2026: Year of The Magnetic Mother
The Annual Ethos Practice
Each new year is an opportunity for many people to take inventory of where they’ve been and set intentions for where they want to go. The outcome of that intention setting might result in a vision board, a word of the year, or perhaps something different entirely. I’ve been known to do all of the above, but I’m perhaps best known for my own adaptation of Grace Clark’s Annual Retro meets Lululemon’s 10-5-1 goal-setting method, revised each year to help me stay on track and stay true to my authentic code, culminating in a new board-deck template to lead me through the year.
But last year, I added something else to my practice… When all my retro-ing, goal-setting, and board-decking was done, I was left wanting to define an ethos for the year. I felt compelled to write about it, and it ended up being the inspiration for my year, and one of the best-performing articles of mine of all time. It took on a life of its own and became how I filtered ideas, actions, and opportunities. It became something I revisited regularly to recalibrate. 2025 became The Year of the Leading Lady.
With 2026 on the horizon, and maternity leave in flight (and therefore more time than ever to sit with my thoughts, with the only interruption being a smiling, cooing, and, let’s be honest, crying, waking-me-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night baby and toddler, lol), I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I want 2026 to look like: my return to work, what core memories I want to unlock with my husband and daughters, and even new and old traditions I want to create or uphold.
And I’ll tell you what, the fantasy of all these things has been pretty intoxicating, because doing this fantasizing has really allowed me to think about these future memories from a third-person point of view. Meaning, when I am envisioning the memory I’m creating, the boundary I’m holding, or the lesson I am teaching, I envision my highest self, and as cheesy as it sounds, I envision her with a golden aura around her.
I envision someone who can hold the duality of the weight of the workday while also compartmentalizing it to be fully present with her daughters and husband in the evenings. I envision someone who can hold the weight of familial drama while also compartmentalizing it to pour the purest love into her relationships with her husband and daughters. I envision someone whose magnetism is guided by love, light, and the divinity within. It’s pure. It’s golden. It’s like honey… sweet, sticky, delicious.
And as I’ve been envisioning HER, I realize I am being called to define my year yet again, not with a word, or a vision board, but an ethos. An ethos through which I feel magnetized and can filter ideas, actions, and opportunities.
That ethos is: The Magnetic Mother.
Defining the Magnetic Mother
My first invitation to create The Magnetic Mother was through To Be Magnetic’s DIs. The belief of the TBM community, in short, is this: We are all born whole and worthy, but over the course of time layers of pain, shame, and societal programming pile on top of that whole, worthy core and become the filters (coping mechanisms) through which we operate in our day-to-day lives.
When we begin the work of the TBM pathway, we start to question the layers and filters we’ve picked up over time. As we examine them, they naturally begin to fall away. This allows us to return to our full, worthy, whole, authentic selves.
As you might imagine, much of this work involves healing childhood wounds. These include both the subtle and the not-so-subtle traumas we may have experienced, whether our parents intended them or not. Through TBM’s Deep Imaginings, we’re guided to create a new parental archetype, The Magnetic Parent, and revisit painful memories from a higher, more compassionate place. In these meditations, we re-parent ourselves as this Magnetic Parent, offering our inner child the love, safety, and understanding they needed but didn’t receive.
IMO, it’s profoundly healing work.
Creating this Magnetic Mother for myself for the purposes of these DIs has been the most incredible blessing. And since I’ve been at this work for a while (the TBM work, that is), I created that archetype long before I had daughters of my own. Now that I’ve actually become a mother myself, I’ve had to reckon with my own need for this Magnetic Mother while also parenting my own children in a sometimes less-than-magnetic way.
Do I lose my cool with them sometimes? Yes.
Does the weight of life crush me sometimes and prevent me from being the mother I want to be? Yes.
Do I fall victim to the algorithm and scroll on my phone after work as a way of dissociating, and does that mean I am ignoring my daughters who live in the physical world with no opportunity to dissociate themselves by tapping into an algorithm of strangers on the internet? Yes.
Is this how I want to show up for them, my husband, or anyone else for that matter? No.
So then, what would embodying the ethos of The Magnetic Mother mean?
Simply by defining it, I give myself the opportunity to embody it. So I began to ask myself: What are the values of The Magnetic Mother? How does The Magnetic Mother operate?
The Magnetic Mother’s Values
As I sat with these questions, not from a place of self-judgment but from curiosity, compassion, and possibility, five core values emerged. Five pillars that felt like the spine of this ethos. Five truths that, if I could embody even one percent more each day, would reshape not only how I mother, but how I live.
These aren’t aspirational values in the Pinterest sense. They are lived values. The kind that show up in the way you speak to yourself while brushing your teeth, the way you greet your children after a long workday, the way you choose to decorate your home, or the way you hold a boundary that honors your energy. These values are the architecture of the woman with that golden aura I’ve been seeing in my mind.
Here they are, the five core values of The Magnetic Mother:
1. Presence & Celebration
The Magnetic Mother is here in the room, in the moment, in her body. She pays attention. She listens. She delights. She notices the tiny, miraculous details of the people she loves and names them out loud. Her presence is her gift, and her celebration is her fuel. Her magnetism is relational, felt through warmth, humor, curiosity, and the ability to make others come alive simply by being seen.
2. Joyful Curation
The Magnetic Mother builds joy intentionally, not through grand gestures but through golden, honey-dripping details: the pajamas she loves, the robes she lays out for guests, the playlist at dinner, how she preps her coffee before bedtime,the delicious meal that brings everyone to the table. Her home is her canvas. Her rituals are her self-love. Her joy is not accidental. It is devotional.
3. Integrated Identity
The Magnetic Mother honors all parts of who she is: woman, mother, partner, friend, leader, creator. She teaches her children that identity doesn’t shrink in motherhood; it expands. She carries her ambition with pride and her love with depth. She doesn’t toggle between roles; she integrates them. She allows her children to witness a woman who is whole and multidimensional. She finds the intersection points between her needs and desires and theirs, and invests in those intersections wholeheartedly, compounding the love and joy that everyone feels in the wake of that integration.
4. Strength & Equanimity
She is rooted. She meets challenges with steadiness, not perfection. She builds systems that support her nervous system (and lends that well-supported nervous system to her family): sleep, movement, routines, boundaries. She knows her magnetism falters when she is overcommitted, ungrounded, or stretched thin, so she protects her energy like it is sacred. Because it is. Her strength is not loud. It is intentional. Her equanimity is not passive. It is practiced.
5. Devotion & Spacious Commitment
She devotes herself to what matters and lovingly releases what doesn’t. Her life has oxygen. Her schedule has margins. Her relationships have room to breathe. She leads with intention rather than obligation, choosing commitments that align with her values, her wellness, her legacy, and her joy. Devotion is the mechanism through which all her other values take form.
The Magnetic Mother’s Operating System
If the values are the what, then the operating system is the how.
It is the quiet, behind-the-scenes software running inside her mind, the questions she asks, the lenses she uses, the way she moves through her day with intentionality and grace.
The Magnetic Mother doesn’t rely on willpower. She relies on awareness. She doesn’t white-knuckle her way to calm. She returns to her rituals, her systems, and her center. She checks in with herself constantly, not anxiously but intuitively, and makes micro-adjustments so her values stay embodied rather than aspirational. Here’s the operating system she lives by:
1. “What does presence look like right now?”
Not in an ideal world, but in this moment with these kids, this workday, this sink full of dishes, this body, this energy.
Sometimes presence looks like getting on the floor to play and leaving the dirty dishes for later so she can savor these fleeting moments of childhood. Sometimes it is taking fifteen minutes to breathe alone in the daycare parking lot before going inside to pick up the girls, so she can recalibrate her energy before her nervous system collides with theirs. Sometimes it is putting the phone in a drawer, leaving messages unread, or muting individuals who activate her, and take her peace away.
Presence is her compass.
2. “How can I add a spoonful of honey to this moment?”
Joy-curation doesn’t require extra time, only a hint of extra intention. A spoonful of honey makes everything sweeter.
Sometimes that spoonful of honey looks like a candle lit before bedtime, music while cooking, dimming the lights for dinner, a favorite lotion after a shower, or a deep inhale before walking into a room.
She asks herself, what would make this feel just a little sweeter, more beautiful, more nourishing, or more sensory?
3. “Is this choice honoring my whole identity?”
This is the “yoke” or yuj, as in the yogi’s practice. It is the intentional uniting of body and breath, mind and spirit, the individual self and the higher Self, the physical world and the internal world.
At its core, yoke is about connection. It is not forcing two things together, but harmonizing them and creating coherence and wholeness.
She asks: Does this honor me as a woman, not just a mother? Does this support my career, creativity, friendships, partnership, future self, and children? If the answer is no, she adjusts. If the answer is yes, she proceeds.
4. “What does regulation look like for me right now?”
Strength and equanimity are daily practices, not default states. She checks in with her nervous system like it is data and uses that data to calibrate.
She asks: Am I depleted or overflowing? Do I need movement or stillness? Food or water? Connection or quiet? Routine or freedom? She knows magnetism requires regulation, so she listens early and gently, without guilt, and adjusts accordingly.
5. “Does this decision create devotion or depletion?”
This question governs her boundaries and filters the invitations that cross her path.
She doesn’t ask, “Can I do it?” because she knows she can. She asks: Does this expand me or constrict me? Does this align with my values? Does this honor my body, time, energy, and legacy?
If it is devotion, she is all in. If it is depletion, she releases it without guilt.
The Core Loop
At the highest level, The Magnetic Mother operates from a simple daily loop: Presence → Honey → Integration → Regulation → Devotion → Repeat.
This is her OS. It turns her values into embodied motherhood, into a home that feels alive, into a life that feels self-loving instead of self-abandoned.
Accepting Imperfection in the Practice of The Magnetic Mother
In a recent podcast, Emma Grede shared something that felt both shocking and obvious: the people who are most successful in achieving their goals don’t simply plan for the goal, they also plan for what they will do when they inevitably fall off the wagon.
Not if. When.
Despite all my reading, all my investing in personal development, and all my systems and rituals, I had genuinely never heard it framed quite like that. And it changed something for me. It acknowledges a truth most of us secretly fear: even with the best intentions, we will break our own rules. We will fall into old habits. We will forget our values. We will get tired, stressed, overstimulated. We are human.
If you’re reading this and feel as intoxicated as I do by the ethos of The Magnetic Mother, then my guess is that you’ll take pieces of this and weave them into your life. You’ll try to live with more presence, more honey, more integration, more regulation, more devotion.
But you, like me, are imperfect. We will both have moments we are not proud of, probably more than we’d care to admit, where we fall very far off the wagon. The Magnetic Mother would say “This isn’t just accepted… It is expected.” (And she would say it with love).
The Magnetic Mother is not a model of perfection. She is a model of return. And so, The Magnetic Mother has a plan for finding her way back… Not through shame or self-criticism or self-punishment, but through the same kindness, compassion, and warmth she gives to her children, her partner, and her friends. The Magnetic Mother parents herself too.
She notices when she is off, scrolling instead of connecting, overcommitting instead of honoring her capacity, dissociating instead of being present. And when she notices, she doesn’t spiral. She returns to her OS through one essential ritual, an anchor that brings her back to herself every single time: her one thing. Maybe it’s: A shower. A walk. Making the bed. A cup of tea. Standing in the sunlight. A deep breath.
Whatever that one thing is, its purpose is to restore her to her center and reactivate her magnetism.
The Magnetic Mother does not aspire to be flawless. She simply aspires to be embodied more often than not.
Inviting You to Define Your Own Ethos for 2026
As you sit with all of this, the values, the operating system, the magnetic return, I want to offer you the same invitation I extended to myself:
Choose an ethos for your year.
A definition for your way of being. A filter for how you make decisions, hold boundaries, build memories, and create meaning.
Your ethos doesn’t have to look like mine. But if you want to borrow The Magnetic Mother, it’s yours.
Whoever you choose to be this year, let it be someone you are proud to return to, even when you fall off the wagon.
Who is the woman you want to step into this year, and what would it look like to lead your life, every ordinary Tuesday and every golden-hour moment and every imperfect stumble, through her eyes?
However you choose to define your year, I hope it brings you more sweetness, more strength, more freedom, and more love in the life you are building.
Alright, that was a lot, so I’ll leave you with this:
Here’s to 2026.
Here’s to your ethos.
Here’s to your magnetism.
Here’s to The Magnetic Mother.
Here’s to you.
Xoxo.
