While a word of the year is not really necessary, it can be a good way to give yourself clarity, focus, and intention for the months ahead; especially if you have specific goals and projects you want to accomplish. The good news is that it can narrow your focus so that you can create goals and plans that you can actually accomplish. The bad news is that it can illuminate your short-comings when compared to your ideal self.
We have two options when that happens. We can ignore those short-comings, pretending like they don’t exist and go on with our lives, pretending that we are our best selves; or we can zero in on those short-comings and devise a plan to improve them. Which brings us right back to the word of the year.
Whether you choose to select a word of the year should depend on several factors.
Reasons to:
It can help you get to know yourself better
Choosing your Word of the Year should not be a flippant decision. Filtering through the millions of options and picking the one word that really resonates with you usually takes time. Ruminating on who you are and who you want to become usually requires purposeful thought free from distractions. Again, this might be a little scary, but if you approach it with the idea of improving on yourself and envisioning the person you can grow to be, it can also be exciting. Ideally, you would start this process toward the end of the previous year so you are ready to hit the ground running come January first.
Occasionally, however, your word might hit you out of the blue. That was my case this year. In December of 2023, I was not planning on selecting a word for 2024, but in the middle of February, a word hit me out of the blue and I connected with it so profoundly that I instinctively felt like it was my word of the year. I immediately created a word of the year spread in my bullet journal and the goals that will be listed there throughout the year will be geared toward that word. Even though I did not take a lot of time to select my word, I feel like using it is still helping me get to know myself better. Just knowing that this word is a goal makes me focus in on how I want to accomplish that.
It Can Help You Focus
If you are like me, you may have too many ideas, goals, dreams, and plans running around in your head. They all seem important, and it is hard to sometimes pick just a few things to focus on. The result, in my case at least, is that focusing on everything meant that I accomplished nothing. Year after year, after year. Choosing a word might help eliminate, or at least postpone, some of those distractions.
Typically, when selecting one word that will become the focus of the year, that word naturally falls in line with your long-term goals, your values, and your expectations of the year.
Selecting short-term goals that align with your word means that those projects will also naturally line up with your long term goals and your values. Not a bad way to start the year.
It Can Help You Filter Out The Rest
Just like your word can help you zero in on your goals, it can also shine a light on plans and projects that felt so important a week ago but don’t contribute to your long-term goals or who you want to be. They might not be bad goals, but they might still be a draw-back or even just a distraction from your big picture goal.
This doesn’t mean that every single goal or plan you choose for yourself has to be serious or life-changing. Of course not. We still need leisure time and fun. We just need to think about how those fit into our lives. One goal might be to complete high scores in a video game that has ten parts to its’ series. This isn’t necessarily a bad goal, but if it distracts you from your big picture goals, it might need to drop down the priority list.
Reasons not to:
FOMO
All my life I have had a serious fear of missing out. If a pen came four of different colors, each sold separately, I needed all four. Making decisions like that has always been hard for me. Choosing. Either/or. I always wanted “And”. While this seems like a great way to live life, it isn’t really practical. First, it means that extra clutter invades your personal space. Two, it means that extra expenses invade your budget. Third, making choices like that is necessary to personal growth, including increasing executive function.
So, when everyone was choosing a word of the year, I did too. The problem was that I was selecting words that sounded good, maybe they were even things that I really needed to implement into my life, but I never focused on them. The excitement and infatuation waned and I would forget to turn to that spread in my journal. By July, I would often forget that I had selected a word all together.
Just because everyone else is doing it.
You might think that the idea of doing something just because everyone else is doing it and FOMO are the same thing, but I disagree. They are very similar, but not always the same. With FOMO, there is often a drive, an anxiety, over the idea of missing the opportunity. However, doing something just because everyone else is doing it might not have any emotion behind it at all. We might just think that it’s what we are supposed to do so we do it.
Have you ever gone down the TikTok rabbit hole and watched videos of people, particularly young girls, filling out what they are calling bullet journals for the day? After the sixth video, you might realize that all of them set up their videos exactly the same way, with the same ASMR sounds, their journals are set up exactly the same way, and they are tracking exactly the same things. Why? Do all of the care about how many hours they slept? How many pages they read? How much water they drank? What are they doing with that information? What is the point if it’s not personal?
In the same vein, if you think you need a word of the year just because other people do it, that word and the process of choosing it will not benefit you.
How to select your word
So, you’ve gotten this far and you think a word of the year might be for you? What now? Exactly HOW do we decide what our word will be?
You could flip open a dictionary, close your eyes, slide your finger around the page, stop, and choose whichever word you land on, but it might be difficult to make words like “dolphin” or “discouragement” help you reach your goals for the year.
You might already have a strong connection to a word and decide to just go with that. Okay, that’s great! Now you just have to decide why that’s your word, how it fits into your long-term plan, and how it will help you accomplish those goals.
If you don’t have a word that is already resonating with you, take a bit of time to find it. If you already have clear goals, review those and see what direction they lead you. Is your word a noun? Who you want to be? Teacher, chef, mom? Is it an adjective? Wealthy, healthy, courageous? Is it a verb? Simplify, clarify, grow?
If your goals aren’t clear, that might be where you need to start. Do you want to move? Get a degree? Get married, start a family, or change careers? What needs to happen before you can do that? What projects and plans need to be put in place? What dreams do you need to give up? Ouch, that’s tougher. Once you know that, what can you do this year? What is your focus? That’s might be your word.
My word and why I chose it.
Like I said earlier, I wasn’t planning on choosing a word this year, it just hit me like a ton of bricks. What happened? I saw a sticker. Yup. A sticker. And guess what? It didn’t have any words. It wasn’t one of those inspirational vinyl stickers that are so popular right now. It wasn’t clever or even funny. It was just a sticker of a bunch of flowers on someone else’s word of the year page.
I looked at those flowers and thought, I want to bloom. And BAM! There it was. Bloom. But what does that word actually mean and what did it mean to me? Were they the same thing? I looked it up in the Oxford dictionary, and in my case, they were. Of course, there were the standard definitions regarding flowers, there was a reference to a youthful complexion, and, oddly enough, the word refers to the grayish-white appearance on chocolate caused by cocoa butter rising to the surface. I love chocolate, but that’s beside the point.
What really resonated with me was “the state or period of greatest beauty, freshness, or vigor”, and “come into or be in full beauty or health; flourish.” Flourish. I want to flourish and be in full beauty and health. I want my goals and plans to bloom- to accomplish them. I want them to be productive. Shout out to @JashiiCorrin- since her page was the inspiration for my word of the year, I chose to set my page up the same way she did.
With the things I am putting into place this year, I believe maybe I can start to bloom this year. I am far from perfect (much to my dismay), but I am feeling confident that, this year, I am going to work toward accomplishing my goals instead of just writing them all down. I am taking you on this journey with me and I can’t wait to share what happens in the year 2024.
I’m curious. Do you have a word of the year? Why? Why not? What is it?