Episode #702 Intentional Living Starts With Looking Back — Jobert E. Abueva
“It’s beginning again without starting over.”
— Jobert E. Abueva, author of The Janus Plan
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Sometimes moving forward has less to do with creating a new plan and more to do with understanding the old one.
Episode Summary
We’re conditioned to ask a familiar question whenever something ends: What do I do next?
Jobert E. Abueva suggests there may be a better question first:
What just happened?
That simple shift sits at the heart of The Janus Plan, Jobert’s framework for intentional living inspired by Janus, the ancient Roman god associated with beginnings, endings and transitions.
For Jobert, this philosophy isn’t theoretical. Years into a demanding global marketing career, a pace of nonstop work, travel and neglected well-being eventually caught up with him in a Hong Kong hotel room, where one morning he simply could not get himself out of bed.
Burnout forced a reckoning.
What followed wasn’t about erasing his career or pretending the difficult parts hadn’t happened. It was about examining them closely enough to recognize patterns, rediscover neglected parts of himself and make different choices.
That creates one of the most interesting tensions in this conversation: perhaps reflection isn’t the opposite of forward movement.
Perhaps it’s what makes meaningful forward movement possible.
Jobert and Audley explore what happens when we stop treating the past as somewhere we either romanticize or run from and instead use it as evidence.
Because sometimes the most audacious way to begin again is to understand exactly what brought you here.
Four Key Takeaways
Reflection Should Come Before Resolution
Most goal-setting begins with the future: What do I want? Where am I going? What needs to change? Jobert turns the sequence around. Before designing what comes next, examine what already happened. The successes, disappointments, habits and patterns of the previous chapter contain information. Intentional living begins when those experiences become data rather than baggage.
Facing Your Past Can Be an Audacious Act
Audacity doesn’t always look like jumping from airplanes, climbing mountains or making dramatic life changes. Sometimes nobody else sees it. Being willing to examine something uncomfortable, admit a pattern isn’t serving you or challenge the story you’ve been telling yourself can require tremendous courage. Quiet acts of honesty can change the direction of an entire life.
Burnout Rarely Arrives Without Warning
Jobert remembers the moment his body finally said enough, but he also recognizes that the signs existed long before that morning in Hong Kong. The harder question isn’t simply whether warning signs exist. It’s whether we’re willing to notice them while life still appears successful from the outside. Achievement can sometimes become camouflage for exhaustion.
Beginning Again Doesn’t Mean Starting Over
One of Jobert’s strongest ideas is that reinvention doesn’t require deleting everything that came before. You bring the wisdom, experiences, mistakes, relationships and abilities you’ve accumulated with you. A new beginning can happen inside the same career, relationship or life. Sometimes the biggest change isn’t your circumstances. It’s the clarity with which you enter them.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Jobert E. Abueva is an author, longtime global marketer and philanthropy executive whose work explores reflection, personal transitions and intentional living.
His latest book, The Janus Plan: A No-Resolutions Path to Begin Your Year with Intention, draws inspiration from Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, endings and thresholds. Rather than asking readers to reinvent themselves through another collection of New Year’s resolutions, Jobert encourages them to examine where they have been before deciding where they want to go.
His perspective is also deeply personal. A demanding international marketing career, including work associated with Clairol Herbal Essences, eventually led to burnout and a significant reassessment of how he wanted to work and live.
That combination of lived experience and practical reflection gives this conversation its weight.
BOOKS, PRODUCTS, RESOURCES & SPECIAL OFFERS
The Janus Plan: A No-Resolutions Path to Begin Your Year with Intention
Rather than beginning personal change with another list of resolutions, The Janus Plan invites readers to first understand the year and experiences they have already lived. Through reflection exercises and practical frameworks, Jobert encourages readers to recognize patterns, decide what deserves to continue and move toward the future more intentionally.
The book is published by Weaving Influence Press and is scheduled for release September 15, 2026.
Learn more:
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
One of the simplest exercises Jobert describes during the conversation is also one of the most revealing.
Look back over a meaningful period of your life and identify:
The Good: What worked? What deserves to be remembered or celebrated?
The Bad: What hurt, disappointed you or didn’t unfold as hoped?
The Ugly: What is uncomfortable enough that you may have preferred not to examine it at all?
The point isn’t to judge the year.
It’s to understand it.
Sometimes the most surprising discovery is realizing that something originally placed in the “bad” column also produced resilience, perspective or an unexpected opportunity worth carrying forward.
WRITE THE HEADLINE OF YOUR YEAR
Jobert offers another deceptively powerful exercise:
Imagine your past year were a news story.
What would the headline be?
Instead of remembering twelve months as hundreds of unrelated moments, look for the larger pattern running through them.
What defined the year?
What changed?
What kept repeating?
What mattered more than you realized while you were living it?
Finding the headline can reveal the story underneath the activity.
AUDACIOUS INSIGHT
Title: The Rearview Mirror Has a Job
Core Idea
We’re often warned not to spend too much time looking backward, yet refusing to look backward can be just as dangerous.
Reflection becomes valuable when we understand its purpose. The past isn’t somewhere we’re supposed to live. It’s information we can use to understand how we arrived at our present position and make better decisions about where we go next.
AUDLEY’S PERSONAL INSIGHT
What stayed with me was Jobert’s phrase “beginning again without starting over.” There is something freeing about realizing that a new beginning doesn’t require throwing your entire life away. Sometimes you simply understand what brought you here, keep what serves you and make the next decision with greater intention.
BEST POINT OF CONTACT
The strongest place to continue engaging with Jobert and his work is his official author website:
Listeners can learn more about The Janus Plan, Jobert’s writing and his broader work around reflection, transitions and intentional living.
LISTEN TO THE AUDACIOUS LIVING PODCAST
Great conversations become even more valuable when they’re shared.
Listen to the full conversation with Jobert E. Abueva, subscribe to The Audacious Living Podcast, and share the episode with someone standing at a threshold of their own.
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