Jim sits down with Sara Blackmer, retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, senior partner at Salaiko Capital, and CEO of FluidLogic. This conversation is about leadership that holds up in the real world, not theory.

You'll hear how discipline creates clarity, why servant leadership is the fastest path to high performance, and how confidence is built through repetition and daily wins. They also get into team dynamics, role alignment, and why movement is not the same thing as momentum.

If you're serious about building winning cultures and making better decisions with your time and money, this episode hits.

• Confidence is built through preparation, repetition, and proof

• Servant leadership means taking care of people so they can take care of the mission

• Discipline creates focus and alignment

• High-performing teams beat even the most talented individuals every time

• When you fully commit to what you say yes to, opportunities show up you could not have predicted

1. Start the day with order
   Make your bed. Get one win on the board early. Your mindset follows your actions.

2. Create role clarity
   If someone cannot explain how their role impacts the mission, you have a leadership problem, not a talent problem.

3. Serve your team daily
   Ask: "What roadblock can I remove for you today?" Then do it.

Sara Blackmer's Final Word

"Give all of yourself to what you say yes to. If you do that again and again, opportunities will come in ways you never expected."

This episode puts a bow on the "Best Year Ever" series and pulls the threads together. Jim Oliver and Nick Kosko walk through what actually keeps you on course when motivation fades - vision without systems drifts, and identity without environment collapses. This conversation is about building a life that compounds, spiritually, physically, and financially, because it is designed to do so - focusing on daily stewardship and long-term thinking.

What You'll Learn:

• Why vision and the systems that support it matters

• The relationship between identity and behavior

• The difference between living as a consumer versus an owner

• The ways faith, health, and money all rise or fall together

Action Steps

1. Install Drift Checkers
   Create 5-minute morning and evening check-ins to stay aligned with who you are becoming, not who you were.

2. Change the Environment First
   Remember to remove friction for the habits you want and add friction for the ones you do not. Pantries, calendars, relationships, and routines matter.

Nick Kosko's Shared Wisdom

"Your plans are drafts. God's plans are complete. When you steward what you've been given, and put the right systems around your life, the results are always better than what you could have designed on your own."

In this final teaching episode of the new year series, Jim closes the loop on how to design the best year of your life on purpose. This is not about motivation; it's about identity, systems, faith, and ownership. 2026 becomes your best year the moment you decide the old way is done and you architect something better with intention and clarity.

What You'll Learn

• The Breakaway Framework

• Why your best year never happens by accident

• Two questions that shape everything you will experience in 2026

• How systems outperform goals every single time

• Why gratitude and vision are non-negotiable if you want lasting change

Action Steps:

1. Write Your Declaration
   Define who you are becoming in 2026 and let that identity drive every decision.

2. Build Automatic Systems
   Replace willpower with environments and systems that make the right actions inevitable.

3. Commit to Community
   Stop trying to do this alone—coaching, accountability, and structure change outcomes.

Jim Oliver's Final Word
"2026 isn't your best year because circumstances change. It's your best year because you change. When you decide who you are and build systems around that identity, the results always follow."

Most people think discipline is the problem. It's not. The problem is that their life is perfectly engineered for distraction, convenience, and drift. In this episode, Jim breaks down why willpower always loses, how environments quietly shape outcomes, and why 2026 must be designed on purpose. If you want momentum without burnout and results without constant self-negotiation, this is the framework you've been missing.

What You'll Learn

• Why willpower is a losing strategy

• How default settings silently dictate your financial and personal outcomes

• The three environments that shape behavior

• The winning strategy of high performers

• How to make the right decisions feel obvious instead of exhausting

Action Steps:

1. Audit Your Environments
   Identify one physical, digital, or social environment that is working against the 2026 version of you. If it's producing friction, it's costing you momentum.

2. Remove One Easy Failure Path
   Delete, hide, or add effort to one habit that is pulling you backward. Convenience works both ways. Use it intentionally.

3. Install One Automatic Win
   Preload success by setting up a simple system that supports the outcome you want. Layout, automation, and visibility beat motivation every time.

Jim Oliver's Shared Wisdom
"Stop trying to become disciplined. Design your life so the right decisions happen by default."

Most people think they fail because they lack discipline. That is false. They fail because their environment is perfectly designed to pull them off course. In this episode, Jim breaks down why willpower always loses, how default settings quietly dictate outcomes, and why 2026 must be engineered, not hoped for. If you want success to feel automatic instead of exhausting, this episode gives you the blueprint.

What You'll Learn:

• Why your environment will either be a headwind or tailwind

• The three environments that quietly shape you

• How visibility and proximity drive behavior

• Why simplicity creates momentum

• The friction formula that makes right decisions automatic
  
  

Action Steps:

• Audit Your Environments
  Identify one physical, digital, or social environment that is working against the 2026 version of you.

• Remove One Frictionless Path
  Delete, hide, or add effort to one behavior that is sabotaging your momentum, notifications, junk food, or mindless scrolling.

• Install One Automatic Support
  Preload success. Lay out workout clothes, preload meals, automate investments, or place your journal and water within arm's length.

🔥 Jim Oliver's Share Wisdom
"Your environment is going to determine whether 2026 works or not. Design it once, and success stops being a fight."

Referenced Thinkers

• Dan Sullivan on environment being either a drag or a tailwind

• Tony Robbins on proximity and state

• BJ Fogg on behavior design

• Earl Nightingale on becoming what you think about

If you are serious about making 2026 your best year, stop relying on motivation and start engineering your life. Install the systems, upgrade the people, and let the environment do the heavy lifting.

Everybody wants bigger results in 2026—more money, more freedom, more impact. Almost nobody wants the pressure that actually builds the capacity to handle it.

In this episode, Jim breaks down the "furnace" moments of life—those seasons of heat, friction, and resistance—and shows how they're not punishment, they're training. Capacity, not talent, is what 2026 will reward. Using the S.A.I.D. principle from strength training, Navy SEAL mental toughness, and Dan Sullivan's Four C's, Jim unpacks how God uses pressure to expose your default operating system and forge you into someone who can hold more wealth, more responsibility, and more calling—without cracking.

If you've been trying to avoid the heat, this conversation will help you see pressure as the forge where Breakaway Wealth leaders are made.

What You'll Learn

• Why 2026 will reward capacity, and how to start building it now.

• How the S.A.I.D. principle (specific adaptation to imposed demands) applies not just to muscle, but to your brain, resilience, and wealth.

• The four types of pressure to train for 2026, and what training each one actually looks like.

🛠️ Action Steps

1. Reframe Your Current Furnace
Name one area of pressure in your life (money, relationships, time, business). Stop calling it punishment. Call it capacity training—and ask, "What is this building in me?"

2. Do a Daily Pressure Rep
Use one of Jim's drills each day: two-minute furnace (sit with the pressure and breathe), calm response to an inconvenience, or a quick financial posture check (fear vs vision).

3. Practice One Surrender per Day
Choose one thing to release—control, fear, resentment—and pray, "God, shake me in the places pressure revealed." Pressure + release = spiritual capacity.

Jim Oliver's Final Word

"Pressure doesn't break you, it exposes you. And once you see what's really there, you and God can forge a version of you that can hold far more in 2026 than you ever thought possible."

In this solo episode, Jim resets the 2026 "best year ever" series and takes you back to the real starting line: identity. This isn't motivation, resolutions, or another empty goal-setting rant. This is a structured, identity-driven blueprint to architect a year you actually control instead of replaying 2025 with a new calendar.

Jim breaks down why you don't get what you want—you get what you're built for. He unpacks how your current identity quietly dictates your health, wealth, habits, and results… and why willpower, hype, and "trying harder" never solve the problem. You'll walk away with one clear breakthrough outcome for 2026, a sharper identity to match it, and three daily non-negotiables that turn this from theory into a new operating system for your life and your wealth.

What You'll Learn

• Why most people repeat the same year on a different calendar

• How to architect 2026 instead of hoping it "gets better."

• The real reason goals fail

• Why great years are built on subtraction

• The three identity-driven daily non-negotiables that make progress toward your 2026 breakthrough outcome inevitable

Install Your Daily Non-Negotiables:
Lock in three non-negotiables for every day. Here are examples

1. 30 minutes of stillness,

2. 10 minutes of identity rehearsal (mentally living as the 2026 version of you),

3. One friction-aligned action toward your 2026 target.

Make the right behavior easier, the wrong behavior harder—design your environment so discipline isn't a coin flip.

Jim's Shared Wisdom
"You either architect 2026 or you replay 2025 with a different calendar. Whoever you decide to be this year is exactly who you'll become by the end of it."

Most people are trying to "goal" their way into a better year. They set resolutions, white-knuckle new habits, and wonder why everything falls apart by March. In this episode, Jim breaks that pattern wide open.

2026 won't rise to the level of your goals. It will fall to the level of your systems—and your systems are built on identity, energy, and emotional mastery. Jim walks you through how elite performers think (Kobe, Brady, Navy SEALs), how your brain literally fights anything that doesn't match your identity, and why stillness and silence—not more noise—are the unlocks for wealth, clarity, and calling.

If you're serious about becoming the kind of person for whom wealth, health, and opportunity are inevitable—not accidental—this is your blueprint.

What You'll Learn

• How to recode who you are in 2026.

• How (and why) to treat energy as currency

• The confidence flywheel and why action must come before feeling "ready".

• A practical stillness protocol to hear from God, regulate your emotions, and make higher-quality business and money decisions.

Action Steps

1. Complete this sentence: "In 2026, I'm the kind of person who…"
   Let this identity drive your behavior.

2. Identify one energizer and one drainer. Double the energizer. Delete the drainer.

3. Phone on airplane mode. Sit upright. Breathe 4-2-6 for a few cycles. Do this every day for 30 days.

Jim Oliver's Shared Wisdom

"Don't ask, 'What do I want in 2026?' Ask, 'Who must I become so that everything I want becomes inevitable?' Change your identity, protect your energy, sit in silence, and then take the courageous step. That's how you become unstoppable."