"Flourish" in 2025 - What will you do this year?
Last December I attended a luncheon with a local women's group that changed my perspective. The speaker walked us through her journey of selecting a word of the year, and she told us stories about how she leveraged a word each year to manifest positive, intentional changes in her life.
She had been practicing this for several years, and it had truly impacted her life. It was impressive, inspiring even. I was intrigued.
When I got home I spoke with my family about the idea. I left my corporate dream job a couple of years back due to a health issue. Through an 8-month journey, my definition of success changed. I've been stuck since then career-wise, and it's caused a ripple effect in our household.
After thinking it through, we agreed to a year-long experiment. We went through a lot of words, looking for something positive that implies growth and transformation. We agreed on the word flourish.
We're early in Q2 now, and we bring up flourish several times each week in dinner conversation. I can't say we're flourishing yet, but the word has driven a lot of change in our household.
We are collectively focused in the same direction, and it is helping with decision making as a family as we tackle some grown-up issues and our adult child and almost-adult child are processing these are the kinds of decisions they'll need to handle on their own sooner rather than later.
A copy of our family graphic is below for your reference. I have a print of this next to my desk, and I read it a couple of times every day. I believe that working the mission at Strategic Stacey to lift others up will also lift up me and my family.
So, why have I included this in the newsletter? How does it tie into best practices and methodologies that consultants use?
I'm so glad you asked!
A word of the year is really about an idea, a theme, or a concept around which you want to make positive change during a specific period of time.
The strategy of using a cohesive idea in this way is commonly used as a change management strategy to help people adapt to change that's coming.
Why? If people don't understand change that's coming, the natural reaction is to resist the change.
Using a word or phrase that helps explain the outcome you're looking for, in this instance - flourish, helps people start to put the future state in a more tangible perspective.
A few of the people who were skeptical will usually adapt to the change, and they will begin to adopt the change. They may even become champions of the change.
Change champions will spread the word and help others adopt the change. This dramatically increases the likelihood of success. Even with a sample group size of four, such as my household, keeping focus on the theme is critical for adoption.
I'll dig into change management a lot more in future articles, as it's important to so much of what you do in your job.
Unless your job is heavily involved in change, you may have never heard of it. Yet knowing about it will give you an advantage. Being a champion for change in your organization will also give you an advantage.
At Strategic Stacey, we're all about advantages and flourishing. :)
