Drum roll please! Finally, I have my Word of the Year for the new year.
Here we go. Ta-da!!!!
It’s “Limitless.”
Now, I don't want you to think I randomly picked this because..."It kinda sounded good."
Wrong!
I've stewed my brain over this for a few weeks. Then I observed my entire process.
The good news is you don't have to stew your brain like I did to come up with ideas for your word of the year. What you get here is the cleaned-up, efficient version of it so that you don’t waste any time.
See, I always think of you.
By the way, we'll come back to my new word of the year a little later to uncover my thinking process after we go over the why & the how so that you can get started.
Sound good?
First, we're diving into why this is NOT some kind of cute thing to do to avoid doing real work in your business.
This is real work with a real purpose.
So, I hope you take this seriously if you have big plans for your business in the new year.
Hey! I’m Maiko.
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What Role Does "Word of the Year" Serve to Creating Results or Achieving Your Goals?
There are 5 major ways defining a word of the year can help you commit to your massive business goals and allow you space to reflect upon the year you’ve had working towards those goals.
1. Encouragement/Discouragement
2. Not 'what' but state of mind
3. Foundation for easy decision making
4. Enhance your personal life
5. Provides intentionality in everyday life & provides new insights
Keep this list handy because it will act as a checklist when you search for one. More on that later.
Here's how it works.
My word of the year for this year was "refinement." I felt my tank was full - both energy & ideas - and I wanted to focus on working with what I already had instead of going out to try new things.
The funny thing about this is that I’m not 100% immune to “shiny object syndrome.” During the course of this year, there were times when I had entertained some new ideas. Any time I thought of jumping on new business activities like creating a brand-new program, signing up for a new tool or starting a new social media platform, I would ask myself a question.
The question I wired myself to ask was, "Is this part of refinement?" Simply asking this helped me put my mind in the right mental space.
If the answer was no, I quickly moved on before I could even attach any meanings or feelings to it.
My word of the year acted as a discouragement.
As I listed above, your personal word of the year doesn’t just have to act as discouragement. It can also act as encouragement when needed. I’m sure you can all relate to the times when you just weren’t motivated or were having a hard time bouncing back from some setbacks and failed attempts.
In this case, you can think of your word of the year to remind yourself of your why.
In order for me to achieve a "refined" state of mind, it also meant I had to stick with what I already had to improve upon them. This requires patience as well as discipline that I lack at times.
Once again, that's where my word of the year, "refinement," comes in. When I felt like I was getting impatient about what I wanted to achieve, I reminded myself that this year was all about “refinement” and that I had to stick with what I set out to do.
We’ll go over how to pick the most effective word of the year for yourself in a few. But let me just say that this is why you’ll want to search for the word that represents “state of mind” over simply “what you want to achieve.”
While you create ambitious goals for your business, you are going to search for a word that supports your goals. In other words, they are aligned and complementary to each other.
As you can imagine, this makes any type of decision making in your business so much easier. This is the third role your word of the year is going to serve. Decision fatigue is the enemy of all entrepreneurs. We want to reduce the number of decisions we make in our daily lives.
Your word of the year will tell you whether to say yes or no to things that come up throughout the year. Very easily.
Another byproduct of having your word of the year in place is that it will also enhance your life in general. Because you will be so accustomed to think about your word of the year, you will also start assessing your personal life through your word of the year.
For example, I became keener on organizing things in my life. It was simply because my word of the year influenced me beyond my business life.
“Can I make this better?”
“Can I make this more accessible?”
“Can I make this easier?”
These are the questions I asked more often than any other years in the past.
Last but not least, it will provide more intentionality in your life. Anything you do, hear and learn, you will use your word of the year as a filter to form your own thinking. It pushes you to think a few levels deeper. As a result, you will gain new perspectives.
Ultimately, your word of the year will set the tone/theme for the entire year.
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How to Go About Choosing Your Perfect “Word of the Year”
The process is very simple. 3 steps to be exact. But what is more important is what kind of questions you want to ask yourself while you are in this process.
Step #1: Brain Dump – No surprises here. You have to start from a blank canvas.
Step #2: Cut down your brainstormed words to a Top 3 to 5
Step #3: Make the final decision
Don’t let the simplicity fool you. Simple doesn’t mean easy, as I always say. So, let’s go over the steps together.
Step #1: Brain Dump - Give all the Words that Come to Your Mind a Chance to be Considered.
No judgement here. Not to mention there's no right or wrong answer for this exercise.
Just open yourself up & trust your gut instincts. There's a good reason some words are popping up in your head. The key is for you to ask yourself why you have gravitated towards them.
Think of it as if you are hosting an audition or a casting call. Let them all come in & participate so that you can grill them. (Well, that’s basically what happens in auditions, right?)
There’s no need to sit down and try to come up with all the words. Instead, I recommend you think about them on and off throughout the day, the week, the month. You may want to jot them down or record them on your phone.
Here are the words that came to my mind:
Prolific
Ease
Nourish
Limitless
Bountiful
Evergreen
Flourish
Cultivate
Impact
Velocity
Ignite
Nurture
Effortless
Grace
Breakthrough
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Should your word of the year be a noun, verb or adjective?
My answer would be, “It doesn’t matter.” You can see that from my list. It’s OK to have your own preference where you would want it to be a noun, for example. Or, you may consider a more versatile one that covers more than 2, such as a word “flow.” It’s a noun and a verb.
What matters the most is that you can repeat the word in your head over & over again with ease.
Step #2: Cut Down on Short-Sighted Words.
In the beginning of this post, I shared 5 ways your word of the year will support your effort to achieve massive business goals. You are going to use them as a checklist. For your convenience, I’m listing them again here:
1. Encouragement/Discouragement
2. Not 'what' but state of mind
3. Foundation for easy decision making
4. Enhance your personal life
5. Provides intentionality in everyday life & provides new insights
You will look at each word and put them through these 5 purposes:
“Can this act as a form of discouragement/encouragement? And aspirational?”
“Does this describe a state of mind that will help me achieve my goals?”
“Can this help me make decisions easier?”
“Does this also enhance my personal life?”
“Can this help me look at things differently?”
Right there and then, you can cross off the short-sighted ones fairly quickly, right?
You want a word that fuels your desire and commitment to achieve the goals that you are about to set. It is also the ultimate end result you are aiming for.
Let me bring back my word of the year, “refinement” again. My goals for this year were to:
Upgrade my content
Improve my existing offers
Refine my messaging
Contribute to other people’s platforms (podcast appearances / guest posts)
See, you don’t see something like, “starting a podcast” or “get myself certified for XYZ” because these activities are not aligned with “refinement.”
Step #3: Make the Final Decision
“There is no way I can pick just one!”
If you are saying this to yourself, you aren’t alone. It’s not easy. A couple years back, I had 3. But I encourage you to cut down to just one because this will force you to think deeply about how you are going to design your year.
I have 2 secrets to share with you that will help you commit to just one.
First secret is starting early. OK, it’s not sexy, but I’m glad I did. I knew I was going to struggle picking one, I started with the process in late August. What I liked about this was that there was no pressure in the beginning. I was at Step #1 for a good 2 months.
The second secret is to take a look at the list from Step #1 and try “grouping” them if you can. Depending on how you come up with possible words, you may or may not be able to do this.
I’m going to use my list as an example. This was not at all intentional, but by looking at the entire list, I saw 3 different groups.
1. Words that describe “force” – Breakthrough, limitless, velocity, ignite, impact.
2. Words that describe “abundance” – Prolific, bountiful, flourish, cultivate, evergreen.
3. Words that describe “calmness” or “self care” – Nurture, ease, grace, effortless.
Once grouped, you can go over the 5 purposes again to see which group is the most important in helping you achieve your goals. This way, you can speed up the process.
“But these all seem important.”
I get it. But that’s when you want to revert back to your goals for the new year. For me, it all came down to 2 words: “prolific” and “limitless.”
Do you want to know how I made my decision to choose “limitless” over “prolific”?
Why My Word of the Year is “Limitless”
During the selection process, I was being strategic & logical about which direction I wanted to go with my business. While I was able to refine many things that I originally set out to do this year, I started to think about what would be the natural step to take after this.
The next step for me was to “do more of what’s been working.” That’s the reason “prolific” made through the final round. Being a prolific content provider under the refined structure, for example, would be something that I was keen on.
The idea was to be productive without killing myself. But prolific only means producing more stuff or being fruitful. I had to stop and think about this for a while because, for what we know, this can also set a tone that “I need to be more productive by doing more and working longer & harder.”
That is the path to burnout. Been there & done that, and I have no plans of going back.
“Limitless,” on the other hand, provides more room with its meaning.
To me, limitless is a reminder to remove limited beliefs that I am not even aware of having. To be clear, I don’t want the word to represent limitlessly working long hours. On the contrary, it’s all about expanding my mind to think, “What if this is possible for no particular reason? Can I do this without needing a proof?”
Making this way of thinking a routine by choosing my word of the year to be “limitless,” I should become naturally prolific while maintaining calmness.
See this? It all ties together. Beautifully.
Do you remember I mentioned earlier that this is serious business with a real purpose?
This last push when it came down to questioning whether or not “prolific” should be my word of the year wasn’t easy to pull off. You must be willing to ask questions that push your (no pun intended…) limit.
To be honest, I was 99% sold on the word “prolific.” It’s aspirational and something I wanted to achieve. But there was this nagging thought in the back of my mind that I couldn’t pinpoint in the beginning. So, I had to investigate.
What I did instead was to peel just one more layer by asking, “What’s required to be prolific without killing myself?”
Turned out being “prolific” really wasn’t a state of mind. Limitless was the state of mind I wanted to be in.
So, What’s Next? Your Turn, Of Course!
If you read this far, my guess is that you are convinced and pumped about coming up with your own perfect “word of the year.” Once you have your word of the year chosen, you can check out this blog post where I explore using your word of the year to experience a breakthrough in any circumstance.
Trust me, this is going to be worth spending your time on. I’m looking forward to hearing about your experience!
