I didn’t know this was a thing, but over the years I’ve met many successful, goal oriented friends and business leaders who choose a word or theme of the year, and for the past several years I’ve done it myself. It helps to keep a focus for the year. It could be an overarching priority, an intention for a goal, or a spirit with which to make decisions, or behave in general.
I first encountered this theme or word of the year in my early business career working for a woman (younger than I) who had just started her own company. She’d attended Wellesley College and Oxford University, and presented her business plan for the company to a professor at Stanford University who told her the plan was flawed and wouldn’t work. She did it anyway and built a great company that helped working families with back up child care. It quickly grew from the East coast to the West coast, and eventually was bought out by the number one corporate child care company in the country. I believe her success was due in part to creating a culture, which included a theme each year that provided a specific overarching operational focus. One year was a focus on the teachers, one was on the children, one was on the client. Of course all constituents were important, but somehow having the “year of” theme’s helped us all speak the same language and reach specific targeted goals around those themes. Brilliant!
This year, I decided that 2019 would be the year of being heart centered. I’ve been practicing being in the moment and purposeful, but being heart centered seemed to go one step beyond. I had to think about what it really meant to be heart centered. The intention was to listen to my heart, my intuition, and to try to act upon what my heart told me to do. With this focus I’ve been even more present to people in my life and to myself too.
How about you? Do you have a theme or word of the year? What do you think of this idea for achievement of a goal?