By the end of November, I had that familiar, quiet dread that creeps in when you are a high-functioning person (hopefully) who has been doing all the things and still cannot point to enough outcomes that feel satisfying. You know the feeling: you can account for the work, the hours, the revisions, the decisions and yet the scoreboard is not reflecting the effort that you put in.
If that is where you are right now, I want to say two things at the start, because both are true.
First, the frustration is real, and pretending it is not does not help. Second, there is a way to close out the year that actually strengthens you instead of making you feel worse.
This is what we built the I Strategize 2026 Bootcamp for.
Not as a “New Year, New You” kind of thing, but as a practical reset for faculty who want to turn a corner or two in 2026 with a clear strategy and a plan to implement your goals taking constraints of actual research life into account. I will share the link at the end.
Let me tell you what 2025 looked like from two angles, my lab and GLIA-Leadership, because the through-line surprised me when I finally slowed down enough to see it.
The lab year, without the highlight reel
In January, an NIH supplement we had just won in December for a fantastic postdoc was rescinded. Welcome to research in the US in 2025. It was the kind of email that makes you reread it, not because you misunderstood, but because your brain is trying to find a loophole.
After that, the year settled into a long stretch of effort that, for a while, did not seem to convert into anything you could confidently call a win.
We submitted grant after grant, including one R01 that I still believe is some of the best work we have done in my career. The previous round had landed around the 20th percentile, and we did what you do when you are taking the process seriously: we incorporated a new direction as desired by reviewers, strengthened the approach, responded thoughtfully to the feedback, and then watched it go to not discussed.
Manuscripts we submitted at the end of 2024 got rejected, then revised, then revised again, and still seemed to circle in that painful limbo where you are doing work but not moving forward.
All of it happened in the broader political climate many of you have been living through, too, if you are a researcher in the US. federal grant funding is even less stable than it used to be and it feels like the research enterprise is asking us to spend more energy navigating a dysfunctional process than doing the work that actually makes a difference.
Until the end of November, if you had asked me how I felt about the year in my faculty job, I would have told you I was not happy with the outcomes.
And here is the important part: it was not because I did not work, and it was not because I was not strategic. It was because the way I was measuring the year was setting me up to feel like I was failing, no matter how much progress was actually happening underneath the surface.
The measurement problem that makes good years feel bad
One idea that helped me name what was happening came from Dan Sullivan. He calls this “The Gap,” which is when you measure yourself against an ideal future rather than looking back at where you started. He writes that this freak-out is “all in the timeframe, not in the goals.” Most of us don’t struggle with setting or accomplishing our goals. We struggle with patience. We drive ourselves crazy with deadlines rather than goals.
If you have ever thought, “I should be further by now,” you know exactly what I am talking about. It is a quiet, constant, and corrosive thought. And it changes how you lead, yourself and others. It makes you push when you should pause, compress timelines that cannot be compressed (ever submitted a grant that wasn’t of the quality it could have been?), and act like urgency is the same thing as impact.
Just this week I had a conversation with Jennifer van Alstyne on her show, The Social Academic Podcast, about overwhelm and faculty life, and what it actually looks like when you are in charge of a research team, not only your career, and a system that does not always reward the effort you put forward. If you want the audio version of this idea, you can listen on Spotify or Youtube.
The turn, and what it did and did not mean
Just about when I let it go and accepted that the outcomes would come when they came, things started shifting.
The postdoc whose funding had been canceled received a fellowship from the American Heart Association. One of our manuscripts was accepted. A graduate student passed his qualifying exam. Our astrocyte cultures, which had been fighting us for months, finally started working.
I am not telling you this as a fairytale ending, or as proof that everything always works out if you just believe hard enough. Sometimes outcomes stay delayed longer than we would like, and sometimes they do not arrive in the form we wanted or at all (zombie projects!). That’s what makes this dream job hard. If you only count the wins that landed inside the calendar year, you miss the progress that make your future wins possible.
None of this happened because I stressed harder. It happened because we kept showing up, kept doing the work, kept refining our approach. The results were always coming. They were just on their own timeline.
I invite you to make the decision I made for 2026: Put in the effort, follow the plan, adjust your strategy when new data become available. And then let it go. The stress, overwhelm, self-blaming/shaming, guilt, and doubt. Not necessary.
Need better skills? Or habits? Or systems? Decide, make it happen, get a trainer or a coach or a book if you like. Make a plan and follow it. Then let it go.
Faith is not a strategy. Systems & strategy are.
I want to be very clear about this: hope is not a strategy.
Resilience is not blind persistence. Resilience is persistence paired with honest review, which means you keep going while also regularly asking, in a structured way, what is working, what is not, and what you are going to change next.
This is one of the reasons GLIA-Leadership built the retrospective into our work, both in my lab and in the programs we run. In research, “we will reflect later” becomes “we never reflect,” and then the year ends and we are exhausted without being any wiser.
That is also why we developed the Agile Research Engine, a project management approach designed specifically for research projects and research teams. The retrospective is a core feature that you use every planning cycle (in my lab we do it every 4 weeks, but some labs choose shorter cycles) because it creates the space to adapt intelligently, which is what prevents you from grinding the same strategies harder in a changed environment.
Robert and I worked on the Agile Research Engine for 3 years! This year, I finally implemented the last elements including the monthly retrospective in my own lab. When NIH funding became less predictable, we made small shifts so we could pursue foundation opportunities we would not otherwise have been eligible for. We did not abandon our science. We protected it by adapting the path, which is what strategizing looks like when the environment changes.
Here is one example of the process:
- All team members write 3 things that moved forward (data, figures, submissions, trainee milestones, or a protocol that finally works).
- Write 3 things that slowed you down (waiting on approvals, missing supplies, mistakes, too many goals at once, unclear federal funding criteria).
- Choose 1 small change for next month to reduce one of those slowdowns (apply for private funding).
- Choose 1 thing you will not do next month.
The GLIA-Leadership angle, and the part I am proud of
Here is what surprised me when I looked back: while my lab year felt like a lot of effort without enough outcomes for most of 2025, GLIA-Leadership was quietly building the exact kinds of systems I needed most.
When I measure backwards, 2025 at GLIA-Leadership looks like a year of making support more concrete, more usable, and more aligned with how academic work actually happens.
We hosted eight free Leadership Labs on leading, managing, mentoring, and grant writing, because those skills are not “nice to have” when you are trying to run a lab, they are the difference between sustainable progress and constant crisis. We ran two cohorts of Research Management Mastery, where faculty spent six months building the foundations and systems that reduce chaos, clarify expectations, and protect attention so research can actually move.
We launched the Research Leadership Hub for faculty who want long-term, personalized support, the kind that helps you build a research powerhouse without burning out yourself or your team. We ran the Agile Research Engine twice, once in a longer format and once as a condensed bootcamp, because sometimes you want depth and sometimes you want momentum, and both can be valid.
We also started the Resistance Lab, which came from a real need many of us have felt this year: a place to connect regularly, to stay grounded in evidence-based truth, and to keep going through a challenging political and institutional climate. People shared how their universities were handling funding cancellations and other disruptions, and we did what scientists do best when we are together, we compared notes, made meaning, and decided how we wanted to respond.
We held retreats in Spain and Florida, because there is a kind of clarity you only get when you step away from your daily environment, and because doing this work in community changes what you believe is possible. We already have 2026 retreats on the calendar for France in April and Florida in November.
Behind the scenes, our team grew, too. Victoria joined us as our project manager, which has made our ability to support clients more robust, and Tanya will be joining in 2026 as a coach. Tanya is faculty at UNC Chapel Hill, has completed extensive coaching training, and will be leading Leadership Mastery moving forward, which I completely redesigned for more immediate impact and problem-solving.
We partnered with McGill University for a second year, taking a group of postdocs through Leadership and Management Mastery as they prepare for their next career step. We hosted the New PI Workshop multiple times, and we partnered with Ana Pineda and Morgan Giddings to bring you insights on grant writing, because none of us should have to reinvent the wheel in isolation.
How to close out the year without dragging what didn’t work into the next one
Here is what I wish more faculty did before setting goals for a new year: a retrospective that is short, honest, and designed to create decisions.
If you have ten minutes this week, try these three prompts:
- What did I do in 2025 that I am genuinely proud of, even if it did not pay off yet?
- What kept costing me time and energy, and what is one small change that would reduce that cost?
- What will I stop doing in 2026 so I can protect what matters most?
If you want to do that work with support, and you want to walk into 2026 with a plan you can actually execute, that is what I Strategize Bootcamp is for.
Bootcamp link:
Podcast links:
And if you are thinking, “I need help, but I’m not sure what kind,” here is the simplest way to think about working with us:
- If you want a fast strategy reset, start with I Strategize 2026 Bootcamp.
- If you want a research project management system that is realistic rather than being behind all the time, look at Agile Research Engine.
- If your lab needs better foundations and systems (symptoms: the lab doesn’t run without you, people don’t use your existing systems, it feels like you’re starting over every time someone new starts, you are the mothership and your team isn’t thinking independently), Research Leadership & Management Mastery are the right programs for you.
- If you want it all plus long-term support and personalized guidance from Robert and me, Research Leadership Hub is designed for that.
- If you want deep focus and clarity in community, come to a retreat.
What did 2025 teach you? Email me at stefanie@stefanierobel.com! I read them all and I’d love to learn from you.
