How to Choose and Stick to Your Word of the Year
If you’re still stuck, here are two simple methods for coming up with your word of the year
Something interesting happens when you list clear goals. There’s an opportunity to become aware of whether or not you’re working towards them or moving away from them.
On the first day of 2024, I was challenged to meet one of the goals I wrote down on New Year’s Eve. And I failed. The interesting part wasn’t the failure. It was me seeing the opportunity to execute the goal in real time and choosing “next time” to rise to the occasion.
I was able to make the assessment so easily in real time because I just made it a focus. I believe the same happens when you choose a ‘word of the year.’ If you’ve never found coming up with a word for the year valuable maybe these three factors might change your mind:
1. Psychological Anchoring
Emotional Regulation: In times of stress or emotional turmoil, reflecting on your word of the year can help realign your emotional state with your broader objectives or desired mindset, providing a sense of calm and focus.
Cognitive Reframing: When faced with challenges or negative situations, your word can be a prompt to shift your perspective, encouraging you to view things in the light of your chosen theme. This can lead to more positive thinking patterns and a more resilient mindset.
Consistency in Values and Actions: When making decisions, you can refer back to this word to guide your choices, ensuring they align with your overarching goals and values.
2. Identity and Self-Concept Evolution
Self-Discovery and Exploration: Each year's word represents a chapter in your journey of self-discovery. It encourages exploration of new aspects of your personality and capabilities, leading to a more nuanced and dynamic understanding of yourself. Spoiler Alert: You don’t always have to create an entirely different word every year. I’ll share more on this later.
Reflective Practice and Growth: This process is inherently reflective, encouraging you to consider your past experiences and future aspirations. It's an exercise in intentional growth, where you actively shape your identity based on both introspection and the experiences you gain throughout the year.
Narrative Construction: Choosing a word contributes to the narrative you build about your life. It's a way of authoring your story, where each word symbolizes a particular phase or focus in your life's journey, adding depth and meaning to your personal narrative.
3. Manifestation and Intention Setting
Alignment of Thought and Action: By focusing on a specific word, you align your thoughts and actions towards manifesting the qualities or experiences that the word represents. This creates a congruency between what you think, say, and do, which is often cited in various philosophical and spiritual teachings as key to manifesting desired outcomes.
Subconscious Influence: Repeatedly reflecting on your chosen word imprints it on your subconscious mind. This subtle influence can guide your actions and reactions in ways that are more aligned with your intentions, often leading to serendipitous occurrences that resonate with your word.
Energy and Vibrational Frequency: From a spiritual or metaphysical perspective, focusing on a specific word or concept is believed to align your personal energy or vibrational frequency with that of your intention. This is based on the idea that like attracts like. So, by embodying the energy of your word, you attract similar energies and experiences into your life.
Before you choose your word, there are three simple considerations I highly recommend you apply. It will help you to be consistent in the word you’ve chosen:
1. Make Your Word Deeply Personal
First, it has to be connected to some part of your that is either vulnerable or that you deeply wish to see thrive. The word has to be connected to you and not some abstract idea of what you want to see happen throughout the year.
2. Make Your Word Experiential
Secondly, your word should come from a collection of experiences you’ve had from the previous year or over a set of years, which can lead to that “aha” moment of what you should work towards in the new year.
3. Make Your Word Relevant
Thirdly, if you have not met the objectives or fulfilled your word from the previous year, don’t feel ashamed or outdated to use that same word again. Use that word until you’ve fulfilled it. Think of your life beyond just single years and see it in bi-annuals and decades.
If you do the first two steps, you might come up with a new word every year but it is just a refinement of the previous word—unless there is something more urgent and important that takes precedence or you started to make your word more deeply personal and experiential. Then it’ll shift.
How to Come Up with the Word: Two Short Methods
So far here are the two ways I’ve experienced intentionally coming up with my word of the year.
Before it used to be based on emotion or whimsical inspiration from some movie or YouTube video I resonated with. Those methods don’t count because those aren’t really methods at all. A method is intentional and systematic. And perhaps if I made the whim of inspiration an intentional process, it would then be methodical. But then it would no longer be whimsical!
Method 1: End of the Year Questions
After going through a set of reflection questions that challenge me to look back on the year and position me to think forward on how I will improve in the year to come, I created a space to include the word that sums up my “big picture” intention.
Method 2: Having a Conversation over a Meal – A Game Changer
What I discovered on New Year’s Eve is the power of sharing this reflection experience in a more free-flowing, organic way but still with a level of intention (you can tell this is an important word by now), so that the conversation reveals what should be the focus for the year to come.
You already know how powerful having meals with friends is. But applying it in a way that could challenge you to boil down the reflective conversation into one word is what changes the game. The meal and conversation combo expedites certain processes (even though the goal is not to rush through the reflective process that creates opportunities to articulate what your big-picture focus will be).
My Word of the Year
The word is “astute.” It means having or showing an ability to accurately assess situations or people and turn this to one's advantage. My word last year was “nurture” because my goal was to focus on cultivating the current relationships I had vs. creating new ones. Well, that quickly changed only days into the new year after attending a conference in the very first week of January. Connecting with new people was inevitable for me. But that’s never been my challenge. The issue was sustaining those new connections. And while I did begin to create and foster new and meaningful connections, I could have leveraged them better for both my advantage and theirs. It likely became harder throughout the year to nurture relationships because I wasn’t as astute in the leveraging.
So this year, my goal hasn’t changed—it’s just refined. I will still make and sustain meaningful connections. At the end of 2023, I noticed how fruitful watering even just a fracture of my network benefitted both me and the ones I’m connected to.
What will your word be? Reply to this email or the note in Substack and let me know!