The Mid-Year Bearing Check
Last week we crossed the halfway point of 2026.
Maybe you noticed, maybe you didn’t. The cultural rhythm we're accustomed to puts reflection at two points in the year: the beginning, when the resolutions get made, and the end, when the year gets reviewed.
The problem is that for a lot of us, the middle can turn into a dead zone, and I think that’s unfortunate, because the middle is actually a very useful moment to pause.
In July, you have six months of time to reflect on, and still have six months of runway ahead of you, which makes the middle of the year a good spot for honest reflection.
So this essay is an invitation. Take twenty or thirty minutes this week, before the second half of your year starts moving as fast as the first half did, and do what I’ve been calling a Bearing Check.
The term comes from navigation. It’s what a person does on a journey to check whether they’re still headed in the right direction. Not once. Regularly. Because the assumption that you’re still on course is exactly the assumption that lets people drift for years without realizing it.
The weekly Bearing Check newsletter is this practice at small scale. This essay is asking you to do it at scale, one full half of the year at a time.
The Story of Your First Half of 2026
The last six months of your life has a story, whether or not you paid attention to it.
The choices you made.
The habits you built or broke.
The relationships you invested in or coasted through.
The money you spent, saved, or gave.
The time you devoted to what matters to you or the time wasted on what didn't.
All of that tells a story. And if I was a betting man, I’d bet that most people couldn’t tell you what that story is, because they’ve never stopped to read it for themselves.
We're conditioned to evaluate our life by outcomes:
Did I get the promotion?
Did I hit the financial target?
Did I hit my weight loss or fitness goal?
Those questions have their place, but they miss the point I've been making from the beginning since starting BFAP. And what matters more than the outcomes is what your daily patterns actually reveal about what you value and who you want to be, because your patterns are the story of who you're becoming.
So the question to ask yourself isn't "did I hit my goals?"
It's "what did the first six months of this year actually say?"
That's a more challenging question, but it's a more honest one.
My First Half of 2026
Before I ask you to do your own Bearing Check, I want to be honest about my own.
The first six months of 2026 have been full. I launched Born For a Purpose in the spring after thirteen years of holding onto the idea. My mom died in June after years of complicated decline. Lindsey became a certified personal trainer. Ava finished half of high school and started her first real job. I messed up my elbow doing too much, and recurring ankle issues have forced me to rework how I exercise. And there have been the usual rhythms of full-time work, family, church, and everything else that fills the ordinary days.
When I do the Bearing Check on my own first half, the milestones aren’t what stand out.
What stands out is what the season revealed about my values. Even in the busiest weeks and hardest days, the practices I’ve been writing about across BFAP held. Not perfectly. But they held. That’s data. It tells me the framework is doing what I built it to do, and it tells me the years I spent building the practices before launching BFAP were not wasted.
What also stands out is what compounded quietly. The daily consistency, especially through the hardest weeks of the year, produced a version of me that could keep showing up for my responsibilities as a husband and a dad, my work, and this writing even when I didn’t feel like it. That wasn’t willpower. That was the accumulation of small choices I’d been making for years.
And what stands out is what I’ve been postponing. There’s more intentionality in carving out intentional time with my wife and daughter, projects for BFAP that keep getting pushed to later, and mobility and stretching that I keep half-committing to. Naming those honestly is uncomfortable. It’s also the whole point of a Bearing Check.
I’m not telling you this to make you think that I’ve got everything figured out. I’m telling you because it’s the honest answer to the questions I’m about to ask you. And it’s the reason why I continue to get on here every week and keep pushing out content. As I get older, I keep noticing the same pattern. The people who make it through busy and hard seasons with their character intact are the ones who were already living intentionally before the hard season arrived. The practices they built underneath the surface for years are what carried them.
The Meta Bearing Check
For those of you who subscribe, every Wednesday morning the Bearing Check newsletter shows up in your inbox. It's designed to be a small moment of reflection, one week at a time. This is the same practice, at a different scale, and there are three questions I want you to consider.
What has the first half of the year revealed about what you actually value?
Not what you say you value. What your behavior reveals. Where did your time actually go? What did you actually spend your money on? Which people got your best attention and which ones got the leftovers? The gap between what you claim to value and what your calendar and your bank account actually shows is a diagnostic that matters. If you can look at the first six months of 2026 and honestly say your priorities matched your life, you're in a good place. If there's a gap, that's not a failure. It's data. Either way, sit with it.
Where has quiet consistency compounded into something you didn't expect?
Most people underestimate what small, boring, daily choices produce over time:
Six months of showing up for workouts.
Six months of a consistent devotional time.
Six months of paying attention to your kid or spouse when they talk to you.
Six months of watching where your money is going.
Six months of learning and/or practicing a new skill.
These moves feel invisible in the moment, but they compound in ways you don't see until you look back. So name the things you’ve put effort into, and give yourself credit for the practices that held.
What’s one thing you keep telling yourself you’ll do ‘someday’ but haven’t made time for?
This is the hardest question. Because the future version of you who will finally get healthy, finally address the relationship, finally start the project, finally have the hard conversation, finally get the financial plan on track, that person doesn't exist. There is only you today. What has been sitting in the "someday" pile long enough that it's starting to become "never"? Name it. Not to feel guilty about it. To decide whether it still matters, and if it does, to move it out of the future and into the present.
The Second Half of 2026
The three questions you just sat with are each asking you something different.
The first is asking you to look at the gap between what you claim to value and what your life shows.
The second is asking you to notice what’s already working, so you can protect it and build on it.
The third is asking you to name what you’ve been avoiding, so you can decide whether it still matters.
One of those questions is probably going to hit harder than the other two. That’s the one worth paying attention to. Pick your one move from whichever question surfaced the sharpest response, and give that move the second half of 2026.
If you identified multiple things, that’s fine. But I’d push you not to try to fix everything.
Pick the thing that stood out most. The pattern that surprised you. The thing you keep putting off, and now can’t unsee it. Move on that one, and give it your attention for the second half of 2026.
Then next January, when the culture is pushing you to set new resolutions, you’ll already know what you built. Not because you optimized. Because you paid attention when it mattered.
Your life has already been speaking through the first half of 2026.
The question is whether you’re going to listen well enough to make the second half different.
