseline for everything that follows. Goals that get set while you're still minimizing what the last twelve months cost you tend to miscalibrate.

The job search is a big project — not your life, not your identity.

The session's framing principle: your search needs balance so your efforts stay meaningful; you need self-care so you stay physically and emotionally resilient; and you need to take breaks and spend time on people and things you care about, so the search doesn't quietly consume everything else.

This is the predicate for the 8-Stack framework that follows. If the job search is one plank of a life, the other planks need naming too — otherwise the search inflates to fill the whole frame.

Eight life areas, rated 1–10, as a 2026 starting point.

Nicole introduced the 8-Stack Goals model — eight life areas rated on a 1–10 scale to create an honest baseline before setting 2026 goals. The eight areas:

A live poll asked attendees where they struggle most — up to three areas out of the eight. The point of the rating exercise is calibration, not judgment: you name where you are before you decide where you want to go. In the baseline frame, these ratings are a sensor reading taken in January that you retake later in the year to see what actually shifted.

One outcome goal per area. One date to achieve it by.

For each of the eight 8-Stack areas, Nicole's worksheet asks for one outcome goal and a target date. The format is intentionally compressed — one line, one commitment, one deadline per area. The worksheet is available as a downloadable PDF (see Downloads, pending Nicole's approval).

Three questions to pressure-test each goal.

Before committing to a goal, Nicole asked attendees to answer three questions for it:

The first question surfaces blockers you already know about. The second makes motivation explicit (instead of assumed). The third pre-commits to reward, which — in behavioral terms — is how you build a reinforcement loop rather than just a to-do list.

Specific beats vague, every time.

Nicole illustrated SMART Goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) with a direct before/after:

The vague goal is a mood. The SMART goal is a unit of work you can either complete or not. Only one of them generates usable data about whether you are making progress.

Pre-commit to how you'll celebrate — before the win happens.

Nicole introduced Celebration Vision Goals — a practice of writing out in advance how you will celebrate each milestone, so the reward is real and specific rather than deferred into vagueness. Five examples from the deck:

Attendees spent five minutes writing three celebrations of their own. The mechanism: pre-specifying the reward makes the feedback loop legible to your own motivation system and turns search-milestones into events rather than noise.

An interactive exercise run live during the session.

TehShan led a breakout where attendees paired up to share one specific Celebration Vision Goal each — five minutes total, switching after the first 90 seconds. Example framing: "I will celebrate reconnecting with an old colleague in the next 7 days by treating myself to an in-person movie (or ice cream, or a hike)."

If you want to run this yourself: pick one celebration from the list you just wrote, then say it out loud — to a friend, to a search buddy, or as a voice memo to yourself. Speaking a commitment converts it from a private thought into something with a witness, which is the cheap version of accountability.

Goal trackers, vision boards, accountability teams.

Nicole named three broader tool categories for attendees to explore: digital goal trackers, vision boards, and accountability teams (formal or informal). The live chat collected tools attendees had found useful — a peer-sourced resource list that only exists because the room is more than the stage.

Specific platforms mentioned or referenced elsewhere in the deck are pointed to from the Sources page. JobNet 2.0 is not in the book club business — we don't endorse tools or platforms. If you see value in one, you may find it useful; if not, skip it.

Part two: the Job Search Journal.

The session's second half pivots from goal-setting to journaling as an ongoing reflective practice for the 2026 search. If the 8-Stack exercise was a baseline reading, the journal is the longitudinal log that captures what actually happens between readings.

Why a job search journal is load-bearing, not optional.

Nicole framed four benefits of a structured job search journal:

The final benefit is the one that does the heaviest work. A journal is not a mood-regulation tool. It's a queryable dataset of your own search — one that you, your coach, or a future AI pass can analyze for recurring skills, accomplishments, and growth signals (a point Nicole flagged directly in her speaker notes).

Four prompts for the end of each search day.

Nicole's starter set of four daily journal prompts:

These four prompts are deliberately simple. The goal is to lower the activation cost to journaling — short enough that you'll actually do it, structured enough that the entries accumulate into a readable log. In Nicole's speaker notes: branding and marketing, and how this connects to LinkedIn and 360Brew, is the subject of February's session with Wayne Rainey.

An external resource Nicole mentioned.

Nicole referenced Mel Robbins' Let Them and her Best Year Workbook 2026 as a free external resource attendees might find useful. JobNet 2.0 does not endorse external content — if you're interested and you see value, you may find it useful. Link is on the Sources page.

A built-in template, and the instructions to find it.

Nicole showed attendees where to find the Google Docs native journal template: File → New → From a Template → scroll down to Journal. The template is free, editable, and comes with sample prompts you can replace with your own.

For those who prefer to use something they already have rather than set up a new tool, this is often the lowest-friction path into daily journaling. Link to the template entry point is on the Sources page.

Prompts designed for the harder days.

Nicole walked through three prompt categories for days when the basic four aren't enough. Each is designed to do specific cognitive work:

Nicole noted the prompts can be tried across different AI apps to compare responses — a reminder that prompts themselves are reusable tools, not one-shot artifacts.

What a more detailed daily entry can include.

For attendees who want a longer-form daily structure, Nicole mapped out additional entry categories AI tools can generate templates for:

The structured version trades activation cost for fidelity. Use the simple four prompts when you just need to show up; use this expanded set when an entry needs to capture more signal — before a big interview, after a rough week, during a pivot decision.

Using AI to generate journal templates and analyze entries.

TehShan ran a live demo using free ChatGPT and paid Gemini with the prompt: "Create a job search journal template that focuses on daily wins/accomplishments, challenges, reflections, gratitudes, and next steps."

Two takeaways from the demo: the template you get is a starting point you edit, not a finished artifact you accept; and comparing responses across two AI tools surfaces differences in framing that help you choose the structure that fits your voice.

The more advanced application — flagged in Nicole's speaker notes — is to journal for a few weeks, then have AI analyze the accumulated entries for recurring skills, accomplishments, and growth. That is the baseline-to-signal loop the whole session scaffolds: log the raw data now, query it later for pattern.

Other tips and tricks for 2026 — your thoughts.

Nicole closed by opening the floor for five minutes of attendee-contributed tips. Part of what JobNet 2.0 exists to do is surface the expertise already in the room; the hosted session is the scaffold, the room fills in the corpus.

If you weren't there live and want to contribute retroactively: think about one tool, habit, or reframe that has helped you in 2025, and share it in the JobNet 2.0 LinkedIn showcase (linked below).

Stay in the loop. Come back for February.

JobNet 2.0 meets monthly, alternating virtual and in-person. The direct handoff from this January session:

Also upcoming: January 28, 2026 · In-Person · baHRC, Redwood City — 2026 Legal Update: New Year, New Rules for California Employers.

Community links: JobNet 2.0 LinkedIn group · JobNet 2.0 LinkedIn showcase · baHRC events calendar.