How to Choose a Word of the Year for 2024 - an Alternative to New Year’s Resolutions!

Dec 14

Around 88% of us won’t stick to our New Year’s resolutions, so why set yourself up to fail?

Lasting change in your life and mindset takes time and work. Instead of unrealistic New Year’s resolutions, I prefer to take a more holistic approach at the start of a new year. A great way to do this is to choose a word of the year.

Curating your word is a positive way to anchor your intentions for the new year. The word you pick can underpin your actions and unify your goals far more than New Year’s resolutions. So, rather than putting pressure on yourself to eat more healthily or travel more often, focus on how you want to feel instead by choosing a word of the Year.

How to Choose Your Word of the Year

Reflect on the past year

What are you most grateful for about 2023?
How have you grown or changed in 2023?
What was the highlight of your year?
What was the most challenging of your year?
What new habits did you cultivate?
What are the first three words that come to mind when you think about this year?

Now look forward

Think about your values and intentions in each of the following areas for 2024. You don’t need to set any rigid goals, rather start comparing where you are against where you want to be in these areas.

Relationships
Work
Physical Health
Wellness and Mental Health
Lifestyle and Hobbies
Life Milestones

Start listing words that come to mind when reflecting on what you’ve written. Use a thesaurus to expand on the terms you come up with.

Create a Vision Board

Your vision board could be physical whereby you flick through magazines or you could use Pinterest or Canva to create a digital representation of images that connect with you.

Think about the areas you might want to focus on in the next year. You may find a theme or colour that starts to appear in the pictures you select.

Live your Word

Once you’ve selected your word, it’s time to actually ‘live’ it!

Visibly display your word of the year and vision board so you can be reminded of it each day, I set mine as my desktop background.
Incorporate your word into questions when making decisions or considering old habits. For example, if your word was ‘thrive’, you might ask yourself: “is spending three hours on social media each day helping me thrive?”
Set a reminder on your phone once a month to check in with your word of the year and see if it is still resonating with you.