01 Word of the Year

First and foremost, welcome to CORE Foundation friend! I am honored and humbled to be a part of your journey, and hope that we create a sustainable, long-lasting, and impactful relationship together.

Through these weeks you will be fed snack-size bites of information in regards to different areas of your life. I hope that you come to them with an open mind, a willing and able body, and a grateful heart.

Secondly, I hope that you are proud of yourself. Proud for taking this first step. Proud for putting yourself first, and proud of understanding the importance of having control over your thoughts and mind.

So let’s get into it. Let’s begin to master our minds so we can master our life.

In a world full of continual uncertainty, so many unforeseeable circumstances, so many uncontrollable instances, we need to remind ourselves that while we don’t have control over the world, the weather, the people around us, we DO have complete control over ourselves.

We may not have the ability to control our instinctual reaction, but we have the ability to correct the course by altering the next thought that we think. We have the ability to change that thought and change how we feel about what happened. We have the ability to react in the way that we want to by taking that split second and thinking about our reaction.

With that said, each and every reaction, each and every decision that we make is either bringing us closer to or farther away from our goals. The decision to get up and move or the decision to stay put with where we are will get us closer to losing weight or staying exactly where we are. The decision to read vs. scrolling social media will sharpen us intellectually. The decision to put in the extra work, the extra time needed at work will put our name higher up on the list when year-end reviews come around.

So think of where you currently are. Assess your surroundings and current state across all facets of your life. Now fast forward to a year from now. Where do you want to be? What do you want to be doing? Who do you want to become?

Now apply those questions to your daily decisions. If I do x, will it get me closer to who I want to be? If I do y, will it push me farther from who I want to be? Will this affect the timeline of becoming who I want to be this year? Yes, this may be a bit extreme for every action that you take, however, if you begin to shift your mindset to think like this, I bet you’d be surprised how many things you differently. I bet there would be a lot more movement, a lot less snoozing in the morning, a lot less social media scrolling, a lot less time being fed information but rather controlling the information you intake.

But where does the word come in to play? Well, now that you have the vision of who you want to be in a year, you need a little chip on your shoulder - a good chip - guiding you through those decisions. You need a constant reminder, a frontal focus to help make some fuzzy decisions more clear. You need a little word to help guide you on your way and be a mantra for how you will conduct yourself. That little word, that little reminder is your word of the year.

So how will you remember the word? How will you implement it into your everyday life? Well here are five ideas, yes some may be cheesy, but cheese sticks:
Change some of your hundreds of passwords that you need to use daily to incorporate your word. It will be a (multiple times) daily reminder of your focus.
Print or make a sign with the word on it. Put it on your desk or in a visible place that subliminally reminds you throughout the day.
Wake up every morning as part of your meditation, thoughts, hopes for the day, and include it in a mantra or some other way.
Close your day with a daily journal of gratitude and note the word as one of them and how you acted in that word’s best interest
Include it in your weekly check-in with yourself of how you did in review on a scale of 1-10 of implementation

Weekly To-Dos:
Take some this time to review the Word of the Year Ideas if you are having trouble coming up with what to choose
Review this past year and be sure you take inventory of the different areas of your life and how you felt and reacted to circumstances in them. NOTE: This is not an exercise of what happened to you, but what did you do when those things happened.
Think about where you want to be, who you want to be, what you want to be doing a year from now, and write them down. Next week we will be putting them into S.M.A.R.T. goals, but I want you to come prepared with ideas across the different facets of your life.
Make sure to clean out any cobwebs in your closet, your home, your mind to make sure you show up for yourself with an open mind, willing and able body, and grateful heart.