Practical Magic | Choose 3 Words to Guide Your Year
More effective than resolutions, more practical than goals, #my3words is a framework to be productive with purpose. I share my own experience with choosing 3 words every year since 2019, tips to choose your own and reveal one of my 2022 words.
Choose 3 Words to Guide Your Year
This is the first episode of 2022, and I invite you to choose three words to guide your year.
Your three words, if you choose them, are not resolutions or goals.
I've been doing this practice since 2019, inspired by Chris Brogan and Rob Hatch, and I really believe in this process. I don't think it's an accident that the last three years of my life have been massively successful on many levels for me.
In this episode, I share why these three words are important, why I chose this process, and why I recommend it for my clients and students. I offer some guidance on how you can choose your three words and how to use them. Finally, I share the three words I've used over the last three years and how they guided me – plus I also share one of my three words for 2022.
Why 3 Words?
I've noticed we tend to fall into a trap of starting the new year from a place of a deficit and not enoughness. "I didn't finish this last year. I didn't do well enough last year. I didn't complete this. Starting the new year from that place puts you in a position of powerlessness. Although New Year's resolutions can be empowering for some, they often encourage the mindset of: I need to right the wrongs of my past.
Choosing three words counteracts this because they are not three words to punish yourself. They're chosen as a compass and a guide for your actions as themes for the year. You consciously choose to focus on three areas, max, and that helps shape your year. You use these words as a decision-making framework: Is this going to bring me closer or further away to the expression of my three words?
To give you a flavor of what I mean, I'll share my three words for 2019, 2020, and 2021.
2019
Space
Voice
Consistency
2020
Prolific
Magnetic
Wealthy
2021
Expanded
Sacred
Well
For 2022, I have chosen three words and I will share one of them with you: Vitality.
Why three? Why not two? Why not four? Why not one?
I don’t know about you, but I feel three words bring a deep sense of balance. Do you know that the triangle is the strongest shape? Three points hold a lot of power.
Two words can create a binary where there doesn't need to be one. It can create a dynamic where there is tension between the two words, or if the two words are too similar they can cancel each other out.
One word can be really powerful – I had a client who chose the word ‘Core’ for her year. But since I use different factors, approaches, and energies to guide me, I like to use three. I encourage you to try three words as well.
I fear that choosing any more than three words will run the risk of scattering your attention.
Choose Words That Are Feeling-Based
I encourage you to choose words that are feeling-based. How do you want to feel?
By choosing words that are feeling-based, when you hear and speak that word to yourself, it will instantly translate into a feeling, state, and body memory that you can anchor into your physical experience. You can visualize it, touch it, and taste it; it has a sensation attached. You can feel it in the core of your being.
Maybe it makes you feel a little nervous. Maybe it makes you feel a little scared. Oh my god, I can't believe I chose this word. This feels like a lot, but that sensation feels really good.
When we choose words that sound great on paper or are a neat mental concept but don't translate into a visceral physical feeling, it can be hard to use them in everyday life. And this is what your three words are for. They are there to guide your daily routine actions, decisions, activities, and how you prioritize your life. They need to live and walk and breathe with you every single day.
For instance, in 2021 my three words were Expanded, Sacred, and Well. From the moment I chose those words, I could feel what they would mean. I could feel what expanded from the inside-out in my body would feel like; it was a state. I could feel what sacred meant; I felt the hairs on my neck stand up. Well came from a place of such depths; I wanted to feel well in my body and in my mind, but I also wanted to draw power, creativity, and ideas from a deep well within me. Those three words were so visceral that I was able to live into them deeply all last year and act accordingly because they were feeling-based.
Once You Choose Your Words, How Do You Use Them?
Live into your words
Chris Brogan, from whom I initially borrowed this concept, recommends writing your words out every day in the notebook you're using. I personally have my words on a whiteboard in my office where I look at them probably about 250 times a day. They are such a big part of my life. I cannot forget them. They are there to guide your actions and your habits.
Instead of choosing arbitrary goals, use your words to dictate where your attention goes and how you measure your success in certain areas. Choose your words, then choose habits that allow you to create that feeling to live into that word every day. Goals are simply you choosing how will you measure the success of those habits. They're very actionable. They can help you with decision-making. Every time you make a decision, you can bring up your three words, and check your decision against them.
For example, I would look at my words for 2021 and ask myself, ‘Is saying yes to this going to make me feel well? Is it going to pour into my internal well? Is it going to contribute to my well-being? Or is it going to take that away? Can I make the way I'm doing this feel sacred? How can I elevate this experience and create more ways to honor and respect it and to receive respect in return? How can I receive more of what I already have? How can I expand my capacity to receive and to enjoy this experience?’
Even in struggle and crisis, your three words can be the home to which you come back. If things go wrong, you get off course or feel lost, come back to your three words. Start from scratch. How can you show up in your life to live into your three words? What are the simplest ways you can create these feelings in your life today? If you're in a crisis and you have to react in a certain way, can you bring these words into how you decide to react?
Make a commitment to yourself
Another way that using three words for your year is so powerful is that it shows commitment to yourself, to your own life, and to your own flourishing. Transformation takes time. Research has shown that it takes on average 62 days to form a habit. Some say it's more like 100 days. We're talking about long-term change. When you spend one whole year focusing deeply on something that matters to you, you will really start to see results.
Not only that, but you will also have time to hone your own process. Working with your new words at the beginning of a new year will feel a little clunky. It will feel different. You may not know how to work with them yet. Your new habits may feel uncomfortable. But by the end of the year, you will have overcome that discomfort and updated and improved your processes because your words will have guided you all along.
Take your greatest visions to the fire
Having these words support your organic process of change can be magical. Even when things in your life are already going well. Especially when things in your life are going really well – you must proactively shake things up and change. Otherwise stagnation sets in really quickly.
I have a Shamanic teacher who says, ‘Take your greatest visions to the fire.’ I understand that to mean that even when you're in the middle of a process and things are going really well, take it to the fire and see what survives. See what is actually ego, excess, and grandiosity and not in line with your up-to-date desires. What survives? What's the goal? What are the precious metals that are left in the embers afterward?
I loved my three words last year: Expanded, Sacred, and Well. 2021 was perhaps one of the best years of my life. I’m not sure I'm ready to let those go. I would quite like to spend another three months continuing working with those words, but I'm not going to. I'm taking them to the fire. It's time to change, it's time to step into something new, even if I'm not ready.
When you have three new words, you have an opportunity to reinvent, renew, and take a new look at every area of your life: your personal life, professional life, relationships, spiritual life. Are your routines still serving you? Is your environment still serving you? Choosing three new words gives you a chance to put on a different pair of spectacles and see a different perspective.
How My 3 Words Worked for Me the Last 3 Years
I promised I would share the history of my three words for the last three years and how they worked for me.
2019
The first year I used this practice was in 2019. My three words were Space, Voice, and Consistency.
The background for this year is that I had burned out in November 2018. I'd given up 80% of my contracts and income because I could not hold all the success I created for myself, I did not have a stable foundation. I began the year with a lot of empty space, uncertainty, and a desire to dig down to the deepest foundations, scrape away all the old paint, throw out all the rotten pieces of wood, and start completely from scratch.
Space. Space was how I ended up living what I called my Year of Magical Living, which became the name of this podcast. It was the year in which I decided to turn all of my rules and routines upside down and inside out. I started by creating space to figure out what was needed. I created space to honor new routines and practices, set new boundaries, and create new systems that would protect my time and my energy. 2019 ended up feeling deliciously spacious, and by creating space I created opportunities to receive bigger bounties in the second half of the year.
Voice. I developed and cultivated my voice. I was devoted to publishing and practicing my writing – that was the year I wrote 50-something newsletters. I wrote two newsletters a week and there were a lot of blog posts that went out. By having the space to cultivate my voice in that devoted way, I was able to use my voice to lead. By the end of 2019, I started getting invitations from people in my audience, newsletter subscribers, and social media followers asking me to coach them through the same process of transformation I had been living in my Year of Magical Living. I was also invited by Seth Godin to lead with my voice at a conference that his business was hosting. Deciding to focus on my voice transpired into some beautiful opportunities for me in 2019 and 2020.
Consistency. I was committed to creating habit streaks for three areas: mental wellness, body conditioning and strength, and publishing. I did meditation and a 30-minute core and stretching routine every single day that I could in 2019. I committed at the beginning of the year to publish something online every second day. I had a big year-at-a-glance calendar, and I would mark the calendar with different colored dots. As the year went on, I had these beautiful colorful streaks right in front of me and I was very motivated to keep going because I didn't want to break the chain. By developing this kind of consistency, my body is still totally transformed from the amount of discipline and devotion I put into being consistent and taking care of myself. The body of work I created with Consistency – blog posts and YouTube videos – are still sending me traffic and delivering business results years later.
The space, voice, and consistency created the foundation from which a lot of my business is built today. I don't have to work as hard, be as visible, or publish as much because of what I did in 2019.
2020
In 2020, my three words were Prolific, Magnetic, and Wealthy.
Prolific. I was so captivated by the results from my consistency experiment that I wanted to continue it but evolve it. This is an example of not reusing a word even if it has worked well for you the year before. Choose a similar word but one that's evolving in a more specific way for you. So I moved from consistency to prolific; they sound similar but with a different flavor.
Living into the word prolific involved hiring, so I made my first monthly hire in my business: my incredible Creative Coordinator, Megan. I hired her in 2020 and she is the one who enabled me to have this podcast, publish as much as I did in 2020, and to leverage the content I already had. She also helped me to create three products: Unstoppable Coaching, Vision of Success online course, and Align + Flow. 2020 was a prolific year!
Magnetic. Magnetic was all about me embodying the success that I wanted to receive on a physical level. Instead of dreaming and hoping to get great clients and contracts, I focused on becoming the kind of collaborator, coach, friend or client that my soul people would want to be with. This involved a lot of physical practices of energy raising and legitimacy. All I can say is that that was a very successful year for me.
Wealthy. I wanted to feel rich in health, relationships, and assets. I wanted to feel like I was creating a great hand of cards to play in my life. This word also worked out for me, because 2020 was the year that my husband and I bought a home and a car. We were able to enjoy some of the fruits of our labor from the last few years. When I chose the word wealthy, I chose to focus on profitable activities only and leveraged and scaled a lot of what I had already created.
2021
In 2021, my three words were Expanded, Sacred, and Well.
Expanded. This word was a development on the word magnetic. This was very much about expanding from the inside out. After the massive growth year I had in 2020, both in my personal life and in business, I realized that to attain another level, I would have to expand my capacity on the inside to be able to hold the next level of success. All of last year, I worked on building my capacity to hold and receive. My emotional stability, resilience, systems, the ways in which I use my energy, saying no more often, and working on how to be open to receive more and not have a brittle foundation.
Sacred. Last year was very challenging because of all the lockdowns and the restrictions. There were seven months in France in which a lot of core businesses were closed. We couldn't go to gyms, we couldn't even go more than 10 kilometers away from our house, and we had a curfew at 6pm (!). We were very limited last year, and the first half of the year felt profoundly unmagical.
Sacred was a conscious choice to choose to see magic in the mundane. This podcast was born of the word sacred. I worked on elevating my settings by beautifying my spaces. I acted with reverence. I created an internal personal experience of joy and creativity. I turned my office into an artist's studio. I also devoted a lot of time last year to spiritual work which was new for me. I hadn't committed that much time and attention to spiritual work since I was a child.
Well was about being well in mind, body, and spirit, and moving a lot. I spent a lot of time outside and created a deeper well from which to draw in my work. That deep well had to be sourced from experiences that were not work.
Sacred and well drove me to take a whole month off in August for my business, and made me a lot more disciplined about getting outside, stepping out of my office and inspiring myself.
In 2021, I wasn't as prolific, I didn't even have any concrete goals. But because of the foundations that my previous words put in place, I still expanded. I expanded my income, I worked less yet I made more, I grew my audience by 75% even though I only published about 20% of what I published in previous years. I created a lot of recurring clients in my business. More women I've coached came back for a second or third time, so I could still fill my practice without having to be so visible. That's all thanks to the work I did in the last few years guided by these focused words.
For Further Guidance in Choosing Your 3 Words
If you haven't guessed by now, I really believe in this process. When I first heard about the three words from Chris Brogan and Rob Hatch, one thing I noticed was that they didn't share a concrete process or framework to help you choose your words so I decided to create one. It has a lot to do with starting from a place of feeling – focusing on desires, not goals.
If you are interested in being guided through my process for how to choose your three words more consciously with more data, I really invite you to go and check out my online course, Vision of Success. There are two modules. The first module helps you figure out your specific desires in three areas of your life: creative freedom, financial stability, and lifestyle design. The second module helps you harvest all you learned and choose three aligned words for your year, and then which habits and goals to set accordingly. I'm sure this podcast has given you a lot of data and inspiration, but if you want more guidance the online course is there for you.
If you feel called, I would love to hear your three words, or one word, for the year if you want to share it with me. May 2022 be one of much focus and many blessings.
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