What if one simple word could set the tone for your entire year in 2025? Not a list of resolutions or a plan you forget by February, but a single powerful word that guides how you show up, the choices you make, and the life you create.

Today I'm revealing my word for 2025 and taking you through the transformative practice of choosing a word of the year. A practice I've used for years now to ground my focus and help me say YES! to becoming the woman I need to be to have the life I want.

Choosing Word of the Year to guide you in 2025 will be the best gift you can give yourself this season. So, stick around and let's unwrap your Word of the Year.

Welcome to The Self-Creation School podcast, for women who are ready to ditch mediocrity, step up and get more of what they want, and finally say YES! to a life that sets their soul on fire. I'm your host Leanne Letica, Self-Creation Coach, founder of The Self-Creation School AND Queen of YES!. If you're ready to play life by your own personal rule book, and give yourself permission to say YES! to yourself and your wildest dreams, this podcast is the place for you.

Hello, my friend, and Merry Christmas to you. Today's episode feels very in tune with the gift giving season because choosing a Word of the Year really is a little bit like going shopping for a gift. One that transforms how you show up in your life and the kind of life you create for yourself as a result. And it's a gift that keeps on giving all year long.

I want to kick off this conversation by talking about the flawed approach to creating a life you love that so many of us follow and I used to follow as well.

Years ago, I loved the energy of New Year's resolutions. Of setting the must do goals for the year ahead. I would dream of what I wanted and then start making all the plans, all the to-do lists for how I would go about making it happen. Any perfectionist listening in will know how good that feels, right?

The thing is, even if I did push through January 31 with those plans after the challenges inevitably start to come up, even if I did achieve my goals by the end of year, I so very often felt let down because I didn't magically become who I thought I would in achieving them.

Here's what I mean.

Most of the early success in my life was driven by a deep desire to be loved, valued, approved of and accepted. Ultimately, to be a worthy human being. I thought that going after all the things that society readily touts as being the right way to do life, that this is how I would finally experience those feelings.

And so, when I checked off society's goal list and the love, value, approval and acceptance didn't follow, I felt a bit cheated. And the goals I pushed through so hard to achieve, well, they kind of felt hollow.

The thing I later learned is that outsourcing how you feel to other people and to materialistic things or societal status through success, well, it rarely ever leads you to what you truly want, which is always a feeling.

You don't want the money in the bank because it looks nice. Well, okay, it might look nice. But really you want it because seeing it there makes you feel secure.

You don't want that once in a lifetime holiday because you want to see the world. You could see the world from your living room these days. You don't even need to get off the couch. In fact, most of us when we travel have probably already seen every attraction at our destination there is to see on YouTube when we're making our plan of attack before we go. But you still take the trip because you want to experience the excitement and wonder of seeing these places with two feet on the ground.

You don't want a relationship for the sake of having a relationship. You want it to feel loved, seen, heard, and supported.

Everything we do, have, or experience comes down in some way to what we want to feel and somewhere in our brain we think that by doing, having, and experiencing these things we will automatically feel that way. It's a flawed method, my friend. Checking off goals does not always result in feeling the way you want.

I went from a Millionaire's Maid to making my own millions. I got the marriage, the car, the house, the kids, the holidays, you name it. And yet, it didn't magically make me feel loved. It didn't magically make me feel valued, approved of, or accepted. It didn't make me feel secure, give me confidence. At the end of the day, those are the things I really wanted.

And this kind of approach is what I like to call the “Do-Have-Be” approach. We take action, so we do, to have something we want, the promotion, the car, the relationship, and so on, so that then we can become a woman who is worthy, secure, loved, confident, proud, happy, fulfilled, successful, fill in the blank.

And so, when we don't magically become a worthy, secure, confident, and so on, woman, after doing all the things to have all the things, this is what leads us to a really unfulfilling, underwhelming life experience. This is what leads to our life feeling like a mismatch on some level.

And honestly, this is a really hard way to go about achieving your goals because the whole time you take action, you are in a state of resistance. You are pushing yourself to do things that simply don't come naturally to who you are.

But when you flip that script to a “Be-Do-Have” approach, my friend, this is where things start to get magical. A Be-Do-Have approach focuses first on who you need to be so that you naturally take the action you need to take to have what it is you want.

When you focus on being a confident woman, you'll naturally start to show up in your world with confidence, which means you will naturally start to say YES! to those speaking opportunities, for example, that get you noticed because of your confidence. That lead to a promotion or some kind of success that you want to have.

Under the flawed approach, you would push yourself to speak so that you get the promotion and then you will feel confident. But chances are, you can make all that happen but if you don't see yourself as a confident woman outside of those things, likely you will still feel unsure of yourself, speaking in front of a room will still feel hard for you, and you will still doubt that you were worthy of the promotion.

Let's say you want to lose weight. If you focus on becoming a woman who loves her body, you will naturally start to take action that supports you loving your body by eating healthy, exercising more, and generally taking better care of yourself. And it's doing those things that is what will lead you to not just losing the weight, but effortlessly keeping it up.

That's a great example actually, because I spent a lot of years yo-yo dieting. I would go up and down two dress sizes every two months. It was a crazy cycle that eventually led me to becoming a bulimic with pretty disastrous consequences.

Now the problem wasn't that I couldn't lose weight. I proved that I could do that time and again. The problem was that I didn't see myself as a woman without a weight problem. Instead of focusing on being a woman who took great care of herself, on being a healthy woman, I focused on being a woman who needed to lose weight, and that continually became my experience.

So, when I lost the weight, it would pile back on, because losing it didn't magically make me become a woman who loved and honored her well-being. I still saw myself as a woman who needed to lose weight. And here's the thing about that. We will always take action to prove true what we believe to be true about who we are.

When I stopped seeing myself as a woman who needed to lose weight and started seeing myself as a woman who cared for her body, I went about looking after my weight in a very different way and the end result was, I overcame my battle with bulimia and the weight came off and stayed off.

And let me bring this back to feelings. My weight problem stems all the way back to the childhood taunts in the playground that I got every single day about my chubby little white legs. Taunts that made me feel unaccepted, unloved and unapproved of. Sound familiar, right?

So, what I really wanted deep down, right throughout my whole weight loss journey, was to feel accepted, loved and approved of. Now tying this love, value and acceptance to my weight was essentially externally outsourcing it. And remember, no one person or thing can gift you a feeling, at least not reliably. But when you bring how you want to feel in-house and you make it an inside job, you can gift this to yourself, and you can do that reliably and consistently.

It's no coincidence that when I started accepting my body, loving my body and approving of it, no matter what the number on the scale said, I became a woman who took care of my body in a completely different way. And it is in feeling the way I wanted to feel first, that helped me be the woman I needed to be to effortlessly do what I needed to do to have the result I wanted.

And by the way, the end result I wanted was not to lose weight. So many of us think this is the end goal. But listen, it's not. The end goal I wanted was to feel confident in my body and confident in the clothes that I wore so that I could show up in a way that would, and you know how this goes, make me feel loved, valued, and accepted.

So, the real goal was confidence. The real goal was loving myself, valuing my body, and accepting myself. I hope that gives you something to think about.

Now the reason I share all of this with you is because the Word of the Year is all about supporting you in being. It's a simple way to ground who you be in one foundational way of being that helps you naturally take the action towards having what it is you want.

And I also just want to share that if you really don't know what you want, if you are right now in a place of trying to find or rediscover yourself and your dreams, having a Word of the Year is probably the best thing I could suggest for you.

When I chose my first Word of the Year, it was at a time in my life where everything was falling apart, me included. My marriage, my family, my business, my health. Honestly, I don't think I had it in me to see past just being able to meet my own eyes in the mirror without loathing who I saw. If we had a talk about materialistic goals back then, I would have been out. The only thing I wanted was to fix myself and put my world back together. I could not see a life anything beyond that.

The word I chose that year was “Grace” and grace turned out to be a life-changing gift. Showing myself grace opened the door to accepting who I had allowed myself to become in chasing society's goals. To accept how I was aging. To accept that I had put some weight back on. And to show myself kindness and compassion.

Grace helped me stop beating myself up for supposedly not measuring up and instead embrace myself with the love I would offer in hard times to my best friend. Grace also changed the love, kindness, and understanding I showed to others. And you can probably imagine how that changed my relationships.

So, if you are in a place like that right now, or you simply just don't know what you want, think about your most immediate goal.

For me, it really was to learn how to love myself fully because only then could I think past that to creating a different life experience that would fulfill me. For you, it might be to find self-belief or self-confidence. There is nothing written in stone that says your goal needs to be a materialistic thing or some kind of grand achievement on display for everyone to see.

I will suggest that the most powerfully life-changing goals are quite the opposite. They are goals that focus on building SELF Wealth, those things like self-love, self-worth, self-trust, and so on. Because in building SELF Wealth, you become a woman who is an energetic match for whatever it is your heart desires.

So, with all of that said, I'd like to walk you through a simple four step process that I use to help me choose my Word of the Year.

And essentially, we are going to work backwards to work forwards. So, we are going to start with looking at the ‘What’, the outcome of your year. What it is you want to have in 2025. What is the life experience you want. What is it you want to do, have and experience in these next 12 months.

And to help you get clear on this, here are three questions that I like to ask myself. What's the one thing I'd love to have in my life by the end of 2025? What feels missing in my life right now that I want to create more? And if I could wave a magic wand, what would my dream year look like?

And allow yourself to write down freely whatever comes to mind. No filtering, no questioning, no doubting, just write.

Then, like we've been talking about, it's important to dig a little deeper into what it is you want you feel by creating this outcome for yourself? Why do you really want the things you wrote down? What is the feeling you think having them will give you?

And to help you dig deeper, you can ask yourself these three questions. Why do I want this outcome? How do I believe having this will make me feel? And if I already had this, what feelings would it bring into my life?

This step is important because remember everything we want comes back to a feeling. Getting clear on the feeling helps you uncover the deeper desire behind your goal. Essentially, this is your why and knowing what your why is will also help you stay on track in the year ahead.

The next step is to consider the ‘How’, the doing part. Now, this isn't about mapping out every detail of your plan. I see you perfectionists. It's about identifying some key actions or habits that you think will align with your goal. For example, if your goal is to feel energized, the how might include exercising regularly, eating well, or creating better boundaries around your time.

Now, I will offer you a word of caution. Don't get too caught up on this because the reality is you might know exactly how you will make your goals happen until you've made them happen. This is just a starting point from where you are right now with what you think might need to happen. What are those first steps? There's going to be a lot of how revealed along the way by taking each step along the way.

So, here's some questions to help you start thinking about the how. What actions or habits would help you create this outcome? What's one small step you could take to start moving towards this? And what choices would support the feelings you want to experience?

Once again, I want you to write down whatever ideas you come up with. There is no wrong or right answer and resist the urge to judge whether or not these things that you write down are doable. I'll give you a hint. They are, and you can become the woman who believes that they are.

Don't worry about getting this perfect because you won't. This is just about connecting your vision to practical action that you think aligns with the outcome you want and the feeling you want.

The next step is to think about the ‘Who’. So, we've looked at the ‘What’, what it is you want to have, including the feeling you want to feel. We've considered the ‘How’, the doing part or taking action part. Now we come back to the ‘Who’, the being part.

This is the heart of it all. Who do you need to be to take those actions consistently and create the feelings and outcomes you want.

This is where having a Word of the Year comes into play. It's that one word that captures the essence of the woman you're becoming this new year. This is where I spend the most time. I want to get to know this version of me in every way that I can.

But here's some questions to help you start to think about who it is you need to become. Who would naturally create the outcome you want? What qualities or strengths would help you take that aligned action? And if you were already living your dream year, how would you describe the person you've become?

Now, once you've worked through all of that, I want you to take a look back over your notes and start highlighting key words or similar concepts that you see repeated. The aim here is to start to uncover the core theme of your year so that you can choose a word to represent that theme.

Here's something that may help you with this. From everything you've written down, create a vision board with images that represent your goals, who you are, the action you are taking, and capture the essence of how it is you want to feel.

It could be images of the outcome you want. Maybe it's a dream destination you would like to travel to. It could be images of how you see yourself dressing this year. It could include images of people who you look up to, who are living the life you want, or who have the kind of energy that you want to embody.

You could include quotes that inspire what it is you want to create, how it is you want to feel, the action you need to take, or who it is you want to be, and so on.

Visualization is such a powerful thing because taking your dreams from your mind and putting them into something tangible like an image that you can print out, touch and feel, this immediately makes them real.

It also gives you a visual representation of your life in the year ahead and often what happens is that your Word of the Year will emerge naturally from this.

But together with your notes you are going to see a theme appear and all you need to do from here is choose a word that represents that theme.

My word of the year for 2025 is “Impact”. My goal is in essence to simplify my life so that I can amplify my efforts across the board and create meaningful, intentional progress in the things that matter most. In the things that will have the most impact in my life.

And I used a thesaurus and tried on a lot of words for size. Most of them didn't feel quite right. One of the things that helps me try on words is to think about using them in my day-to-day life.

So, with the word impact, I felt really driven by this when I asked myself things like, “What one thing can I do right now that will have the most impact on my health, on my relationship, on my business, on my client's results, and so on?” “How would doing this one thing create impact?” “How would an impactful person think about this, feel about this?” “What would they believe about this?” You get the idea.

And when I started asking myself the kind of questions I know will drive massive change and growth for me in 2025, that's when the word impact felt right. It created a buzz of excitement within me and a ball of nerves in the pit of my stomach because I know that becoming a woman with impact, a woman who has impact, is going to push me far beyond my comfort zone.

That's honestly the kind of mix that you want when you land on your word. Excitement and fear, because then you'll know you've really captured both sides of what will be required to step into the life you want to create.

One thing I will say is, don't get too caught up in this. There really isn't a perfect word and the reality is it's not set in stone. If you choose a word that doesn't feel right as you start embodying it, you can change it.

The only word of caution here is that you're not changing it because the ‘you’ it pushes you to be is uncomfortable. You're changing it because it really doesn't help you embody who it is you need to be. It doesn't help you stretch and grow in the right ways. Make sense?

So, don't overthink this. Most of the time your word will come naturally. It will naturally emerge from your notes and vision board. But listen, if it doesn't, simply choose a word you are attracted to in some way and go with it. You are likely going to make some progress, and some progress is better than no progress.

Now, I want to offer you a couple of final tips.

When you have your word, you want to put it front and center of everything you do. For example, I will start my day with journaling about the one thing that will create the most impact today, and the one feeling, thought, and belief that will have the most impact in helping me do that.

I will put my Word of the Year on my calendar as an all-day event that runs from January 1 to December 31. In 2025, it will be an event that says something like, “I am a woman of impact.” Sometimes for the first few months of the year, while this word is becoming part of how I think, I will set reminders throughout my day that highlight my word and remind me who it is I am becoming.

I add my word of the year to my vision board and set it as a desktop wallpaper on my computer. There really are so many ways that you can put this word front and center, but you do want to make this word a part of everything you do.

The last tip I have is to reflect on your progress regularly and celebrate it. Look back on your day and note down one way you embodied your word. Look back over your week and your month.

Sometimes it might not feel like you're making much progress towards your goals, but you are in fact embodying the essence of who it is you need to be to achieve them. And I promise, if you focus on that, your goals will have no choice but to eventually become your reality.

Having a Word of the Year has been one of the simplest ways I've found to go about creating the life I want. It really is a gift that keeps on giving too because I still embody my previous Words of the Years, years later in my life and that has a truly powerful impact in the kind of life I can create.

I hope you have fun unwrapping your Word of the Year knowing that this is a gift that really does have the potential to change your entire world.

Think about the what and the why, the how and then the who. Choose a word that captures the essence of your year and then go about embodying that word in everything you do. Remember, this is the Be-Do-Have approach and it is the most effective way I've found to create the life of your dreams.

Before we wrap this up, I want to leave you with one final thought.

Your Word of the Year is essentially a promise to yourself. I promise that you are worthy of your dreams, capable of your goals, and ready to show up in a way that makes those dreams inevitable.

So, say YES! to this promise. Say YES! to you. Because when you do, you step into the life you've always wanted with more ease, joy, and alignment than you ever thought possible. And that, my friend, is my greatest wish for you, and for me, as we step into this new year together.

On that note, this is the final episode for 2024. Whether you've been following along all year, or you've recently joined me, thank you for tuning in and allowing me to be part of your life and your YES! this year. It's a privilege I truly do cherish, and I can't wait to continue cheering on your YES! this coming year.

I'll be back on New Year's Day with an episode that I think really goes hand in hand with our conversation here today. So, do join me next Wednesday for that.

Until then, be the woman who says YES!

Hey, want to know what's stopping you from saying YES! to you and a life you love?

Head over to https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock and take my FREE 60 second quiz to find out what's standing in your way today and I'll send you my Self-Creation Shift process for shifting it.

That's https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock. I’ll see you there.

What if one simple word could set the tone for your entire year in 2025? Not a list of resolutions or a plan you forget by February, but a single powerful word that guides how you show up, the choices you make, and the life you create.

Today I'm revealing my word for 2025 and taking you through the transformative practice of choosing a word of the year. A practice I've used for years now to ground my focus and help me say YES! to becoming the woman I need to be to have the life I want.

Choosing Word of the Year to guide you in 2025 will be the best gift you can give yourself this season. So, stick around and let's unwrap your Word of the Year.

Welcome to The Self-Creation School podcast, for women who are ready to ditch mediocrity, step up and get more of what they want, and finally say YES! to a life that sets their soul on fire. I'm your host Leanne Letica, Self-Creation Coach, founder of The Self-Creation School AND Queen of YES!. If you're ready to play life by your own personal rule book, and give yourself permission to say YES! to yourself and your wildest dreams, this podcast is the place for you.

Hello, my friend, and Merry Christmas to you. Today's episode feels very in tune with the gift giving season because choosing a Word of the Year really is a little bit like going shopping for a gift. One that transforms how you show up in your life and the kind of life you create for yourself as a result. And it's a gift that keeps on giving all year long.

I want to kick off this conversation by talking about the flawed approach to creating a life you love that so many of us follow and I used to follow as well.

Years ago, I loved the energy of New Year's resolutions. Of setting the must do goals for the year ahead. I would dream of what I wanted and then start making all the plans, all the to-do lists for how I would go about making it happen. Any perfectionist listening in will know how good that feels, right?

The thing is, even if I did push through January 31 with those plans after the challenges inevitably start to come up, even if I did achieve my goals by the end of year, I so very often felt let down because I didn't magically become who I thought I would in achieving them.

Here's what I mean.

Most of the early success in my life was driven by a deep desire to be loved, valued, approved of and accepted. Ultimately, to be a worthy human being. I thought that going after all the things that society readily touts as being the right way to do life, that this is how I would finally experience those feelings.

And so, when I checked off society's goal list and the love, value, approval and acceptance didn't follow, I felt a bit cheated. And the goals I pushed through so hard to achieve, well, they kind of felt hollow.

The thing I later learned is that outsourcing how you feel to other people and to materialistic things or societal status through success, well, it rarely ever leads you to what you truly want, which is always a feeling.

You don't want the money in the bank because it looks nice. Well, okay, it might look nice. But really you want it because seeing it there makes you feel secure.

You don't want that once in a lifetime holiday because you want to see the world. You could see the world from your living room these days. You don't even need to get off the couch. In fact, most of us when we travel have probably already seen every attraction at our destination there is to see on YouTube when we're making our plan of attack before we go. But you still take the trip because you want to experience the excitement and wonder of seeing these places with two feet on the ground.

You don't want a relationship for the sake of having a relationship. You want it to feel loved, seen, heard, and supported.

Everything we do, have, or experience comes down in some way to what we want to feel and somewhere in our brain we think that by doing, having, and experiencing these things we will automatically feel that way. It's a flawed method, my friend. Checking off goals does not always result in feeling the way you want.

I went from a Millionaire's Maid to making my own millions. I got the marriage, the car, the house, the kids, the holidays, you name it. And yet, it didn't magically make me feel loved. It didn't magically make me feel valued, approved of, or accepted. It didn't make me feel secure, give me confidence. At the end of the day, those are the things I really wanted.

And this kind of approach is what I like to call the “Do-Have-Be” approach. We take action, so we do, to have something we want, the promotion, the car, the relationship, and so on, so that then we can become a woman who is worthy, secure, loved, confident, proud, happy, fulfilled, successful, fill in the blank.

And so, when we don't magically become a worthy, secure, confident, and so on, woman, after doing all the things to have all the things, this is what leads us to a really unfulfilling, underwhelming life experience. This is what leads to our life feeling like a mismatch on some level.

And honestly, this is a really hard way to go about achieving your goals because the whole time you take action, you are in a state of resistance. You are pushing yourself to do things that simply don't come naturally to who you are.

But when you flip that script to a “Be-Do-Have” approach, my friend, this is where things start to get magical. A Be-Do-Have approach focuses first on who you need to be so that you naturally take the action you need to take to have what it is you want.

When you focus on being a confident woman, you'll naturally start to show up in your world with confidence, which means you will naturally start to say YES! to those speaking opportunities, for example, that get you noticed because of your confidence. That lead to a promotion or some kind of success that you want to have.

Under the flawed approach, you would push yourself to speak so that you get the promotion and then you will feel confident. But chances are, you can make all that happen but if you don't see yourself as a confident woman outside of those things, likely you will still feel unsure of yourself, speaking in front of a room will still feel hard for you, and you will still doubt that you were worthy of the promotion.

Let's say you want to lose weight. If you focus on becoming a woman who loves her body, you will naturally start to take action that supports you loving your body by eating healthy, exercising more, and generally taking better care of yourself. And it's doing those things that is what will lead you to not just losing the weight, but effortlessly keeping it up.

That's a great example actually, because I spent a lot of years yo-yo dieting. I would go up and down two dress sizes every two months. It was a crazy cycle that eventually led me to becoming a bulimic with pretty disastrous consequences.

Now the problem wasn't that I couldn't lose weight. I proved that I could do that time and again. The problem was that I didn't see myself as a woman without a weight problem. Instead of focusing on being a woman who took great care of herself, on being a healthy woman, I focused on being a woman who needed to lose weight, and that continually became my experience.

So, when I lost the weight, it would pile back on, because losing it didn't magically make me become a woman who loved and honored her well-being. I still saw myself as a woman who needed to lose weight. And here's the thing about that. We will always take action to prove true what we believe to be true about who we are.

When I stopped seeing myself as a woman who needed to lose weight and started seeing myself as a woman who cared for her body, I went about looking after my weight in a very different way and the end result was, I overcame my battle with bulimia and the weight came off and stayed off.

And let me bring this back to feelings. My weight problem stems all the way back to the childhood taunts in the playground that I got every single day about my chubby little white legs. Taunts that made me feel unaccepted, unloved and unapproved of. Sound familiar, right?

So, what I really wanted deep down, right throughout my whole weight loss journey, was to feel accepted, loved and approved of. Now tying this love, value and acceptance to my weight was essentially externally outsourcing it. And remember, no one person or thing can gift you a feeling, at least not reliably. But when you bring how you want to feel in-house and you make it an inside job, you can gift this to yourself, and you can do that reliably and consistently.

It's no coincidence that when I started accepting my body, loving my body and approving of it, no matter what the number on the scale said, I became a woman who took care of my body in a completely different way. And it is in feeling the way I wanted to feel first, that helped me be the woman I needed to be to effortlessly do what I needed to do to have the result I wanted.

And by the way, the end result I wanted was not to lose weight. So many of us think this is the end goal. But listen, it's not. The end goal I wanted was to feel confident in my body and confident in the clothes that I wore so that I could show up in a way that would, and you know how this goes, make me feel loved, valued, and accepted.

So, the real goal was confidence. The real goal was loving myself, valuing my body, and accepting myself. I hope that gives you something to think about.

Now the reason I share all of this with you is because the Word of the Year is all about supporting you in being. It's a simple way to ground who you be in one foundational way of being that helps you naturally take the action towards having what it is you want.

And I also just want to share that if you really don't know what you want, if you are right now in a place of trying to find or rediscover yourself and your dreams, having a Word of the Year is probably the best thing I could suggest for you.

When I chose my first Word of the Year, it was at a time in my life where everything was falling apart, me included. My marriage, my family, my business, my health. Honestly, I don't think I had it in me to see past just being able to meet my own eyes in the mirror without loathing who I saw. If we had a talk about materialistic goals back then, I would have been out. The only thing I wanted was to fix myself and put my world back together. I could not see a life anything beyond that.

The word I chose that year was “Grace” and grace turned out to be a life-changing gift. Showing myself grace opened the door to accepting who I had allowed myself to become in chasing society's goals. To accept how I was aging. To accept that I had put some weight back on. And to show myself kindness and compassion.

Grace helped me stop beating myself up for supposedly not measuring up and instead embrace myself with the love I would offer in hard times to my best friend. Grace also changed the love, kindness, and understanding I showed to others. And you can probably imagine how that changed my relationships.

So, if you are in a place like that right now, or you simply just don't know what you want, think about your most immediate goal.

For me, it really was to learn how to love myself fully because only then could I think past that to creating a different life experience that would fulfill me. For you, it might be to find self-belief or self-confidence. There is nothing written in stone that says your goal needs to be a materialistic thing or some kind of grand achievement on display for everyone to see.

I will suggest that the most powerfully life-changing goals are quite the opposite. They are goals that focus on building SELF Wealth, those things like self-love, self-worth, self-trust, and so on. Because in building SELF Wealth, you become a woman who is an energetic match for whatever it is your heart desires.

So, with all of that said, I'd like to walk you through a simple four step process that I use to help me choose my Word of the Year.

And essentially, we are going to work backwards to work forwards. So, we are going to start with looking at the ‘What’, the outcome of your year. What it is you want to have in 2025. What is the life experience you want. What is it you want to do, have and experience in these next 12 months.

And to help you get clear on this, here are three questions that I like to ask myself. What's the one thing I'd love to have in my life by the end of 2025? What feels missing in my life right now that I want to create more? And if I could wave a magic wand, what would my dream year look like?

And allow yourself to write down freely whatever comes to mind. No filtering, no questioning, no doubting, just write.

Then, like we've been talking about, it's important to dig a little deeper into what it is you want you feel by creating this outcome for yourself? Why do you really want the things you wrote down? What is the feeling you think having them will give you?

And to help you dig deeper, you can ask yourself these three questions. Why do I want this outcome? How do I believe having this will make me feel? And if I already had this, what feelings would it bring into my life?

This step is important because remember everything we want comes back to a feeling. Getting clear on the feeling helps you uncover the deeper desire behind your goal. Essentially, this is your why and knowing what your why is will also help you stay on track in the year ahead.

The next step is to consider the ‘How’, the doing part. Now, this isn't about mapping out every detail of your plan. I see you perfectionists. It's about identifying some key actions or habits that you think will align with your goal. For example, if your goal is to feel energized, the how might include exercising regularly, eating well, or creating better boundaries around your time.

Now, I will offer you a word of caution. Don't get too caught up on this because the reality is you might know exactly how you will make your goals happen until you've made them happen. This is just a starting point from where you are right now with what you think might need to happen. What are those first steps? There's going to be a lot of how revealed along the way by taking each step along the way.

So, here's some questions to help you start thinking about the how. What actions or habits would help you create this outcome? What's one small step you could take to start moving towards this? And what choices would support the feelings you want to experience?

Once again, I want you to write down whatever ideas you come up with. There is no wrong or right answer and resist the urge to judge whether or not these things that you write down are doable. I'll give you a hint. They are, and you can become the woman who believes that they are.

Don't worry about getting this perfect because you won't. This is just about connecting your vision to practical action that you think aligns with the outcome you want and the feeling you want.

The next step is to think about the ‘Who’. So, we've looked at the ‘What’, what it is you want to have, including the feeling you want to feel. We've considered the ‘How’, the doing part or taking action part. Now we come back to the ‘Who’, the being part.

This is the heart of it all. Who do you need to be to take those actions consistently and create the feelings and outcomes you want.

This is where having a Word of the Year comes into play. It's that one word that captures the essence of the woman you're becoming this new year. This is where I spend the most time. I want to get to know this version of me in every way that I can.

But here's some questions to help you start to think about who it is you need to become. Who would naturally create the outcome you want? What qualities or strengths would help you take that aligned action? And if you were already living your dream year, how would you describe the person you've become?

Now, once you've worked through all of that, I want you to take a look back over your notes and start highlighting key words or similar concepts that you see repeated. The aim here is to start to uncover the core theme of your year so that you can choose a word to represent that theme.

Here's something that may help you with this. From everything you've written down, create a vision board with images that represent your goals, who you are, the action you are taking, and capture the essence of how it is you want to feel.

It could be images of the outcome you want. Maybe it's a dream destination you would like to travel to. It could be images of how you see yourself dressing this year. It could include images of people who you look up to, who are living the life you want, or who have the kind of energy that you want to embody.

You could include quotes that inspire what it is you want to create, how it is you want to feel, the action you need to take, or who it is you want to be, and so on.

Visualization is such a powerful thing because taking your dreams from your mind and putting them into something tangible like an image that you can print out, touch and feel, this immediately makes them real.

It also gives you a visual representation of your life in the year ahead and often what happens is that your Word of the Year will emerge naturally from this.

But together with your notes you are going to see a theme appear and all you need to do from here is choose a word that represents that theme.

My word of the year for 2025 is “Impact”. My goal is in essence to simplify my life so that I can amplify my efforts across the board and create meaningful, intentional progress in the things that matter most. In the things that will have the most impact in my life.

And I used a thesaurus and tried on a lot of words for size. Most of them didn't feel quite right. One of the things that helps me try on words is to think about using them in my day-to-day life.

So, with the word impact, I felt really driven by this when I asked myself things like, “What one thing can I do right now that will have the most impact on my health, on my relationship, on my business, on my client's results, and so on?” “How would doing this one thing create impact?” “How would an impactful person think about this, feel about this?” “What would they believe about this?” You get the idea.

And when I started asking myself the kind of questions I know will drive massive change and growth for me in 2025, that's when the word impact felt right. It created a buzz of excitement within me and a ball of nerves in the pit of my stomach because I know that becoming a woman with impact, a woman who has impact, is going to push me far beyond my comfort zone.

That's honestly the kind of mix that you want when you land on your word. Excitement and fear, because then you'll know you've really captured both sides of what will be required to step into the life you want to create.

One thing I will say is, don't get too caught up in this. There really isn't a perfect word and the reality is it's not set in stone. If you choose a word that doesn't feel right as you start embodying it, you can change it.

The only word of caution here is that you're not changing it because the ‘you’ it pushes you to be is uncomfortable. You're changing it because it really doesn't help you embody who it is you need to be. It doesn't help you stretch and grow in the right ways. Make sense?

So, don't overthink this. Most of the time your word will come naturally. It will naturally emerge from your notes and vision board. But listen, if it doesn't, simply choose a word you are attracted to in some way and go with it. You are likely going to make some progress, and some progress is better than no progress.

Now, I want to offer you a couple of final tips.

When you have your word, you want to put it front and center of everything you do. For example, I will start my day with journaling about the one thing that will create the most impact today, and the one feeling, thought, and belief that will have the most impact in helping me do that.

I will put my Word of the Year on my calendar as an all-day event that runs from January 1 to December 31. In 2025, it will be an event that says something like, “I am a woman of impact.” Sometimes for the first few months of the year, while this word is becoming part of how I think, I will set reminders throughout my day that highlight my word and remind me who it is I am becoming.

I add my word of the year to my vision board and set it as a desktop wallpaper on my computer. There really are so many ways that you can put this word front and center, but you do want to make this word a part of everything you do.

The last tip I have is to reflect on your progress regularly and celebrate it. Look back on your day and note down one way you embodied your word. Look back over your week and your month.

Sometimes it might not feel like you're making much progress towards your goals, but you are in fact embodying the essence of who it is you need to be to achieve them. And I promise, if you focus on that, your goals will have no choice but to eventually become your reality.

Having a Word of the Year has been one of the simplest ways I've found to go about creating the life I want. It really is a gift that keeps on giving too because I still embody my previous Words of the Years, years later in my life and that has a truly powerful impact in the kind of life I can create.

I hope you have fun unwrapping your Word of the Year knowing that this is a gift that really does have the potential to change your entire world.

Think about the what and the why, the how and then the who. Choose a word that captures the essence of your year and then go about embodying that word in everything you do. Remember, this is the Be-Do-Have approach and it is the most effective way I've found to create the life of your dreams.

Before we wrap this up, I want to leave you with one final thought.

Your Word of the Year is essentially a promise to yourself. I promise that you are worthy of your dreams, capable of your goals, and ready to show up in a way that makes those dreams inevitable.

So, say YES! to this promise. Say YES! to you. Because when you do, you step into the life you've always wanted with more ease, joy, and alignment than you ever thought possible. And that, my friend, is my greatest wish for you, and for me, as we step into this new year together.

On that note, this is the final episode for 2024. Whether you've been following along all year, or you've recently joined me, thank you for tuning in and allowing me to be part of your life and your YES! this year. It's a privilege I truly do cherish, and I can't wait to continue cheering on your YES! this coming year.

I'll be back on New Year's Day with an episode that I think really goes hand in hand with our conversation here today. So, do join me next Wednesday for that.

Until then, be the woman who says YES!

Hey, want to know what's stopping you from saying YES! to you and a life you love?

Head over to https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock and take my FREE 60 second quiz to find out what's standing in your way today and I'll send you my Self-Creation Shift process for shifting it.

That's https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock. I’ll see you there.