What’s Your Word (or Two) For This Year

If you’ve been reading the Radiantly Living Blog for at least a year, you know when the New Year rolls around, I’m about Evolutions, Not Resolutions.

However….

A New Year’s practice that I have adopted is picking a word or two to focus on for the year. This is what I would call a healthier, more practical approach to New Year’s resolutions. You pick an area in your life that you want to strengthen, improve upon, or just put more attention on in the coming year.

So instead of saying, “Okay, I will lose those extra 10 pounds this year,” and then in mid-January, finding yourself surrendering to a container of Chubby Hubby, you have the focus of Better Eating or Health as you begin the New Year. If the focus is maintained then perhaps the result is indeed losing 10 pounds.

A year that has a theme to it seems like a gentler, more functional way to achieve goals, rather than locking yourself into the “I wills” and “I wonts.” The practice lends itself more to evolving into who you want to be by creating more lasting change through a year’s worth of focused attention on it.

How might this work for something that’s disability-specific? Think about something related to your disability (or that of a loved one) that is a struggle or creating a barrier. Instead of focusing on the problem, what is the experience you’re looking for if the problem were to be “fixed”?

As an example, many people with disabilities are looking for employment. People often feel if they were employed, they would feel more confident. Using the “word of the year” theme, a person in this situation may want to pick Confidence as her word for this year. By focusing on Confidence, rather than “this will be the year I get a job,” chances are she will grow more self-assured, which could very well result in more job opportunities for her.

See how it works? So are you in with me? Do you have a word or two?