How Do You Want to Show Up This Year?

I'm setting a bold focus for this new season: choose who we will be in hard moments and build relationships with no regrets. I share five common end-of-life regrets, turn them into learnable skills, and give you a clear assignment to craft one specific intention for the year.

• the five most common relationship regrets are: silence, absence, guarded love, inauthenticity, unrepaired ruptures
• skills for honest expression with loving power
• rituals for presence and attention
• vulnerability as a trainable skill
• authenticity with empathy over people-pleasing
• relationship cycles: harmony, disharmony, repair
• spotting losing strategies like withdrawal, defensiveness, perfectionism
• writing one specific, behavioral intention for hard moments
• commit to practice and celebrate reps, not perfection

So if you feel like this is your year to really start working on your relationships, then I would encourage you to go to https://monicatanner.com/call and book a complimentary, no obligation, 30-minute relationship breakthrough to see if this would be a good time to start working together.

Send me an email, drop me a line on social, let me know what is your intention for this year.

Transcript

New Season, Clear Focus

Speaker 0:00

Hello and welcome to season five of the Secrets of Happily Ever After podcast. I am so, so, so excited for everything that I have in store for you this year. Some of you may have noticed that I took December off to really pay close attention to my clients and my family and really be able to recharge, regenerate, and have some self-care so that I could go into the new year super ready to serve. And I'm so grateful that I did. I did a lot of planning and forecasting for the best 2026 ever. And part of that means I thought about what was most rewarding. And I decided that working with couples and individuals around marriage, intimacy, and attachment was really what I loved the most. This year, my practice filled up and I actually had a waiting list. So for this coming year, I've opened up some new slots to work with new clients. I've opened up my schedule on Fridays and weeknights, which you all have requested. So if you feel like this is your year to really start working on your relationships, then I would encourage you to go to monicatanner.com slash call C-A-L-L and book a complimentary, no obligation, 30-minute relationship breakthrough to see if this would be a good time to start working together. So with that being said, let's get into this year and this week's content. I took a lot of time during the break to really brainstorm and plan out what I wanted to talk about this year, what I really wanted to focus on. And taking some feedback from you, we've got some great things in store. But this year, my ask from you is that you engage. When you see my posts on social media, when you hear something that appeals to you on the podcast, I would love to get your feedback, your questions, and the things that you feel challenged by. I want to really create content that is helpful to you based on your specific needs. So make sure you're communicating with me through email, on social media, in all the places. I'm the only one that reads those things. So you don't have to worry about anyone else. And confidentiality is in full force. So this year, I'm going to make sure that all of these podcast episodes have really actionable takeaways that you can literally, right after the episode, you have something that you can do to improve your relationship that day. So this episode is all about how you're going to show up this year. How are you going to show up for yourself and your relationships? As I was thinking about what I wanted to focus on this year, the thing that kept coming back to me was what do I want the last moments of my life to feel like? I know that's a little morbid, but I was thinking about how I want to feel at the end of my life. What do I want my relationships to look like? Who do I want surrounding me? What do I want to be remembered for? How do I want my love story to be told? I want to make sure that I don't have any regrets. So as I was preparing for this season, I did some research about what people say they regret or wish they could change at the end of their life. And what I found was really interesting, but not that surprising. So when people are nearing the end of their lives, they're not wishing that they had made more money, answered more emails, worked harder, they're not wishing that they had won more arguments or been more accommodating. Over and over again, in the research, people say that they wish that they had said more what they really felt. They wish they had shown up more honestly in their closest relationships, and they wish they hadn't waited so long to show love to the people they really cared about. Now, these are not bad people by any means. These are just normal, everyday people who lived good lives. But the reality is that most of us were never taught how to stay connected to ourselves and the people we love. It takes intention and skills, and that's what I want to share on the podcast this year. So we're not going to be talking about how to fix your partner or get the people around you to do what you want them to do. The skills we're going to be talking about this year are much more within your control. And it's deciding very intentionally how you're going to show up in your relationships, even when you're not getting what you want, even when the people around you are doing things you do not like, and even when you're most triggered. So today is not about setting goals, it's about making a very specific commitment about how you're going to show up this year and who you're going to be, no matter what the people around you or the circumstances are doing. Sound good? So just to really set this up and drive it home, I'm going to tell you the five things that people on their deathbed regret. These are the most common deathbed regrets that relate to relationships. Number one is not expressing their true feelings. Many people on their deathbed regret that they held back their emotions, often to keep the peace or avoid uncomfortable situations. And they missed opportunities to be honest and vulnerable with the people they loved. This creates a lot of resentment and a lot of disconnection. So one of the skills we're going to work on this year together is learning how to say what is truly important to us, to the people who are truly important to us with loving power. Number two, people unsurprisingly often regret not spending enough time with their loved ones. Now, this one is interesting because people at the end of their life wish they had prioritized presence with their partner, their children, family, and close friends instead of focusing so much on working and accomplishing goals. See, especially in our culture, people often really prioritize productivity and responsibility while neglecting emotional connection, which is so important because the skill we're going to talk about is how to cultivate and be intentional about spending time and especially giving our attention to the people who matter most to us. All right, number three, deathbed regret, is not having the courage to fully love or let others love them. People express sorrow over not opening themselves up emotionally, being vulnerable, and being able to give and receive love. This is so important because emotional intimacy and vulnerability, it's a skill set. Just like anything else, a sport or learning an instrument, you have to decide that it's important to you, and then you have to learn the necessary skills and practice them. It's absolutely possible and within our control. Number four, deathbed regret is not living true to yourself. So the most commonly documented regret is that people didn't live authentically, including how they showed up in their most important relationships. Instead, people regret living by other people's expectations. Now, I bet you're nodding along right now because you can relate. Whether it's the work that you do, how you show up in the world, maybe it's your religious beliefs. I bet that there's something you're doing right now that doesn't feel 100% authentic to you. And maybe it's some expectation that somebody important to you has for you. And this often shows up and losing connection to your purpose, suppressing your emotions, staying silent or not speaking up in order to keep the peace, saying yes when you want to say no, all of which can end up being regrets. So we're gonna talk a lot about this this season. And last but not least, number five, not reconciling or repairing important relationships, aka forgiveness. When people are talking about their deathbed regrets, they often regret not saying sorry when they should have, not reconnecting sooner with important people in their lives, and not resolving estrangements. Now, one of the most important things I want to talk about this year is understanding that all relationships go through cycles of harmony, disharmony, and repair. Repair is where trust is built, and you can't have repair without disharmony. So it's okay that you don't always agree with the people in your life, even the people that mean the most to you. What is important is that you seek for understanding, you learn the skills of repair, and you learn how to love the people in your life that are hard to love. A lot of this has to do with healing those old traumas and wounds that we all experience. No matter how perfect our parents or our upbringing were, we all have it. This is the work that we all have to do. And I'm so excited to work with you as I work on these things myself. So today's episode is all about setting our intention for this year and how we're going to show up. Now, this is a very important thing to consider when we talk about taking our power and controlling and self-authoring our lives and our love story. This is not setting goals for how our partner's going to behave or how our children are going to do things. This is very much what we control and what our intention is in those hard or uncomfortable moments. So when most people start the year and they start setting goals, they start thinking about what is it that you want to fix or what do you want people in your life to do differently? This is very, very, very common. But this season and this episode is about something much more powerful. It's deciding who you're gonna be in your most important relationships. Your assignment, whenever you're listening to this episode, is to think about what is your kind of go-to way of showing up? Are you an overfunctioner? Do you suppress your emotions in order to keep the peace? Do you do passive aggressive things like giving the silent treatment when somebody's not behaving the way you think they should? First, consider kind of what your go-to losing strategies are normally. And then I want you to think about what showing up with real authenticity and integrity would look like for you. Does that mean staying present, being more honest? And how do you stay connected to yourself and to your partner, even in the most challenging moments? So when things start to feel tense, do you shut down? Do you overcompensate and try to fix things? Do you have perfectionistic tendencies right here? Are you a people pleaser? Do you withdraw? Any of these things are okay and they're understandable. They don't make you a bad person, they don't make you a lost cause. These are just the adaptations you learned growing up. And they probably have worked for you pretty well until now. Today's the day I want you to decide with intention how you're gonna start showing up from now on. And we're going to take that intention and we're going to learn the skills to back it up. I want you to be real specific. So not something like I want to be more loving or I want to learn better communication skills. Here's what we're looking for. These are examples. When I feel misunderstood, I'm going to pause before I get defensive. When I want to withdraw, I'm going to name the emotion that I'm feeling and stay present. When I feel resentment building up, I'm going to address it with my partner early rather than stuff it down and explode later. Those are the types of specific intentions. I want you to pick just one based on what we talked about earlier. What's your go-to losing strategy? Is it defensiveness, withdrawal, resentment? And what do you want to do instead? Your intentions should describe a hard moment. So a hard moment is like when I want to withdraw, when I want to get defensive, when I want to explain myself, when I feel resentment building up. Your intentions should describe just your behavior, not when I'm defensive because my partner is critical. These intentions have nothing to do with your partner and everything to do with how you will show up. And they should be realistic. Realistically, I want to pause before defending myself. Realistically, I want to name the emotion I'm feeling before I withdraw. And realistically, I want to learn how to ask for what I want so that I don't get resentful later. Those are the types of specific intentions that I want us to set today. And when you do that, send me an email, drop me a line on social, let me know what is your intention for this year. Write it down, put it on your mirror, on your computer, somewhere where you'll see it. And remember that this is your focus this year. You're going to learn the skills to be able to do this and show up with intention in your most important relationships this year. That's how you're going to live with no regrets. Remember, you're not going to get it right every time. None of us do. We're going to learn the skills together of how to actually do what we're setting our intentions to do. And next week, I'm going to talk real specifically about how you stay grounded in your intention, even if and when you can't control the behavior of other people. So I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for showing up today. And I will see you same time, same place next week. And until then, happy marriaging.