2026: The Year to Deinstitutionalize (Even from within institutions)
If 2025 were a metaphor, it might look like a dumpster fire, aka, super messy, stinks, chaotic, and at times overwhelming. And yet, as the smoke and sparks settle down temporarily from their roar, moments of clarity, growth, and real accomplishment reveal themselves and are worth honoring.
In the second half of 2025, many of us have been working on embodied boundaries. You’re learning to notice when you’re overing, where you want to reclaim your agency, and how to keep showing up in ways that align with your values rather than default expectations. Here’s your pause and reflection to honor all those very things…
Reflecting on 2025: Wins and Opportunities
Gather your calendar, journal, or whatever tools you use, and take a look at the positive shifts you’ve created for yourself and those around you this year.
Identify the small and big moments where you reclaimed presence, made clear decisions, and honored your priorities. What did you learn about yourself in those moments?
What practices, rituals, or routines supported you in good-feeling kinds of ways this year?
What do you feel particularly proud of as you look back on this year? If you started the year with an intention or motto, how did it turn out?
What practices will you continue in 2026 to continue reclaiming yourself and your purpose, even within institutional contexts?
Maybe you learned to pause before agreeing to every meeting and actually experienced the relief and clarity that comes from saying no. Maybe you started practicing presence in difficult conversations, noticing the impact on your team and feeling proud of your steadiness. Maybe you started micro-rituals—stretching, walking, journaling—that kept your energy steady during chaotic weeks. Maybe you noticed patterns of overing, named them, and took steps to repattern your responses.
On the counter, where did you give up your own agency, perhaps willingly or unconsciously? Where has it been taken from you by institutional norms, unspoken rules, or organizational pressures? What in all of that do you feel done with in terms of tolerating those choices or ways you feel forced to react and respond?
This clarity gives you a strong platform for what’s next - these are your opportunities to design next year. The work we’ve been doing there has laid a foundation for something bigger: deinstitutionalizing yourself from systems that unconsciously shape your choices, behaviors, and sense of self, even while still in those same organizations.
2026: The Year to Deinstitutionalize (Even from within institutions)
Deinstitutionalizing doesn’t mean leaving your organization (unless you want to). Nor does deinstitutionalizing mean rejecting leadership or colleagues or the sense of purpose you still feel in the J-O-B. It means reclaiming agency and presence from within the structures you inhabit.
Next year can be about:
Community over networking: Building genuine relationships that support reflection, experimentation, and honest conversations about what matters.
Practices to embody and connection: Establishing rituals, embodied exercises, and reflective pauses that allow you to notice when systems are shaping you, rather than the other way around.
Repatterning mindsets and behaviors: Shifting habits and patterns that no longer serve you, your team, or your mission, especially the ways you’ve been conditioned to overextend or overperform.
Clarity to build bigger shifts: Using the boundaries you’ve practiced to create space for discernment so you can decide where to invest your energy based on what actually matters.
From Boundaries to Agency to Presence Reflection
As you look toward the new year, I invite you to reflect:
What parts of myself or my creativity have I tucked away to fit institutional expectations, and which am I ready to bring forward in 2026?
Which institutional myths (scarcity, busyness, security, or loyalty) shaped my choices this year, and which am I ready to release in 2026?
As I look toward 2026, what would it look like to deinstitutionalize, even from within my organization, to align more fully with my values, rhythms, and community?
Your answers hold the map for a 2026 that is intentional, grounded, and regenerative, for you, your teams, and your communities.
Here’s to closing the dumpster fire of 2025 with pride in what you’ve reclaimed, clarity in what you’ve learned, and stepping into 2026 with agency, boundaries, and presence at the center of living a life in greater alignment with self, community, and Earth.
Much love and appreciation to each of you as we kiss 2025 goodbye! Even though I know 2026 will hold more in store of what started in 2025, I feel more equipped to resist and reshape as best I can, together, with you! If you want to as well, sign up for The Grove Community to kick off your 2026 with some supportive deinstitutionalizing community!