What are your words for 2020?

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

As I send and receive best wishes for 2020, I can’t help but feeling that we miss half of the equation. When we say Happy New Year, may 2020 bring you X and Y, we are addressing the part that we can’t control, the part where life is happening to us. And this part is real, I don’t want to dismiss it. But there is another part, where we are responsible to create what we want in our lives, where we happen to life. And so here is what I want to wish you today:

I wish you a Happy and Healthy New Year. AND, may you create and design 2020 as you REALLY want it to be, filled with dreams and possibilities, achievements and personal fulfillment.

You have probably read and heard about creating a Vision, setting Goals, setting up the Structure to move efficiently toward these goals. What I’d like to invite you today is simpler. It is to find power words that capture your intention, or mindset for 2020.

I use this with the athletes I coach on their mental games when preparing for an important competition. I ask them “what are the words that come up for you that capture your intention/mindset for this meet. Some might say: Confidence, Toughness, Determination. Others might say: Confidence, Commitment, Fun. Then I have them repeat these words over again and again, internally and / or out loud so that their intention is always at the top of their mind and they really embody these words in their doing but also in their being. It’s a way to simplify, to get straight to the point, to bring the essentials back when negative thoughts and self-doubts rise, a trigger to refocus.

I’d like to invite you to do the same regarding your intentions for 2020. What words come for you for this year? Listen to and trust your intuition (something I have been working on lately and that I might share in future posts). Find a quiet place, without any distraction, close your eyes and see/feel what words come for you for 2020.

Last year, I had shared that my words for 2019 were DISCOMFORT (I felt I needed to get more out of my comfort zone, which I did in different ways, the most challenging one being some weekly Facebook videos) and IMPOSSIBLE (because I felt I was limited by some roadblocks regarding what seemed impossible, for me and for my clients, and I had to work on this which I did by, for instance, joining a program called creating the Impossible with Michael Neil, that really stretched my perspective on this topic).

For 2020, the words that come for me are:

POSSIBILITY: My word for 2019, Impossible, actually transformed into Possibility through some coaching work. Our brain tends to focus on the words that we think of and if I think Impossible (although the idea behind this is to make it possible), my brain will only see “Impossible”. So, instead, I want to focus on POSSIBILITY. My rational, analytical, engineer left brain tend to kill any possibility as soon as it doesn’t see the path to reach the goal or find thousands of reasons why “this won’t happen”. I started to practice last year to leave the possibilities alive, without being attached to them happening, accepting the not knowing how, not even whether they would occur. And I want to continue to build that muscle this year, and invite my clients to do the same. That is absolutely a game changer to create the life we want because that helps to keep moving in the important direction with momentum and motivation as opposed to giving up on our dreams.

CREATIVITY: Last year, I started to be more and more present to the creative part in me, even artistic, which was a little unexpected for me… I believe our creativity tend to be shut down because of societal norms or corporate rules. I come from a place of learning and reproducing what I learned, modelling, usually trying to make it right. I haven’t been used to or trained to create my own thing, my own way and it is a both exciting and scary to lean into this and bring more of ME. I’m not sure where it is going to take me, but I definitely want to let it out more, whether on a personal level or on a professional level (for instance by creating a unique event/program that would combine different skills and passions of mine). And I want to help my clients develop their own creativity.

ADVENTURE: someone once told me his definition of adventure was when you don’t know what is going to happen. And I like that definition. I would add to this that it is when we discover new things and when we do extraordinary things in the sense that they are out of our ordinary (which is different for everyone by the way). Not knowing, Discovering and Extra-ordinary would be my definition of Adventure and 2020 will be adventurous in this way.

This is not meant to replace any other work around goals and structure, just another way to raise your awareness of where you are and where you want to go, and to simplify (Note: you may do this any time, like every quarter, or for any particular event you attend, any project you conduct).