Hi all! Welcome to the 2020 version of the SBN Marketing blog! For the first time ever, I opted to choose a “word of the year” for myself. I chose “committed” because it fit my personal and professional selves. I am committed to the goals I’ve set, personally and professionally. I’m committed to being the best version of myself possible, as an individual and as a business owner. And jokingly, I’ve started saying that if all else fails, I could end up getting committed. (I know making light of mental health is not a good thing. But if I don’t add some kind of humor into this for myself, the perfectionist in me is going to make this whole thing miserable.)
If you’re still on the fence about whether to set a word of the year for yourself, or if you can’t decide on what your word should be, here are a few tricks I used to pick my word of the year.
First, I set my goals for the first quarter. (If you’re wondering why just the first quarter and not the whole year, check out this post on goal setting.) I noticed a lot of them were the same as they had been in 2019…and 2018…and so on and so forth. That’s not an entirely bad thing. Some stayed the same because I’d been hitting that goal and I wanted to keep the status quo (like the amount I’d set to contribute to my retirement each month). Some, though, stayed on the list because I hadn’t hit them yet.
Second, I took a long, hard look at the goals I hadn’t been hitting. Why wasn’t I hitting them? What was holding me back? The detailed answers varied, but the basic theme was commitment to the goal/getting distracted from what I really wanted. And that’s how I chose “committed” as my first-ever word of the year.
So here’s my question to you: What’s holding you back from reaching your goal(s)? Don’t give yourself some trite answer. Dig deep and really figure it out for yourself. You don’t have to tell another soul, if you don’t want to. Once you’ve got that answer, let it guide you to your word of the year.
Good luck!
Image by M. Maggs from Pixabay