So, for a woman who does performance improvement for a living, reads self-help books for fun, and writes about self-improvement because she can't NOT do it, New Year's is IT. It's the time. The best time.
(To be truthful, I have also set Valentine's Resolutions, Easter Intentions, Memorial Day Meanings, et cetera, because I can find a way to start over whatever time of year it happens to be. But this is New Year's...)
So we're obviously a few days in. As you saw in my last post, resolutions can be frustrating because if you don't achieve that exact outcome, it's easy to feel like you've failed, even if other valuable lessons were learned on the journey. This was my conclusion after reading 1 billion articles and snippets about other wayfinders picking their Word of the Year. I did the same last year, and I think it was helpful to focus.
So after advice from Martha Beck, Anna Kunnecke, Danielle LaPorte and somehow I found Christine Kane as well, the advice was to focus on an adjective, on what you wanted to be as opposed to do, and a whole tool.
I'd had a discussion with a friend about a month ago about how annoying it was to read misuse of the word "awe". Honestly, I don't know if this is a grammar rule, or just our own issues with phonetics, but I'd always thought that "aw" was the noise you made when there was an adorable kitten present, and "awe" was a sense of wonder. Therefore, it's not wrong to write "Awe!" under a picture of a cute baby, but it's not exactly correct either.
(Sidebar: My cat is named Mr. Awesome partially because I was rambling aloud to a co-worker about this cat I'd seen on Petfinder named Sam and I was going to adopt him and it was going to be awesome because "Aw, Sam!". On my 3rd attempt to adopt this cat, it actually worked. So his name is Mr. Sam Awesome.)
So, I'd picked those words because they were sounds that encompassed what I wanted to be this year. I wanted to be empathetic and compassionate as well as restore a sense of wonder in the world. and as even the Foodist, Daria Pinto Rose says, I wanted life to be awesome.
But then I had my crisis of faith. What if it wasn't the right word? Also, isn't it breaking the rules to have 2 words? Even if one of them is more of a sound?
Enter BFF Lindsey. We don't always exchange Christmas presents but for whatever reason, this year we'd both found the perfect thing for each other. Of course, we don't always exchange them right on Christmas. So she brought it for me to the New Year's Party we were both attending. And it cemented my choice for Word of the Year, because it's this coffee mug:
So, here's the ritual: drink my coffee in the Captain Awesome mug. At the end of the day, assess what was Aw / Awe / Awesome during the day (I'm considering doing an Awesome journal for a while. Maybe the month of March, which is not always evident in awesomeness.) And stand back in awe...
(To be truthful, I have also set Valentine's Resolutions, Easter Intentions, Memorial Day Meanings, et cetera, because I can find a way to start over whatever time of year it happens to be. But this is New Year's...)
So we're obviously a few days in. As you saw in my last post, resolutions can be frustrating because if you don't achieve that exact outcome, it's easy to feel like you've failed, even if other valuable lessons were learned on the journey. This was my conclusion after reading 1 billion articles and snippets about other wayfinders picking their Word of the Year. I did the same last year, and I think it was helpful to focus.
So after advice from Martha Beck, Anna Kunnecke, Danielle LaPorte and somehow I found Christine Kane as well, the advice was to focus on an adjective, on what you wanted to be as opposed to do, and a whole tool.
I'd had a discussion with a friend about a month ago about how annoying it was to read misuse of the word "awe". Honestly, I don't know if this is a grammar rule, or just our own issues with phonetics, but I'd always thought that "aw" was the noise you made when there was an adorable kitten present, and "awe" was a sense of wonder. Therefore, it's not wrong to write "Awe!" under a picture of a cute baby, but it's not exactly correct either.
(Sidebar: My cat is named Mr. Awesome partially because I was rambling aloud to a co-worker about this cat I'd seen on Petfinder named Sam and I was going to adopt him and it was going to be awesome because "Aw, Sam!". On my 3rd attempt to adopt this cat, it actually worked. So his name is Mr. Sam Awesome.)
 |
| Cat, on some hats. It's Mr. Sam Awesome! |
So, I'd picked those words because they were sounds that encompassed what I wanted to be this year. I wanted to be empathetic and compassionate as well as restore a sense of wonder in the world. and as even the Foodist, Daria Pinto Rose says, I wanted life to be awesome.
But then I had my crisis of faith. What if it wasn't the right word? Also, isn't it breaking the rules to have 2 words? Even if one of them is more of a sound?
Enter BFF Lindsey. We don't always exchange Christmas presents but for whatever reason, this year we'd both found the perfect thing for each other. Of course, we don't always exchange them right on Christmas. So she brought it for me to the New Year's Party we were both attending. And it cemented my choice for Word of the Year, because it's this coffee mug:
So, here's the ritual: drink my coffee in the Captain Awesome mug. At the end of the day, assess what was Aw / Awe / Awesome during the day (I'm considering doing an Awesome journal for a while. Maybe the month of March, which is not always evident in awesomeness.) And stand back in awe...
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