Your Year of ____
In under 5 minutes, you will have a theme set for your year and a clear WHY for what you are working on achieving.
“The more you say no to the things that don’t matter, the more you can say yes to the things that do. This will let you live and enjoy your life - the life you want.” - Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic
Your Year of _____
You binged holiday leftovers and let loose for a weeklong party leading up to January 1 and now you are ready to take on your Resolutions.
Every year we go on repeat with the resolutions that we set at the start of a New Year.
Get to the gym and start working out
Get on a diet
Clean and tidy up your house
Get your finances in order
The list goes on and we pile on so many goals, often without any clear connection, only to look back on the year having made little progress.
Why is it that so many people go through this same pattern year after year?
This month at Finding Flow we are getting focused and it starts with defining your Word of the Year.
Having set a word of the year for the past four or five years, I can tell you that it works to bring more purpose and meaning to your goals. It’s the beginning of doing great things with your year.
When you start with a clear and narrow vision of the theme of your year and the intention behind it, your goals will flow more naturally from it. Knowing the WHY behind your goals and projects makes it easier to stick to the plan that you have for yourself.
And that’s why finding more flow in your life and accomplishing what you dream of always needs to start with a clear intention.
My word for this year was going to be Focus, but upon further reflection, I changed it to Less after reading Ryan Holiday’s thoughts on the Word of the Year.
Last year I had set Growth as my word. And it was a year of growth for me in a lot of ways. I evolved Flow Spa, started getting into cycling and rediscovered my passion for ultimate frisbee, it was a year that came with a lot of heartache that forced me to grow as well. I lost close friends and had my attention pulled in many directions from new business ventures and projects that I kept saying yes to.
This year is going to be a year of focus but also less in the sense of saying No and minimizing the complexity that I’ve created. To whittle down and perform my best on what matters most. The opportunities that came with growth last year also caused me to spread myself too thin and lose that focus on what really counts.
Less to me is the path to mastery and flow. If I keep trying to simultaneously start multiple businesses, there isn’t enough focus on any one of them to see them flourish. To try to uphold the skills of many different sports at once is to miss out on the nuances of greatness and flow that come from peak performance. And without less care for the opinions of others, creativity gets stifled by consumption.
We will be continuing to focus on what you want to achieve this year and the why behind it next week with a postcard from your future self.
So for now, what is your word of the year going to be?
Focus is the ultimate weapon in the war on time. While time is trying to get in your face, waving its arms and setting off alarms to remind you how late you are, focus takes you to that place where you have no idea how much time has passed, and you don’t care. - Tim Grover, Winning
Take Action
Start a new page in your journal or open up your notetaking app and pin a note with your word of the year to the top page.
If you struggle to come up with a clear word for yourself, you can first write a list of mentors and people who inspire you and list out the values or words you think define them. You can then pick a word that feels right from this list to use as your word.
Any goals or projects you take on this year should be written on this page below this word of the year. Question whether it’s in alignment each time you say yes to something.
Recommended Resources
Tribe of Mentors - a great book to get lots of ideas on words from world-class performers - the Gigantic Billboard question in particular is helpful.
Bullet Journal - Bullet Journaling helps me to focus on LESS in doing only the most important tasks. While you don’t need to get a dot-grid notebook, I do recommend you get a paper notebook to follow along in the work we will be doing this year in Finding Flow. This is the official Bullet Journal which includes some unique pages and a quick-start guide if you’re new to Bullet Journaling but any dot-grid notebook works the same.