Episode 119: My ONE Word for the Year--and Why You Should Have One Too
In this episode I want to talk about one of the best things you can do for yourself every end/start of a year to call in massive transformations.
It’s something that’s helped me just as much as end of year reflections or new year goal setting.
And it pertains to my lifestyle overall, not just business performance or personal growth.
And that’s selecting a single word, or theme, for what I want to focus on for the year.
In this episode I share:
-Why I made this a habit
-My specific words for 2022, 2023, and 2024
-The transformations and shifts that were made in each of those years related to the guidance from my word
-My different journeys of self care, healing from my childhood, leadership, finance and business expansion
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Hey, small business heroes, welcome back to the small business PR podcast, where we make PR and marketing accessible for everyday small business heroes like you, because everyone deserves to be seen, heard, and valued now at the time of recording this, we are getting into Q4, the last few days of the year, and it brings so many fields so many times for reflection, you know, And just all the things, right?
That's why today I wanted to record an episode for you to listen to at the beginning or end of every year. And it's really about having a word or theme for the year. Now this concept is of course not new. I'm sure you've been to those friends giving parties or even holiday parties where you do exercises to read the recap that year and call in what.
You are hoping to achieve in the next year. So I will just quickly tell you about the previous two years that I've had in terms of the themes and the word that I pick and then reveal to you what my word is for this year, 2024. Let's back up a little bit. Why [00:01:00] do I decide to pick a word for the year?
Right? Why one word? Well, I find that the days are long, but the years are short and to organize my year with kind of a thematic focus with. Everything that I'm doing and distilling it down to one word can really set the tone for how I want the year to look. And it doesn't mean that there are not other priorities and other things that I'm doing.
It just means that this one word, which is so easy and so simple to remember, because anyone can remember one word. It really guides me as I'm in those difficult moments, as I'm facing challenges, or maybe when I'm feeling joy and love. What does it all come down to? Right? So let's go back two years before in 2022, as you know, January of 2022, I had the most major surgery I've ever had in my life, my first surgery, which was to remove a 13 centimeter fibroid in my uterus.
Now that started a whole self care journey where I. Really started to understand my body, how I was mistreating it, how my generational and childhood traumas played into hijacking my nervous system and [00:02:00] all the things. So my year 2022 was really defined by seeing this huge growth, this tumor in my uterus, which is kind of the chakra that controls my relationship.
With money and it also is the womb. So it is a lot of symbolic significance with my relationship with my mother, which if you know about this podcast is something that I have really tried to work on. So my word for 2022 was growth, growth in all the areas. So when I got the tumor taken out of me, I saw what stuck energy, what generational trauma looked like in a physical form.
And I thought to myself, wow, that is the generational trauma that my grandmother passed on to my mother that passed on to me. And there's so much research about how, like with epigenetics, like how trauma and stuck and scarcity mindsets get passed on because it actually is encoded in your DNA. And so when my mother.
grew up in communist China. Like her first job was like sewing shoes in a factory. Right. And her mom grew up in an even worse time of poverty where there was like food rations, [00:03:00] literally like little stamps that you get where one family was allowed a tiny little bit of rice and grains. So growing up in that poverty, which, you know, in Asia is not very many generations removed.
Like my mom grew up like that. For me to be able to have the life I do in a developed country, having born in the US just means that I had to do so much more work to unravel and untether my identity with scarcity. Because if you look at someone who was third or fourth or fifth generation in the US, a country that has enjoyed.
Wealth and abundance for a much longer time than a country like China, right? Their relationship to safety, to abundance, to security is a little bit different. And I learned this through my husband who is Italian and not to say that they don't have their problems, right? But they're far less removed from that kind of poverty where there was literally no electricity, water, or food than my mom and her generation.
So I had to do the work of this one lifetime to cross maybe three or 400 years of development that another country had. And that's why the work was so important for me. And that's why, to [00:04:00] me, I had such a difficult relationship with my mother and which to me was manifested by this growth that grew rapidly in my uterus, in my womb, because I've always had very difficult times relating to my mother.
I always felt like she didn't understand me and vice versa. And everything was just so different. I didn't feel I was of her flesh because not only was she growing up in communist China, like she. It comes from a completely different culture than me, a different generation. And we just had oceans of separateness.
And I actually did the math. I only spent like eight years of my entire life living with her because of various circumstances. And this is something that I also talk about in a podcast. If you go to episode number 113, that's GloriaCiaoPR. com slash 113. I really go deep into my generational trauma and how I've been working on it.
So. Word for 2022 is growth. It started off with me removing the growth, which is a tumor for my uterus, understanding that everything is psychosomatic, that everything's energy and that your body actually knows and is aware of this energy. And it does manifest in physical [00:05:00] form, whether it's illness or health.
And that led me to realize that I had a lot. A lot to do in terms of my personal growth, my relationship with money, how that scarcity rippled into how I led, how I micromanaged that resulted in people leaving my team that resulted in me facing burnout because not only was I hiring a lot of people, I was doing all the work by myself.
And that came down to my inability to lead because I was almost crippled by my narratives that I had stuck in my head. Things like I am how much money I make, or if the more money I make, the more valuable I am. As a human being, right? All of these things that were passed on to me from my mother and her mother.
So that whole year of 2022 was for me to grow in elevating and redefining my definition with safety, with money, with security, because there was not enough money in the world that would ever have made me feel secure. I could have made a million dollars and I didn't feel secure. I actually did my first six figure launch that year, right after my surgery, giving myself no time to rest.
I became [00:06:00] physically and mentally burnt out right afterwards because, duh, I was doing this launch like wearing bandages. And I realized that it wasn't the amount of money that made me happy. I had to really do the inner work to figure out why is it that I don't feel safe? What is it about my childhood narratives that kept me that way?
And how can I really rewire that root of the problem where I feel safe regardless of how much money I make? That was the work that I did. So I started hiring coaches from Money Mindset Coaches. To business coaches, to speaking with my peers about that and realizing that money is no longer the goal for me, right?
It's about feeling aligned and doing what I'm called to do and having enough room and space to create and cultivate my ideas outside of just making money. Because I realized that I have made all the money progress that I made and I still didn't feel safe. In fact, I felt the opposite. I felt burnt out and quite awful and the energy just wasn't right on my team because I wasn't that visionary leader.
So 2022 was growth, which leads me to 2023. My word for this year, time of recording this, we're in December of [00:07:00] 2023. My word for this year was spaciousness. And here's why. Growing up, I always had this go, go, go mentality. I was super solution oriented. Anytime there was a problem, I had 20 different ways to solve it.
So I lived in that action mode where I did not take any time. I was always thinking about what is the right solution. So that made me and my nervous system always fired up, right? I was constantly running on adrenaline, and I honestly think that's why I had the fibroid grow so rapidly in my uterus is because I, my nervous system was just unbalanced.
I had ADHD tendencies. I was never really present, always hopping from one thing to the next. That hustle, that nonstop grind for more launches, more activities, filling my calendar to the brim where I had no time to even connect with myself to understand what I wanted, to understand what self care looks like, and to understand that I am worthy of just doing nothing, which is a very profound thing because I think in Western cultures.
And in like developed [00:08:00] cultures, we really value busyness, but I do think that there is a whole mental health and wellness movement to challenge that because we realize that busyness and doing more is really not the solution. And having overcome burnt out in 2022, my word for 2023 was spaciousness. How can I create space in my day?
How can I feel a sense of spaciousness where I am just doing nothing? I talk a lot about this with my peers, which is we all need CEO time, which is thinking time, time to read a book, time to reflect where you're not going, going, going, launching, emailing, executing, but you're really reflecting and figuring out.
Is this business model for me is what I'm doing. All the marketing activities aligned with what I want to create. Am I having enough room and spaciousness in my day to fully create? Because what are we as entrepreneurs? If we are not creatives, right? I think we are all born to create. I think we have unlimited potential to create, but after a while in business, you get so caught up doing the things and managing and reporting and implementing and posting [00:09:00] that you forget to create.
You're all of a sudden a hamster on a hamster wheel. Feeding this machine, whether it's followers or content and it just never gets satiated. So my goal for this year was spaciousness and that really relates to my journey with self care. Can I feel good where I have an evening with nothing planned? Can I feel good where I just decide I don't want to take any more meetings today.
I want to just take a bath and watch a show on Netflix. And I was able to do that. My sense of guilt from doing that became less and less and I'm leaning more into that and I can happily report that I did good on my promise. I think I didn't do as well as I could have, right? The journey never ends, but I did feel more spacious this year.
Now I am someone, as you can tell, I talk fast, I think fast. I'm a New Yorker. I'm walking fast. I am always on the go, but having that word spaciousness has allowed me to step into leadership where I am not super micromanaging everyone anymore and breathing down their neck. Why didn't you just do what happened?
Like what's going on? Because nobody wants to [00:10:00] work for someone like that. I was able to step back and really enjoy investing in that person, whether it's hosting team retreats, which we will host to this year. Investing in their wellness, sitting with them to learn about their families, because I promise you, you will not grow as a business leader.
You will not be able to scale. If you're constantly focused on the doing, you have to be focused on the being a lot of entrepreneurs say you have to be to have, you have to embody that frequency to have that lifestyle. Now, people don't work for just money. I've hired people for a lot of money, and I've also hired people for the cheap.
And what keeps them there is my ability to really hold for their vision, my ability to allow them to understand what the vision is, even if it means costing a sale. And so me building in spaciousness has allowed me to say no to just doing things for the sale, which in turn have made my company and my teammates understand that my vision is far greater than just what's the very shiny thing ahead of me.
Right. So that is spaciousness. Now. I could have done a couple of things [00:11:00] a little bit better. I will say that we had a very heavy period in Q4. The tides are changing for marketing. I think what used to work is not working anymore. The golden eight days of the gold rush for online courses and programs are not the same anymore.
So that caused us to reflect on a lot of the things and realize like we really just need to adapt and innovate and just have higher levels of thinking in 2024. Because as you know, what got you here won't get you there. Now this is a painful realization. It's not one that I like because it means more work, more reflection and more things, but you know, everything evolves and why shouldn't our business, right?
So I am just trying to take in cues from the universe. And as I was recording this, I wanted to have a word for this year so I could reveal it. And after sitting with myself and listening to the universe. Sending me different synchronicity messages, which is repeated patterns that I'm picking up on is I really think the universe wants this year for me to be the year of discipline.
So discipline is the word I'm having. I'm calling forward to cultivate more of, and this is why it's so interesting because [00:12:00] if you know me, you know, then I love novelty. I am a curious person. I have this unsatiable desire for curiosity that has really helped me in many ways. It's allowed me to connect deeply with people.
It's allowed me to have a very multifaceted and dynamic life. But it's also something that has hindered me. And here's why first for me is to understand that there is a difference between discipline and determination. I am probably one of the most determined people I know I have grit and I have such a thick skin from, you know, calling all these newsrooms cold pitching.
And this is what I teach, by the way, that I have been rejected. Thousands of times that is grit. That is determination, right? But that is different than discipline. And I realized that while I had so much determination and grit and perseverance to hit a goal, I didn't have the discipline it took along that journey to foster that unwavering belief for the longterm vision.
So as you know, entrepreneurs, right, we are constantly being tempted by shiny new objects, make this offer, do this new thing. And it's constantly a battle of [00:13:00] discipline versus chasing the next new thing and not getting anything done. So I think that for me, this year is about discipline. To really have a patience to test different ideas instead of being inpatient and dropping one thing and starting another.
It's the patients to know that maybe if the revenue does suffer in the short term, we are doing this for the possibility of having a longterm vision come true. So it's about being able to have that patience, to have that groundedness, to do something over a long period of time, which doesn't sit well with me because it's hard for me to sit still.
Right. I am someone always on the go. So as much as I'm reluctant to call in this year for discipline, it doesn't sound sexy, it doesn't sound fun, right? I would much rather be on the chase for the next thing. I think that's what the universe is calling me. I keep having discussions where this word keeps coming up.
I cannot miss the fact that this could be a message that the universe is sending me. So. Discipline is what I'm calling forth. I want to really hold space for that. I want to use discipline to be [00:14:00] able to consistently perform at a higher level, to hold me and my team to a standard of excellence and repeat that consistently instead of just being a one off thing.
It's discipline on across all things, right? Discipline with how we work, with how we show up, with the consistency that is required to perform at that level. And maintain it throughout a long period of time. So that just means that I will need to have better systems, better ways of reporting, better check ins.
I'm going to need to elevate my ability to communicate as a leader, to have uncomfortable conversations with my team, to have more frequent check ins and to hold them accountable. All of those things can help me foster this discipline that I am trying to have, which is to hold a long term vision and really create that discipline that's necessary to make that long term vision come to life.
So that is what I'm calling in, uh, having a more longterm view, even though there are so many other temptations that's always coming to us so many different opportunities and just elevating ourselves so that we can perform on a higher level consistently and defining what that means, because it might not [00:15:00] mean just revenue, right?
It might mean customer service. It might mean how the team is feeling. It might mean consistency in terms of our numbers, and it might not be this crazy exponential growth, but slow and steady. So that's what I'm calling in for this year. I hope that this gave you something to think about as you plan your year and set the tone for what you want to call in so that you can direct your energy, your focus, and attention to that.
That's also the, one of the reasons why I'm calling in discipline, because I do feel like I could have a much better way of sending my focus and attention tend to be all over the place sometimes that I really want to hone in on discipline so that I can have more focus for a longer period of time on one or two things that really gets done instead of just kind of spreading myself too thin.
So hopefully you have my support for that. Let me know what your word is. Please. Right in the comments. If you love this episode, give me a five stars and write in the reviews, what you're calling in for so that we can also cheer you on along the journey. If you are looking for PR support, I welcome you to join our signature PR program, [00:16:00] where we have one of the most inclusive and diverse communities to help you feel like you can.
Advocate and pitch for yourself and understand exactly how this whole PR thing works. Go to prstarterpack. com. And if you know anyone who is also a small business hero, like yourself, please refer them to this podcast. I thank you so much for your attention for being here. I really hope that this year is one where anything that you want to create is possible and you feel empowered to do that because you deserve to have it all.
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