Discovering your annual Word of the Year helps you to find out what your true passions and goals are. It also helps to motivate you to keep striving for those goals, and it provides a great source of inspiration throughout the year.
Sharing your Word of the Year with friends and family is a great way to track progress, hold yourself accountable and reflect on your growth throughout the year.
Having a powerful phrase as your WOTY can be truly motivating and inspirational; it helps you move on from the previous year, set and achieve personal goals while staying focused on the bigger picture. As we face unforeseen challenges in 2023, embracing a Word of the Year can be helpful in staying positive and striving towards your dreams.
You can use your Word of the Year in a variety of ways – use it as a mantra when you need an extra boost; share it with friends and family to connect on a deeper level; or simply reflect on its meaning throughout the year. No matter how you decide to use your WOTY, embracing this powerful phrase can help you make the most of 2023.
So why not create your own WOTY? Choose something that resonates with you and inspires you to take on the year ahead.
But first...
What is a Word of the Year and why do I need one?
Word of the Year (also referred to as WOTY) is a German tradition started in 1971, identifying the most important word(s) or expression(s) used in public during a specific year. It was a retrospective assessment, introspecting the most active words that have been used to describe attitudes, emotions and events.
In more recent years, Cambridge Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary, Macquarie Dictionary, Merriam Webster, Oxford English Dictionary et. al. have all added their own WOTY to the list.
The idea behind having a Word of the Year is that it captures your prevailing mood and what you want to focus on in your life for the year ahead. It should be something that resonates with you personally and will help motivate, guide and inspire you throughout 2023.
This practice has been perpetuated throughout the world wide web in marketing and coaching contexts, becoming increasingly popular on social media. People have been using Words of The Year in an immersive way as an empowering tool to stay focused and motivated through the year, helping them create tangible goals that realize their ambitions.
Your choice of a word for the year reflects your commitment to stay focused on what matters to you.
A Word of the Year is not a New Year’s resolution or a set of goals; it is much more profound than that. It is a powerful phrase: an expression reflecting your prevailing mood, that defines your values, visions, and intentions for the year ahead. It can be used to focus on what matters most to you or spark creativity when feeling stuck.
It can be a totally new word to your vocabulary, or a word that already has meaning to you.
How Can You Choose A Word Of The Year That Reflects Your Intentions And Goals?
Finding focus is an incredibly difficult task, but it's essential if you want to achieve your goals this year. It can be hard to know where to start, but by following these simple tips, you'll be well on your way to finding your word of the year.
1. First and foremost, it's important to evaluate your current and future feelings. Are you feeling motivated and excited about the year ahead? Or are you feeling overwhelmed and stressed out?
2. Once you've identified how you're feeling, it's time to decide what exactly you'd like to focus on this year. Do you want to work on your personal relationships or career development? Maybe both are important to you!
3. Now you know what's important to you, it's time to choose words that reflect those intentions, ambitions, values, and goals. It can be tough choosing just one word for the whole year, but by breaking down what YOU want from the year – not society or other people – will make choosing a word much easier.
Additionally, incorporating your word into every aspect of your life will help make it feel more meaningful and significant.
Finally – and this is probably the most important step – make sure that when your word starts becoming less meaningful or motivating for you (which will happen sooner rather than later), that you take a step back and reflect on how far you've come, especially after such a difficult year. This allows for growth in both areas of life: personal relationships as well as professional achievements. With these three steps in mind, finding focus shouldn't be too difficult!
The Benefits Of Choosing And Applying Word Of The Year To Focus And Achieve Your Goals
Most of us have goals that we would like to achieve in the coming year. However, it can be difficult to stay focused on those goals when everything else is happening around us. That's where Word of the Year comes in.
Every year, we take a moment to think about the words that capture what's happening in the world and focus our efforts on achieving those words. It can be daunting to choose just one word, but it's an important task that has tremendous benefits. By choosing a Word of the Year and focusing on it throughout the year, you can increase your productivity and motivation levels.
Here are four ways in which choosing a Word of the Year impacts your productivity and motivation:
1. It Increases Focus - When you're focused on something, it becomes easier to accomplish tasks. By selecting a WOTY and focusing your efforts on it throughout the year, you create a clear goal to work towards. This increased focus allows you to achieve more than you would if you were working on multiple goals at once.
2. It Increases Productivity - When you're working on something that is important to you, there is usually more energy and dedication involved. By focusing your efforts on one goal for the entire year, you will see significant improvements in your productivity levels. This extra effort will pay off dividends down the road as you achieve your desired outcomes faster than normal.
3. It Increases Efficiency - When everything is handed over from one day or week to another without any planning or organization, chaos reigns supreme! By selecting a Word of the Year and planning for it ahead of time, you reduce this chaos and increase efficiency by making sure all aspects of your life are organized and accounted for prior to starting each new week or day.
4. It Increases Motivation - Choosing a WOTY can have an emotional impact as well as an intellectual impact. When we invest our time into understanding or reflecting upon a word – whether we agree with its meaning or not – we tend not only learn more about that word but also ourselves. This increased awareness often leads us down new paths or expands upon old ones, thus inspiring us even further towards our chosen goal(s).
Using Your Word Of The Year In Your Content Creation
Your powerful and influential word can have a huge impact on your content, social media presence, and even your business plan. It can help you ditch social norms, be unapologetically self indulgent and create content that reflects you unashamedly.
Your Word of the Year can also encourage clarity and focus when it comes to content creation, allowing you to be more selective about what you post or produce. Instead of creating content that is simply ‘good enough’, your WOTY can encourage you to dig deeper and create something truly remarkable.
By using your word as a filter for content creation, you can ensure that your work is in line with the topics, themes and ideas it implies. This helps to create a cohesive body of work that speaks volumes about who you are as an individual or business.
Finally, using your Word of The Year as a basis for content creation allows you to be purposeful and intentional in all that you do. It can be a great reminder to stay true to your values and visions and an excellent source of inspiration when it comes to creating engaging, thoughtful content.
By choosing and focusing on a Word of the Year, you can increase your productivity, efficiency, and motivation - and you can discover your WOTY by answering just 10 questions!
How Can Artificial Intelligence Help You Achieve Your 2023 Goals?
Staying focused and on track is a difficult task, but with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it's possible to make progress and achieve your goals. AI can be used in a variety of ways to help you stay on track, from gaining insights into your current situation to uncovering new opportunities for growth.
Harnessing The Power Of AI To Reach Your 2023 Goals
Artificial Intelligence powered tools also make it easy for us to create content quickly and easily, which is essential in today's fast paced world.
In this video, I'll show you how easy it is for users to interact with AI (Jasper.ai) to discover which word belongs foremost in their minds for the upcoming calendar year.
What Is The Oxford Languages Word Of The Year?
Each year, Oxford Languages releases its official Word of the Year, highlighting the major topics and events of the past year. The Oxford Languages Word of the Year is "Goblin Mode", and it certainly captures the mood of 2022!
What does Goblin Mode mean?
'Goblin mode’ - a slang term - expressed as ‘in goblin mode’ or ‘to go goblin mode’ – is a type of behaviour which is unapologetically slovenly, self-indulgent, lazy, or greedy. Typically, in a way that rejects normal life expectations and social norms, expectations, rebelling against the increasingly unattainable aesthetic standards and typically unsustainable lifestyles exhibited on social media such as TikTok feeds over the past twelve months.
Oxford Corpus have a long history of selecting the best word of the year. In fact, they have selected the English Language best word of the year for over forty years now!
Every year, Oxford Dictionaries editors carefully track the words and expressions that have lasting cultural significance in order to determine the Word of the Year. By closely monitoring real language usage patterns, frequency statistics and other language data from their Oxford English Corpus over a 12-month extended period, they can identify potential candidates with lasting influence.
Permacrisis
'Permacrisis', which portrays an extended period of instability and insecurity, has been distinguished as the Collins Word of the Year 2022. This term is among a variety of words that demonstrate the climate emergency and ongoing crises throughout the world, consisting of political malaise, Ukraine's warfare conflicts, global warming issues, and skyrocketing cost-of-living crisis.
Woman
Dictionary.com chose 'Woman' as their WOTY, reflecting how gender, identity and language are at the forefront of contemporary discourse, steering much of the dictionary's mission. In 2022 searches for the word - meaning an adult female person - increased more than 1,400%.
To Sum Things Up
Choosing a word of the year can be an incredibly powerful tool to help you stay focused and motivated throughout the year.
Use your WOTY to inform your content creation and social norms — make it a part of who you are!
Leverage AI technology to help you achieve your goals and use available tools to turn your vision into reality.
Release your inner goblin 😈
Make 2023 a year full of purposeful action—take steps towards realizing your dreams today!
