A few weeks ago, I asked a friend who’s a role model for me if she would share how she turns dreams and goals (whether external or self-improvement) into a practical approach to accomplish them.

I was ecstatic when she said yes and over the moon when I read what she wrote.

Teresa Tanner is that friend. We met at McDonald’s, when she was in a class I taught. Out of the many people who came through those classes, she is one of three people who left an impression so strong that I can still picture that person sitting there, making a comment, all these years later.

Our paths crossed again when I had a role that took me out to McDonald’s regions, to support the development of HR leadership in the field. I took thirteen trips to meet with thirteen different regional leaders.

Teresa was the only one who set the agenda for our meeting (I ditched mine). The only one who talked me through her three-ring binder of regional plans and results (these were the olden days; she’d have it on a laptop now). I drove away from that meeting thinking, “Well, she doesn’t need me to go back there again.” She’s also the reason I live in Cincinnati, but that’s another story.

Here’s Teresa’s peek behind her curtain of how she leads and lives an intentional life.

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I start every day the same way. Up by four or five in the morning, before the house or my inbox has a chance to speak first. I spend at least an hour in quiet time. I read, I pray, I reflect, and then I write it all down. I’ve kept a digital journal for years now using the Day One app, and it has become one of the most important tools I own. That hour is the foundation. Everything else in my week, month, quarter, and year builds off it.

On a weekly basis, I look back at the week that just happened and look ahead at the week coming. I want my time to be intentional, not just full. So I ask myself what actually mattered in the last seven days, what I want to carry forward, and what needs to change before Monday shows up again.

At the end of every month, I do a deeper look back. This is where I’ve started using AI to help me. I’ll feed it a month of journal entries and ask it to summarize what it’s seeing, patterns I lived through but didn’t necessarily notice while I was in them. It’s not doing the reflecting for me. It’s doing what a good friend does when they’ve known you a long time and can say, “You’ve mentioned this three times this month, have you noticed that?” I hadn’t. That’s the point.

Quarterly is where I go further still. I take a full day away at a place immersed in nature, on my own, to review the quarter and check in honestly on four parts of myself: emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual. I use that same AI-assisted process here too, feeding it the quarter’s journals and asking it to help me connect dots I might otherwise miss between what I was feeling in January and what showed up in March. Some of the most useful insights I’ve gotten about my own life didn’t come from a person. It came from finally being able to see three months of my own words laid next to each other at once, which is not something the human brain is naturally built to do.

Then once a year, in the week between Christmas and New Year, I try to go away for a whole week. If I can’t get away physically, I still protect quiet days to do the same work. I look back over the whole year and look intentionally ahead into the next one. Last year, I uploaded an entire year of journal entries to AI and asked it to help me see what I’d lived through. What came back genuinely surprised me. Themes I would have described completely differently if you’d asked me in the moment.

The other thread running through all of this is my dream journal. Any time I wake up from a dream that stays with me, I write it down. I didn’t expect this practice to matter as much as it has. But looking back over months of recorded dreams, I’ve started to notice they were sending me messages I hadn’t consciously picked up on while I was awake, about grief, about identity, about what I was actually working through underneath the surface of my regular days. My dreams have quietly become one of the most honest narrators of my own life that I have access to.

None of this works without my faith at the center of it. The quiet time each morning isn’t a productivity hack I bolted onto my calendar; it’s prayer and reflection first, and the rest of my operating rhythm grew out of that, not the other way around. I believe I’m meant to steward my time and my attention well, and these reviews are how I try to actually live that out instead of just believing it.

What I’ve learned is that none of this is about more data or more discipline for its own sake. It’s about giving myself permission to actually look, honestly and regularly, at the life I’m living, so I’m not just moving through it.

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If you’d like to read more from Teresa, she regularly posts personal essays on LinkedIn, like this one. They’re targeted to business people but apply to anyone in the business of life.

Chewing the Cud of Good

Thankful for electricity.