If you have a word of the year...
Thoughts on where I think I went wrong, what I'm doing now I have one for the first time in three years and four ways to approach your word in your journal
I cannot tell you how good it felt to write this piece. It feels useful and helpful and clarifying. If you feel the same and think it might be useful to someone, I have one ask: that you share it with them. I really think there’s something in this.
I prefer to collect my words as I go, like picking up pebbles as you walk along the beach. I haven’t had a word of the year for the last three years, but I do have one for 2024. Actually, I have three.
Finding my word of the year, started with a question.
I thought my word of the year was progress, but completing the Unravel Your Year workbook by
, confirmed a question that has been going around my mind:Is it an intention, a theme, an action or just something to be aware of?
I think that’s where I might have been going wrong with previous words of the year. Not knowing if I’m chasing a feeling or an outcome. And not having any markers to know if and when I’m there, what it feels like, how far I’ve come or have to go.
So this year, I’ve split it up. I have a theme word, which is progress, an action word which is move and a third word that keeps coming up for me. It’s not tied to a goal, but it feels important, so I’m calling it my awareness word. There’s no measurement around it, it’s simply a word of personal significance (it’s mirror by the way).
My awareness word, I’ll just notice as and when it comes up in my mind. My theme or intention word is an overarching one steeped in feeling, but sits interlinked to my action word, the doing of my days, how I spend my time and the outcomes.
Some years, I have no word of the year. Going forward, I might have one type or all three—who knows? But I am finding this so useful to consider and clarify where my expectation sits alongside each one as often, I think I’ve set an intention word based around feelings, but what I’ve needed has been an action word. And then because I’ve had no structure, markers or measures, I’ve deemed the year a failure based on how I feel at the time, which at the end of a year and the start of Winter is usually, depleted and in need of respite.
I should also say here and refer right back to the first words I wrote. I place no pressure on myself to have my word on January 1st, or January at all. I collect them as I go. Sometimes I only figure them out around September, in retrospect, once I’ve lived through them and can find the language for it.
Anyway, if you do have one ready and raring to go, I do have some further thought prompts to help you carry it with you below:
Make it an active question (useful for decision-making)
Gretchin Rubin taught me the idea of making your word of the year a question. I find it makes it active and gives it life. I’ve found it most useful when contemplating making decisions in the moment or at the top of my day. In the moment, I can ask myself if this consideration takes me closer to or away from (safety, peace, feeling illuminated/insert your word of the year here). In each day, I can consider the context of my energy or the details of that day, but still ask what I am willing and able to do to “feel safe today,” “move today” or ask what my word of a year looks like on that day. Then I can either still move towards it in a way that feels doable or actively decide not to do anything that day, knowing it was considered and that was my active decision.
Make it a reflective question
I find this question super interesting as I think we often have an idea in our minds of what our word of the year will look like and what shape it will take when we decide on it. Then life happens. Some prompts here might be:
What did my word mean this week/month? Where did it show up? In which areas of life? Did I expect it?
At the back of my last journal, I had a page with the header ‘SAFE.’ I didn’t have a word of the year, but that is one that kept presenting itself. A few days a month, I’d turn to the back and simply note what the word looked like on that day and where it showed up. It was so interesting to note the unexpected places that SAFE made itself known. In financial safety, emotional safety, trusting I could feel safe in my body and my decisions. Sometimes safe was a place or a person.
Immerse your senses
Ask yourself what your word might or does feel like and taste like. What’s its texture? In which contexts does it apply? What could it sound like?
Make it a phrase
My wonderful creative friend
said this in a WhatsApp the other day. That she didn’t have a word, more a phrase. She’s written about it (linked below) and again, I think this is a great way to draw your word of the year closer. Something you can mull and ruminate on, repeat like a mantra as you go about your day, not only when sat with your journal open.Edit: the other questions that came to mind as I read Luisa’s post are: what if you hold your word of the year lightly rather than tightly? I think especially if it’s an intentional word. It’s just one that we’re choosing to walk alongside for a while. It doesn’t need us to death grip it and force it into every nook and cranny. More omnipresent than obsession.
And because Luisa and I are friends, I find our chat is always littered with creative rebellion (which to my mind, isn’t rebellion at all, more just life as it needs to be at that moment). This question came up: What doesn’t your word mean? Where don’t you want to see it or find it creeping in? I like considering the antithesis of a thing a lot, as sometimes while we can’t figure out all the yeses, we often immediately and powerfully know its no’s. I find a no can be an equally helpful guide.
The thing with all four of the angles or thoughts I’ve listed is that it’s about incorporating and weaving your word into your days. That’s how you’ll end the year, firstly, remembering what the word was. That’s how you make a word of the year tangible. That’s how you keep it present and make it mean something.
So if you have a word of the year, let it be a compass or a passenger, not a weight or baggage that you have to remember to pack up and carry with you. Envelope it. Invoke it. Decide what it means to you whenever you come back to it, and allow that initial definition the space to expand, change or be set down.
Let your word of the year be a compass, not something you’re chained to.
This post is part of a New Year series called The Gathering Time. Click here to read the others as the series builds over January.
My word of this year is "ecosystem", and I really love these prompts because the other ways of connecting with the word haven't really worked for me - like creating a vision board, I just have loads of visions of frogs. So I love this as a way to ingratiate it. Thank you so much!
My words of the year are safe and brave. I love the idea of turning the word into a question.