Towards the end of last year I starting thinking about my word for the coming year. I’ve seen posts on this before and recently I even came across the hashtag #oneword. Essentially, you choose a word that will guide your actions over the coming 12 months.
Last year, I chose ‘build’ as my word which you can read about here. I felt I had mixed results with what I wanted to achieve last year so initially my word for this year was going to be ‘habit’. But on reflection, habits don’t just happen, I really need to develop the behaviours that become habits.
So my word for 2017 is: Discipline
In order to build good habits in learning and in life, you need to have discipline. Many of the goals I had last year, are still relevant. I want to further explore and grow and keep learning but sometimes I get caught up doing the things that I’m comfortable with. This year I want to be more disciplined in my approach – to make time for learning new things, reflecting, blogging, sharing and hopefully creating opportunities. I also want to be more disciplined with my own health and well-being (yes I know, everyone says that!).
I like the beginning of a new year, it’s a fresh start and full of possibilities. So what’s your word for the year?
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Comments
2 responses to “My Word for 2017”
Hi Matt, with the start of a new year I’ve been working on this too. I think the most challenging thing is wanting to do too much across too many areas of your life – being overambitious, especially at the start of the year and then losing motivation because it all gets too hard.
Discipline is something I considered too. What I’ve been finding really helpful is to start small and work on the small things – the daily routines and rituals that make up the fabric of your life – and look for opportunities to weave your goals into these daily routines. But not everything – just focus on one or two things that you think will make the biggest impact. For me, it’s been the morning routine – making adjustments to carve out daily time in the morning for me to do a few minutes of mindfulness practice, go for a short run, and then spend about 30 mins working on a personal goal – something I care about. If I only do this thing in the morning I’ve achieved what I wanted to. But it’s essentially a process of consciously stripping back and reducing the amount of things you want to do and just focusing on the important things – and focusing on one main thing / goal at a time. It’s actually a bit difficult to verbalise! Leo Babauta (https://zenhabits.net/) is a good reference – he advocates a simple, less is more type approach to life that I’ve found very helpful and aligned with where I am at currently.
Thanks Tanya, insightful as always 🙂
I’m guilty of trying to do too much and then I tend to stick to things that I’m comfortable with while others fall by the wayside. I really want to develop a better routine and you’re right, it’s about carving out some time to work on the things that will have an impact. Thanks also for the link, I’ll check it out 🙂