My 2016 Word

While I was scrolling through Instagram, I chanced upon a picture from Laracasey which got me thinking.

Hmmm. What is my word for 2016?

So I discussed it with my friends, who chose their own beautiful words:

So what’s mine?

Before I got there, I multitasked, as one does, and somehow ended up reading Jillian’s blog post about her 2015. The whole thing is a good read, but here’s my favourite part:

2015 was the year of failure.

I failed a lot in 2015. Oh my gosh.

This year I failed and I failed and I failed some more. Big and small. Over and over. Each failure hits me like a bullet to the chest. I do not take failure well. I take failure the worst you can take it and then I take months and months and monhts to semi recover.

It’s a terrible system and one that I fear will take my whole life to get over.

And through all this, the growing up and the failing and the wishing so, so badly that something, anything would work out, I settled a word for the year. A word to encompass it all.

Try

This year I tried.

So damn hard.

I tried over and over and over again until I felt like I couldn’t try anymore. I tried and I failed and I am up again and I am still trying. I’m still working at it.

I may get up shaking at the slightest breeze, not up with a fury and an “I’LL CONQUER THIS AND SHOW THEM” attitude, but I am up. I’m shaking and up and I’m trying again.

I’m trying anew.

I love her positive spin on her year. Indeed, if you failed, that’s not always a bad thing, because it means you at least tried. And that’s better than not trying at all.

I don’t think I tried very hard in 2015, to be honest.

But it was a great year, a year of milestones – 5 years at work, 10 years of blogging. It was a year when I enjoyed the fruits of my years of labor, when I finally reaped what I sowed.

So there’s my word for 2015: REAP.

And what of 2016?

CHOOSE is the word I choose. 😜

Initially I wanted it to be POSITIVITY. Or FORWARD.

But then I remembered the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The first habit is “Be Proactive” which is explained in the official website as:

Your life doesn’t just “happen.” Whether you know it or not, it is carefully designed by you. The choices, after all, are yours. You choose happiness. You choose sadness. You choose decisiveness. You choose ambivalence. You choose success. You choose failure. You choose courage. You choose fear. Just remember that every moment, every situation, provides a new choice. And in doing so, it gives you a perfect opportunity to do things differently to produce more positive results.

Habit 1: Be Proactive is about taking responsibility for your life. You can’t keep blaming everything on your parents or grandparents. Proactive people recognize that they are “response-able.” They don’t blame genetics, circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. They know they choose their behavior.

Reactive people, on the other hand, are often affected by their physical environment. They find external sources to blame for their behavior. If the weather is good, they feel good. If it isn’t, it affects their attitude and performance, and they blame the weather.

All of these external forces act as stimuli that we respond to. Between the stimulus and the response is your greatest power–you have the freedom to choose your response.

One of the most important things you choose is what you say. Your language is a good indicator of how you see yourself. A proactive person uses proactive language–I can, I will, I prefer, etc. A reactive person uses reactive language–I can’t, I have to, if only. Reactive people believe they are not responsible for what they say and do–they have no choice.

Instead of reacting to or worrying about conditions over which they have little or no control, proactive people focus their time and energy on things they can control.

I need to stop being reactive and start being proactive.

I choose positivity.

The thing about being human is that we tend to fixate on the one thing we don’t have and forget everything else that we do.

I am guilty of that. A lot. I tend to pity myself because I don’t earn as much as or don’t have a love life or don’t get to travel a lot like other people I know.

Then I saw an infographic on if the world were 100 people and it was such an eye-opening article for me. It made me realise just how lucky I really am, and how I’ve been acting like an entitled brat by not realising that!

So now whenever I find something “bad” about my life, I remember that article and choose to focus on the positive.

I choose to move forward.

I tend to dwell on regrets, to be stuck in the past.

Like wishing I had a time machine so I could go back in time to undo certain things, or that I could find a genie and wish to be in my twenties again.

But being stuck in the past means not growing. I need to accept that what has happened is already done and I can’t do anything about it, so I should just focus on what I can do something about, which is the future.

It’s like evolution. If organisms hadn’t evolved to adapt to their changing environment, what would they be like now? Dead, probably. Or terribly antiquated.

Or imagine that you’re still using a flip phone in 2016. How horrible.

I choose success.

I still have a lot of dreams or goals, and I’ve made excuses for why I can’t have them, or just sat back and waited for them to be dropped on my lap.

But life doesn’t work that way.

If you really want something, you need to work hard for it.

So this year, I will do just that – work hard for what I want, and achieve it.

 

Wish me luck! 🍀

How about you, what’s your word for 2016?