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Today on the podcast we are talking about creating a focus for the year. We will discuss why you should create a focus for the year, and then, we will talk about the difference between choosing a word of the year and a theme of the year. Lastly, we will talk about how to create a theme of the year and some next steps after you’ve created it. This is Season 1 Episode 19 of A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast. I’m your host Cayce Fletcher for the show that helps you to create a life you love and cultivate your heart for God.

Hey everyone! As we approach the New Year, I can’t wait to break out my planner and get dreaming. The New Year provides the perfect opportunity to pause and reflect on what went great this past year and what might need to improve. We’ve talked about flexibility in setting your goals and habits in our Lifehacking podcast. Over the next few weeks, we are going to be brainstorming the best goals, routines, and habits to get your year started out right. In Season 1 of the podcast, we have been talking about habits that help you create a life you love and cultivate your heart for God. Today on the podcast, we are focusing on a habit that helps you to focus your year on growing in the way that you want to. We are going to be talking all about choosing a word of the year vs. a theme of the year. At the end of this podcast, our goal for you is for you to have an idea of what you would want to do: a word or a theme. And, then to have a general idea of what you would want that word or theme to be.

So let’s dive in.

S1E38 – Why You Need Space in Your Life to Truly Serve God – A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast

Do you feel frazzled – like you are stuck in the rat race of the modern day’s focus on productivity? In today’s episode, we are talking about why you need margin in your life to hear God’s voice and recognize the needs of those around you. Then, we are going to talk about the special ability of those who have more space in their lives to truly serve and minister to others. We need more margin people. View the full post here. Want to start a new morning routine that will give you deep knowledge of God, practical spiritual disciplines, and an appreciation for the good, true, and beautiful things? Get a copy of our NEW AMBL Collective Morning Menu: A Morning Time Practice for Thinking People! . Visit our Shop to get a copy of any of the resources mentioned in this episode. I’m your host, Cayce Fletcher, and you can learn a little bit more about me here. While you’re here, would you consider leaving a comment, rating, or review? You can find our podcast, A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch on YouTube. Subscribe to the blog for access to our latest content and some freebies. I love creating and sharing resources with you. You can find all of our resources at A More Beautiful Life Collective Shop. Keep creating a life you love, and cultivating your heart for God.

Why Pick A Focus for the Year?

Whether you decide to pick a word or theme for the year, the first question we have to answer is why? Why is this habit something that you should do?

Choosing a focus for your year is a lot like making resolutions or goals. It is something that can help with making decisions and setting priorities as you look at the year ahead.

Over Christmas, I was juggling a lot of different priorities. I wanted to make sure I had time to do fun activities with my family, while also wanting to make sure the house was clean while also doing projects that needed to get done. I remember feeling a certain dilemma almost every morning. It would go something like this.

I would wake up thinking about all the things I needed to get done. Then, I would go through some of my automated habits that are my morning routine: unloading the dishwasher, doing my Bible reading, and taking care of the animals. After I finished Breakfast, I would look at my son and ask, “So, what should we do today?” And, that’s when things started going downhill. Because at that moment, I had given my tasks for the day into the hands of the most fickle master. And no I’m not talking about my son. Really, I was asking him because I didn’t want to decide for myself what to do. I was relying on my own motivation to choose the direction for how my day would go. It was much easier to let someone choose for me. If he said, let’s go outside. I would say, “Yeah that sounds good.” And it mostly would sound good because I wouldn’t have to choose what I needed to do next myself.

We’ve all experienced this. It’s that dreaded question that you ask when you are in the car headed out to eat but no one knows where they want to go. Ultimately, no one wants to make that decision.

And why?

It’s because decisions are hard. They require willpower. There’s a common study that says that the amount of willpower that you have goes down as the day goes on. As you go through the day, you get tired. You may experience decision fatigue. You get discouraged that not as much got done as you wanted. And so, your ability to make decisions goes down.

To solve this problem, we need to have a fallback plan. It’s the thing that will help us to make decisions when we start to feel that fatigue because the plan is in place.

Our safety net against our failing willpower is made up of two things (1) a schedule with solid habits and routines and (2) a focus that determines our priorities.

We’ll talk about our schedule in a later episode, but today we are going to focus on our focus. How do we determine our priorities?

In our lifehacking episode, we talked about the importance of establishing goals and then choosing habits that will help us to meet those goals. Sometimes though, it’s difficult to even have the willpower to choose those goals. You are living in a survival mode or you are comfortable with the status quo. Maybe you have an idea of the direction you want to go, but it’s kind of amorphous and fuzzy.

This is why a word of the year or a theme of the year can be so beneficial. Unlike setting specific goals for all the areas of your life, a focus of the year can be a guiding light that extends to all different areas. You don’t have to set specific goals because as long as you are focusing on doing that one thing and seeing growth you have moved forward. A focus of the year is easier to remember than a lot of little goals as well. So, you can refer back to it repeatedly as you go through the goings-on of everyday life.

A Focus of the Year in Action: Living Out Your Theme of the Year or Word of the Year

So let’s think about what this would look like in action.

Let’s say your word of the year is Discipline. You choose this word because you want to be more disciplined about waking up in the morning, doing your morning and evening routines, reading your Bible, and doing some exercise. For you, discipline means not putting off small things for a later date and doing the hard things first. Instead of making little goals in each area of your life, you decide that every day you are going to have more discipline. So, you start with the beginning of the day and celebrate every time that you choose to do something right rather than putting it off. As your year goes on, maybe you decide you want to add in doing a garden outside. With that comes the discipline of weeding and watering which you do in the summer months. As September approaches, you start thinking about schooling for your kids and maybe your own learning. You decide that you are going to do a reading challenge with your family and lean on your word discipline to read more. December rolls around with the financial stress of the holidays. You rely on your word of the year to help guide your purchases.

In this example, the word helps to shift your priorities. In each case, you are reminding yourself that you want to see growth in this area. Importantly, your word can impact a lot of different areas of your life and so the application of that word can change as your life changes. Because it’s not really something you can get ‘behind on’, unlike a resolution, a word may have more staying power throughout your year. You can’t focus on everything at once. Picking a focus of the year will help you choose how you want to spend your year and ultimately lead to more growth this year.

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So Which Should You Choose? A Word of the Year versus A Theme of the Year?

Choosing a word of the year because popular several years ago for the reasons I mentioned before. More recently, I’ve heard of people choosing a theme of the year. So what’s the difference?

A word of the year is normally a trait or sometimes a thing that you want that year. Some examples of a word of the year could include:

Discipline
Rest
Energy
Health
Prayer
Relationship
Connection
Patience
Joy
Peace

As you can see from the list, the word almost acts like a kind of prayer for that thing. That by choosing it you are hoping to have more of that thing in your life in the future. Again, a word can help you guide your goals and priorities.

A theme of the year is similar to a word of the year in that it is a focus that you want from your year. A theme of the year is a more nuanced version of a word of the year that is more similar to a mission statement.

When I used to teach English, I would always stress to my students that theme statements could never be just one word, or a theme topic. My students knew that they needed to write a theme statement. Theme topics are more like our word of the year. These were one-word ideas like love or power. With literature, two stories can say an entirely different thing about one theme topic. Just think about the difference between what Romeo and Juliet is saying about love to what Sleeping Beauty is saying about love. True love’s kiss does something very different in each story. A sentence-long theme statement can do a much better job conveying what the story is saying about love than just a one-word theme topic.

So, what does this have to do your theme of the year? A theme of the year is a sentence-long (or more) statement that says what you want from your word of the year (or theme topic.) You are defining the direction you want to go with your word of the year so that you have a more honed in focus on that idea.

Our “Discipline” example from above is an example of a word of the year. It is a one-word topic for your year. If we wanted to make that into a theme of the year, we would expand on that. As I said before, discipline means we want to take care of things right away. So our theme of the year could be “I will have the discipline to do small tasks right away and the hard tasks first on the list.” By doing a little more thinking at the beginning of the year, you are giving yourself a more honed in focus on what you want to do about discipline. Again, this will give your focus of the year even more sticking power because it is easier to remember.

Some examples of a theme of the year could include:

Discipline – I will have the discipline to do small tasks right away and the hard tasks first on the list.
Rest – I will build in a sabbath rest from work and technology to my schedule one hour a day, one day a week, and one week a year.
Energy/Health – I will focus on improving my energy/health by improving my sleep, diet, and exercise routines.
Prayer – I will pray every day, keep a journal of my prayers, and regularly ask others how to pray for them.
Relationship/connection – I will focus on relationships/connection in my home, with my church family, and with my friends by prioritizing hospitality and conversations each week.
Patience – I will have more patience in interactions with my family and coworkers.
Joy – I will choose joy daily and complain less.
Peace – I will have peace about the things I cannot change.

You can see how our theme of the year examples take the same words from our word of the year examples and make them more concrete. I find that more concrete almost always means more actionable. Instead of just saying you hope for joy in the next year, you’ve made that hope able to be realized by saying an action that you will take. You’ll also notice that for some words you may have chosen something completely different. Maybe your focus on rest means that you will add a specific activity to your schedule, like a weekly hike. Or you want to focus on relationships by creating a weekly date night. You can also make your theme statements more broad.

As you can see, in the debate between choosing a word of the year versus a theme of the year, I have a clear bias towards one side. I think a theme of the year is best because it provides a little bit more actionable information throughout your year.

How to Pick a Theme of the Year?

Sometimes with a word of the year, we just pull a word out of the blue that we like. And, then we attempt to make it stick for our year. But, without much thought, it just gets thrown out with the rest of our resolutions and our goals. A theme of year requires a little bit more thought up front, but it can become a mantra for your life that you don’t forget.

Importantly, you want to be sure that you are praying through all of these steps. You want God to be first and foremost in developing whatever the focus is of your life. Everything you do is for his glory. You must be sure that all your plans are in accordance with his will.

To help with this, you can download my goal-setting sheets at the shop link here for free! These goal-setting sheets will walk you through each of the following steps.

Here are some steps to choosing your theme of the year:

Complete a yearly review. This is where you should look at everything that is going well and going poorly in your life now. If you have a previous focus of the year or other goals or resolutions, this would be a great time to write that down. Journal all of these things as you work through them. (Writing it down can help produce more ideas because writing is generative.)
Then, read through what you have written and determine any patterns. What has been a repeating concern or triumph? What is annoying you? What is a source of joy? All of these things will help you to get closer to your specific word.
Then, pick a word that sums up all of the things you found out in your yearly review. It should be a word that you love. A word that makes your heart sing.
Using your word of the year, write out a theme of the year. What exactly are you wanting to focus on, grow in, or accomplish about this topic, idea, or area of life?

And, then you’ve done it!

I’ve been walking through this process myself. One thing that I have been struggling with is what I mentioned before: consistency with routines so that I don’t have to rely on willpower to get things done. I also can’t seem to figure out the best way to incorporate exercise into my life. And, I also want to work in habits and routines that make sure I’m leaving space for hospitality, relationships, and joy.

Looking through my list, I can see that one of the recurring patterns in my yearly review is this idea of habits, routines, and schedules to automate decision-making while getting me closer to the life I want to live. Now, I need to brainstorm my word. Automate could be it, but it’s not something I really enjoy. Your word should be appealing to you, and since I want less technology in my life, not more I wouldn’t choose the word automate. But, it gets at the idea. So, I looked up synonyms for automate that gets rid of the machine connotation. Some synonyms for automatically include impulsive, instinctive, and spontaneous. That intrigued me. I like the word “spontaneous” because really my goal for my habits is twofold. I want to instinctually, spontaneously, automatically do the things I want to do without thinking about them so that I have space to be spontaneous in my life: to add in joy, connection, and adventure.

That’s it! That’s my theme of the year. By working through the yearly review, I was able to hone down all of my worries and joys and create an actionable statement to guide my goal-setting, decision-making, and everyday life.

So here’s my theme of the year: I want to spontaneously do my habits, routines, and my everyday to-do list so that I have space to be spontaneous in my life to create more joy, connection, and adventure for me and those around me.

What to do after you pick your theme of the year?

After you’ve done the work to create your theme of the year, it will hopefully be ingrained in your brain. It should become a mantra, something that you repeat every day and every time you make big decisions and goals.

Here are some good ideas for the next steps after you create your theme of the year so that it has ‘sticking power’ throughout the year.

Write it down. The first thing you need to do is write it down and memorize it. You’ve done the hard part of developing it, and you don’t want to let that work go to waste by forgetting what you’ve created. I would write it down in several places so that it is there to look back at. Some good ideas of places to keep your theme of the year are in your planner, by your bathroom sink or on the mirror, and maybe in other prominent places like your laundry room, kitchen sink, or car. Then, I would spend the first week or two of January committing it to memory. This step is all about ‘sticking power,’ meaning will you remember your theme of the year in March.
Pray about it. Second, I would pray about it. Hopefully, you were prayerful as you made your theme of the year. Now, it’s important to pray through living out your theme statement. There should be an attitude of growth in your prayers: For God to show us how to better grow in this area of life and give us the strength and perseverance to live it out daily. You want to be sure that you are relying on God and attentive to his voice as you live out your theme of the year. You should be praying through your theme of the year regularly, all year.
Research it. Next, I would research your theme of the year. This is a great step for the beginning months of the year. I’ve heard people say that once they pick a focus of the year they start to notice it everywhere. That word starts coming up in podcasts, books, and conversations. I think because the theme of the year is fresh in your mind because you’ve just created it you are looking for it everywhere. I’ve also always found that reading and research help to add more motivation to my life. As you think about your theme of the year, brainstorm topics that you would like to grow. In my case, if I am choosing to add more habits and routines in my life to help my to-do list get done ‘spontaneously,’ I can read books about habits and routines. I can also read books and articles about specific habits I want to do such as gardening, exercise, homeschooling, and blogging.
Journal about it. Lastly, it’s important to build time throughout the year where you can reflect on your theme of the year, how you are doing, and what you want to improve on. These journal times can help you to refine your goals and pivot throughout the year. If you build in monthly or quarterly review sessions (which we talked about in our life-hacking episode), you can determine how you want to refine and reinforce your theme of the year. It also just does a good job of reminding you that you have a theme of the year. As you can tell, ‘sticking power,’ or remembering what you’ve created, it one of the key factors in how effective your theme of the year is. Building in times of journaling, aka times of remembering, will help to remind you of your goals in the first place.

Going “All In” With Your Theme of the Year

We set goals because we want to grow. We want to be better than what we were before. Choosing a theme of the year can be a small habit that is easy to do at the beginning but leads to big gains throughout the year. By creating something that can refine and realign our focus, we are more easily able to do the things that we want to do with our days. We can steward our lives well. To do this, we have to commit our focus for the year and act in wise ways that lead to effective outcomes for ourselves and those around us. We have to go all in on making our days count.

So what do you think? Do you normally do New Year’s resolutions, a word of the year, or a theme of the year? What would your theme of the year be for this year? You can leave a comment on this podcast by clicking on the show notes or you can shoot me an email. I’d love to hear what you think. Be sure to leave a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts to help others find the show. Don’t forget about our free resource that you can find on the blog that will help you to complete your yearly review and choose a theme of the year. Until next time I’m Cayce Fletcher and I pray you keep creating a life you love and cultivating your heart for God.

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