Reset the Room: Close the Loop and Stop Carrying Yesterday
18 Dec 2025 · 7 min
Steve Lichtman explains how to "reset the room" each night: clear your desk, close digital tabs, and state your three most important tasks aloud. Carrying stress from one day into the next erodes wellbeing and feeds burnout. Athletes shift focus after mistakes; you can too.
Chapters
Hey, everybody. Today we're going to talk about resetting. It's the first part of the rise framework, and in many ways, it's the most crucial. It connects to the effort. Switch. But there's little micro details within all of this that really can help you every single day. So it's not the bad phone call that kills you, right? If you have a crappy phone call during the day, that's not what kills you. It's when you carry that bad phone call into lunch, into your commute home, into dinner, into your family's conversations. And maybe you're hanging out with the family, having TV time or something, or playing a board game or doing whatever you might be doing. Our house, it's a lot of music. So the kid puts on rock concerts every day. She's been playing for seven years. She's shred a maiden for me every night, and it's fantastic. I don't want to carry that bad phone call into that absolutely freaking awesome minute with my family. I don't want to carry that bad phone call into when I go to sleep at night where I'm laying in bed thinking about it. I don't want to carry it into tomorrow. I want to learn how to close the loop so that way I'm not dragging yesterday's garbage and baggage forever. Because that's what happens to all of us. We carry things. We carry negative feelings. Most people, sadly, can carry a negative feeling, like, 10 times longer than a positive one. You get that dopamine hit on the positive one, and now you want more. People have lost the art form of remembering and promoting the good more than the bad. So this is something I want you to learn how to do and to reset yourself so you don't dwell on the bad. We need more positive people in this universe, right? The world. Look at the world we live in today. One thing you'll find is I don't talk about politics on here. I never will. But I will say this. Holy hell, it's 2026. Or maybe it's 2025 when it's coming at the end. This is right at the end. This is probably the. This is gonna be coming out, let's say the ninth epis. Yes. Coming out next week. So this is almost 2026, the end of 2025. Look at where the hell this world is. Look at all the chaos. Look at all the angry people. Look at all the just people, just happy being miserable with each other and towards each other. It's so bad. It's just, oh, the energy is just so wrong. The vibe, I'm a big vibes guy and Jalen Brunson of the Knicks always says it best when he goes, the vibes are immaculate. That's the only thing he strives for, right? I mean, obviously he strives to be an amazing basketball player and everything that goes with that. He's got a kid now, you know, he's got a happy wife, happy kid. He's hitting all the marks in his career and life at this point and it's fantastic to see as a New Yorker. But his vibe energy, like the idea that he only wants good vibe people around him, is important because that means he's understanding that you don't. And look, sporting athletes, they have to be able to flip that switch, right? And not carry that bad moment into the next moment. Otherwise they'd get their asses kicked and they lose. So look at it as a way. Look at it like a basketball player, like how they miss a shot. That's like having a bad phone call, right? The only difference is it's on national television. So there could be 50 memes for it by the time they sit on. The next time they sit on the bench and grab a water, there could already be 400 memes posted on Instagram about it and X about it, roasting them. So think about how you can't control the chaos. You can't control the bad phone call, but you can control your transition. That's leadership. The way you can take chaos, pivot it and control it, make that transition, still be positive even after a negative. That is how you learn how to lead yourself even. So here's the ritual that here's. Look, I'm weird because I am like super free spirited, but I have a lot of rituals that I do. Little weird ones, but it's just small stuff. So my what I would call like the reset the room. It's something you could do every single night. Clear your desk, tidy it up, no mess to wake up to tomorrow, right? Clear off all the sticky notes, make your your world non chaotic so you don't fall into chaos the minute you start your day. Close the tabs, close the apps in your browsers, right? Close them all out in your phone. You don't need all this garbage open when you're done with something, close it and move on. It's important to not get stuck in everything and then brain dump the three most important tomorrow tasks. So write them out down, say them out loud. Yeah, you gotta get those things written down. So tomorrow you have Your three top tasks, what your three main goals are, other than what your day might already have. You might already have calls booked. You already have meetings, networkings, whatever it is that you might be doing. You might have time blocked. Hopefully you have that 10 to 10, 10 time block to do that social media post we talked about the other day, to be consistent, close it all down and say yourself out loud. You know, I do it like this as a joke even. Sometimes I'll be like, all right, shop's closed. I'm off the clock, and I walk out. Takes a couple of minutes, but it saves hours of mental drag, Right? Like you're noble now. If you know you're off the clock and your brain is off the clock because people, oh, I live my business 24 hours a day. They're all gonna have heart attacks way before I do. Because you have to release that stress and that tension and that pressure every day. Otherwise, it swells up inside of you. And it is literally what is killing people. It is what's putting people on pharmaceuticals. It's what's destroying the very essence of the joy of trying to start a business and run something to help other people. If your business is truly to serve and help other people, well, then the mental drag that you're causing yourself is killing the jo of why you started it in the first place. So let's talk about today's riff of the day. It's real simple. Close the loop or drag yesterday's baggage into tomorrow. That's your call. So remember, guys, success. It's built into transitions, right? You need to master transitioning from moment to moment, and you'll work out. You know, you'll. You'll outwork everyone in the room without burning out. If you learn how to do it right, you could be the biggest beast in your industry and in your sector and in your niche if you learn how to stop the negatives, transition, and then move on to the next thing. Because you won't be getting yourself dragged down every day into the BS that's around you and into the negativity and the bad moments of your day. Because we all have bad moments in our day. It's just how we get past it and get onto the next thing. With that in mind, everybody, thank you so much. I'm Steve Lichtman, and this was unfiltered and unshakable.
