What are your biggest challenges?
If you are a regular reader of my blog you will know that I stepped back from full time work last year. If you are interested you can find a few posts about it, but to cut a long story short it’s been quite difficult to decide how to still make progress and what that progress will look like.
In 2026, Happy New Year by the way, I have decided to develop certain aspects of myself and I have made a set of resolutions to focus on those aspects. My biggest challenge will be to ensure that I keep working towards that improvement. I shared those resolutions in my post yesterday in the hope that once I had announced it publicly, as it were, I would be more motivated to ensure that I do things to the best of my ability.
So, 2026 will be a year of challenges, both planned and no doubt unplanned, but I am really looking forward to meeting those challenges head on. Wish me luck.
As we stand on the threshold of 2026, and as many people wave a relieved goodbye to 2025, I wanted to look forward to my first full year after full time work and to share my goals. For once, I can focus just on myself and my wants and needs. It’s liberating and not as selfish as it sounds. By becoming a better version of myself I can be a more effective person for those who live with or learn from me. So, I have seven goals for 2026 and I will share them with you now to make sure that I feel more motivated to achieve them. I will keep you posted on how it goes.
Whether you are setting resolutions or not I sincerely hope that the year ahead will be better than the year we are leaving. Take care of yourself and those you love. Good luck for 2026!
What makes you feel nostalgic?
Music, TV, Films, photos, newspapers, magazines – you name it, it makes me feel nostalgic. You may have noticed that on my blog over the last few years! However, I work hard not to fall into the trap of pretending that everything was better in the past. It causes huge problems for both the individual and the society. We can’t go back to the 1970s and nor should we. They were great times in some ways but not in others. There was an awful lot of sexism and racism that was not just accepted but encouraged by society at large. Circuses with animals were considered to be fine and were the centre of afternoon TV on Christmas Day. I still love the music and I still love the TV and it takes me back to a childhood that for a couple of years at least was really enjoyable. Christmas started in November in the shops and the season was simpler and more focused on the Christmas story rather than the presents.
Christmas TV was not always great but we shared it as a family and a society. The atomisation of society since, has taken so much of that away, as Christmas Day can see us all on separate screens if we’re not careful. The viewing figures for Christmas Day programmes in the UK were truly awful in 2025, where the bottom of the Top 10 most watched programmes came in at under 3 million viewers!
So, I love looking back and enjoying the things that I watched or listened to all those years ago, but I am clear sighted enough to realise that things have improved in a multitude of ways. Take this approach to the past and it will keep giving you pleasure to look back on.
It’s New Year’s Eve 2025 as I write and for young people today these will be the good old days in 20 or 30 years time. Don’t forget to enjoy their reflections and to ask them what they remember from the time. They will surprise and delight you with their love for their own childhood and teenage years. That never changes.
What relationships have a positive impact on you?
One thing I have learnt from my Calm App is that a lot of relationships can have a positive impact on you if you only let them. However, the most important relationship you have is the one with yourself and it is that relationship that, I believe, governs every other relationship.
If you are not a fan of yourself you find it baffling when others congratulate you or praise you for being yourself. If you don’t think you have reached the limits of what you could have done, you belittle the praise and think of those who praise you as somehow deluded! I definitely come into this category. It’s about upbringing for those of us who are children of the 70s or 80s where you get so used to criticism at school or at home and so unused to praise that you almost always assume that the latter is flannel! Well, I do anyway. I am more than happy to praise other people and consider it vital, so why don’t I apply it to myself? The phrases I was bought up with were, ‘Self praise is no recommendation’ and ‘Stop blowing your own trumpet’ so you can see where the problem started.
So for the moment I will try to see if I can get a better relationship with myself, even if it’s a bit late. I do really appreciate the positive relationships I do have, but to do so fully my starting point has to be me.
If you started a sports team, what would the colors and mascot be?
I don’t really see the colour a team wears as having any real impact. When my daughter started playing for her junior football team, she wore a purple kit. When she moved to a new team to play senior football she started to play in red. The kit didn’t affect her determination to do her best, but she became very attached to her number, which was Number 5 in her first year. Ever since, she has chosen that number when she has been able to. It is part of her personal ‘brand’ and she is definitely more comfortable having that number on her back whether she realises it or not.
So, the first thing I would do if I set up a sports team would be to ask my players to choose and keep their number. Colour wise I might choose purple for old time’s sake, but that would be the only reason.
The most important thing for any team is spirit and togetherness. When you have the right coach setting the right direction and encouraging the right approach, the team will play their best. My daughter had really good coaches and really bad coaches as a junior. The really bad coaches had one thing in common, favourites and a focus on results over performance. I saw two or three occasions where the coach damaged the spirit of the team due to those approaches and the performance got worse and worse. When the coaches stopped doing that the performance improved. I could never understand why grown men (and it was invariably men) would come into girls’ football without trying to understand the difference between that and boys’ football. The atmosphere was key. Get that right and you get the best performance. To give the coaches their due, they were giving up their time and often getting loads of criticism from the parents, occasionally justified, much more often not. We had three really good seasons out of seven because the atmosphere was right. It’s interesting to reflect on the way that the girls reacted to their coaches, as they could do so with fear or enthusiasm. When the atmosphere was right that fear of a bad performance was taken away and the result was a much better experience for everyone involved. With one glaring exception, the coaches we came across only ever did things for the best as they saw it, but it didn’t always go as well as they wanted.
Mascots are a nonsense in my opinion. They add nothing to a club and nothing to a team within that club. I would absolutely refuse to have one. When we go to the Emirates to see Arsenal they have a mascot called Gunnersaurus and watching it lumber around the perimeter of the pitch is an unnecessary distraction.
For anyone who is involved in a team the most important things are enjoyment and improvement. If those two aspects are in place everything else is taken care of. The players will want to play and they will improve naturally as a result. That would be at the absolute centre of any club I set up.
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 