Ringing In the New Year: Four Things We’re Leaving Behind
At year’s end, the ancient Romans used to perform a purification ritual.
People would clean homes or make sacrifices to leave behind what no longer served them as they moved ahead into the new year. In Ecuador and Scotland, traditional end-of-year fire rituals symbolize the purification and destruction of lingering burdens and bad spirits.
While symbolic, these yearly cleansing rituals have a foundation in psychology. A 2018 integrative review on the “Psychology of Rituals” found that rituals can act as a buffer against the harmful effects of negative emotions and reduce psychological distress. A 2025 paper on "Religious Rituals and Their Healing Functions” found that rituals went beyond anxiety relief to foster positive attitudes, facilitate behavioral adjustments, and enhance social inclusion. Such “rituals can be spontaneous, diversified, and tailored to the needs of individual lives.”
On that note, as KNG Services wraps up another year of helping executives build their thought leadership, we find ourselves reflecting on any lingering burdens we’d like to leave behind. As co-founders of a young business, we know we still have a lot to learn. It takes experience to point out when we might be making mistakes or inadvertently repeating bad habits. Unaddressed, they go on.
So this year, we performed our own cleansing ritual. We shared stories of lessons learned through this year’s experiences and reflected on what we could do with that knowledge to improve. To advance into 2026 with a stronger outlook, here are four things we plan to leave behind:
1. Being Our Own Worst Enemy
Story time: “I was talking to someone about feeling glum over the past few weeks, and they made a joke: ‘When you think “woe is me,” what you’re really thinking is “me is woe.”’ I don’t think they meant to be as profound as I took it, but the phrase really hit me. I was being the woe in my life, causing it for myself and dragging down others to experience with me.”
Every year since we began this entrepreneurial journey, we’ve faced organizational hardships. That struggle makes it easy to question whether or not we might be better off in other professional pursuits or opportunities. Unresolved, those concerns fester. This is why, at KNG, one of our company values is communication. It can be hard to speak up when feeling woeful, but talking through that woe keeps it from taking up the mental space we need to celebrate what we’ve built and the progress we've made towards our goals. Feeling bad for ourselves over the ups and downs of business helps no one, and it won’t help next year either.
2. Accepting Less than Our Worth
Story time: “In my first freelancing job, I accepted pennies a word. Over time, my schedule filled up with more clients than I could accommodate, but I still struggled to raise my rates. In those early days, I was so stuck in the mindset of undervaluing my worth. I was charging just enough to keep up, burning out and resenting the work I loved to do because it was draining me.”
At KNG, we know the layers of intentional insight and creativity it takes to craft high-impact thought leadership, and trust that corporate leaders value a vendor who charges an appropriate rate to assure that. Flexibility is good, but for 2026, we’re leaving behind undefined approaches. Making changes on the fly without a solid understanding of the changes we can comfortably accommodate can be stressful. With clearly defined parameters around the work required to complete specific projects, as well as a range of high-quality alternatives to meet diverse needs, we can feel more confident in our outreach and that we will be valued for our work.
3. An Informal Approach to AI
Story time: “We started using AI in our workflow early on, but always prioritized authentic, human-written content, so we never devised any formal disclosure policy around that use. Then, clients also began using it to brainstorm, revise, and provide feedback, and we realized disclosure was necessary. Without setting those ground rules, for us and for our clients, it was hard to distinguish between what a model invented and what the client actually wants.”
2025 was the year of AI content. With AI, people could brainstorm ideas faster than letting them evolve naturally, and rewrite text to “sound better” rather than developing targeted feedback. They could respond to simple questions with a six-page AI-generated overview. But this endless flow of text isn’t always a good thing. In writing, it needs to be distilled into a handful of impactful words and requires rewriting so no one will question whether or not it’s AI-generated. With established policies moving into 2026, we can know the extent to which our clients understand and care about those factors at the outset of each new project and more effectively navigate that collaboration.
4. Not Prioritizing Our Passions
Story time: “The fitness tracker analogy about setting realistic goals made me realize: we have so many good ideas to grow our brand, but even when we set realistic goals, we don’t always meet them. We have a new science fiction novel to read through, edit, publish, and promote, but when workloads feel heavy or we’re looking for new clients, it’s easy to push passion projects to the side, even if pursuing them might open new doors of opportunity.”
Of course, income plays a factor, but there’s a particular mental block that comes with being an entrepreneur and worrying about the future of your own business. At times, client goals and projects can seem like the only tasks of any importance, and worry can impose a mental block on all non-client activity. Under that stress, it can be hard to find the motivation for new ideas, or even daily tasks, like blog writing or LinkedIn posting, that require consistency. In 2026, we can keep things moving, remembering that even small steps move us forward and when we do more, learn more, and strategize, good things usually come from it.
And with that, our cleansing ritual is complete. Having named the bad habits sabotaging our momentum, we can let go and replace them with intentional practices and a clearer sense of the company we want to build. This ritual, and the closing of the year, marks that shift.
