Word Of The Year: Making It Count In Your Home

Choosing a word of the year can help you to actually accomplish things that are important in your life and in your home. 

Happy new year friends! We have been pretty MIA these past few weeks mostly due to the holidays but I wanted to start the year off right by sharing our 2019 word of the year!

You have probably seen many people sharing their resolutions for 2019 and that used to be my go-to way of kicking off the new year. 

Unfortunately, the story was always the same, I’d write down goals and resolutions, hit it hard for a week or two and then slowly fall back into my old habits which always left me feeling like a giant failure.

I mean who doesn’t have that friend that vows every year to start going to the gym on January 1st only to backslide by months end? Typically by the end of February, they are eating oatmeal pies and watching real housewives with the rest of us.

Have you ever wondered why? 

It’s because resolutions just don’t work very often, we are attempting to turn our entire world around in one day… Changing habits that took us years to make and that just isn’t realistic, so we fail.

Knowing that resolutions are rarely successful, last year I wanted to try something completely different!

Instead of writing down my resolutions and goals, I  created a word of the year that basically encompassed what I wanted the year to look like for my life + home in a particular area that needed improvement and surprisingly, I had great success in that area of my life during a really tough year.

So knowing that this approach works I was so excited when it came time to choose a new word for this year and I hope that you’ll join me by creating your own word for 2019.

Choosing A 2019 Word Of The Year

When asked, I feel like a lot of us automatically know what our word of the year should be. We know our deepest struggles and where we are lacking usually right off the bat, but for some, things may not be so clear.

Think of areas you struggle or would like to improve, then write down the words that come to mind. The idea is to choose one word (just one if you can) and focus on that one word throughout the year.

Let your word be at the forefront of the things you do and decisions that you make instead of making resolutions then never sticking with them, use one word and recite it to yourself when you’re feeling discouraged.

For me keeping my word front and center helps me to feel more in control and instead of concentrating on tons of complicated resolutions, I am slowly allowing that word to seep in and change me little by little.

Use your word for motivation, encouragement, and to grow instead of guilt-tripping yourself when you’re struggling, you can simply resight your word and use it for motivation in those tough moments.

Many people have seen success with this and I believe it is partly because using just one word isn’t as overwhelming as “I want to start going to the gym five days a week” or ” “I want to be set financially” and it kind of makes things seem less complicated and makes the it easier to process.

While reflecting on the year and things you’d like to change about yourself or your life try to pinpoint one word that sums it up for you or if you’re like me and think your life is such a hot ass mess that you can pick just one, try no more than three.

Here are some word examples 

Kindness

courage

discipline

inspire

gratitude

abundance

change

wealth

creativity

presence

health

confidence

action

forgiveness

release

trust

self-love

For me choosing a word of the year starts with our home, I mean think about it, how can we change our life if it doesn’t start with our home?

2018 was a very rough year for me, kind of a rollercoaster ride of sorts, except not the fun kind that you want to stay on. Before 2018 my life was settled, predictable, and easy.

Then somehow before I knew it all of these hard things began to happen like extensive health issues with multiple family members, moving job locations, going from three people in our home to four, raising a tween, trying to navigate this new family dynamic we suddenly had, a job change for my husband, raising a teenager, deaths in the family, watching my grandmother slowly decline to the point where my heart aches daily not knowing when it will happen and dreading the day I’ll have to say goodbye.

Now before you go questioning me, no, not all of these things are bad or stressful, but they are all very different than what made up my life before 2017-2018.

Being an introvert has kind of preprogrammed me to reject change and having so many things happen seemingly all at once caused me to kind of lean into this rut of unstableness instead of picking myself up and adapting to the way my life was changing.

Now you may be asking yourself what this has to do with the word of the year or how that affects your home but bear with me here.

During this period, while things were kind of spinning out of control so was our HOME…

I stopped caring as much about things like decluttering, organizing and keeping our home in shape by controlling the items that we were bringing in. I stopped going through my kid’s clothes seasonally to get rid of the old to make room for the new, I was strapped for time + energy and things slowly started to pile up around me.

Things that were once important to me no longer were because I was so consumed with the things that were going on in my life that were out of my control and I had no energy or motivation left when it came time to get things back on track.

If you’ve ever had a rough year then you may know what its like to feel stuck and how quickly that can roll over into other areas of your life.

It has taken me way longer than I would like to admit to acknowledge that there was a problem but I think I always knew deep down that things had to change and only I could fix things.

No choosing a word isn’t going to make those stresses fix themselves but we can learn how to adapt to the changes in our lives and I believe right down to my core that the way our home functions and looks has a direct effect on how we feel as human beings and vice versa.

Example, my life felt so out of my control and slowly my home began to reflect those feelings in the form of clutter, those practices that kept things in check before fell by the wayside and suddenly my home began to resemble the way I was feeling inside. 

So with all of that being said, I want 2019 to be a much better year for me and for any of you that may be struggling with some of these same issues!

So what better time to implement change than the beginning of a brand new year.

Considering how screwed up things felt for me I couldn’t pick just one word to sum up what I want out of 2019 so I landed on three simple words that I believe will totally turn things around in my home which will then spill over to those other areas of my life so without further ado here they are.

 This post may contain affiliate links for your shopping convenience, this is at no extra cost to you. For information see my disclosures here. 

 

2019 Word (s) of the year

Organize + Simplify + Minimize

Each of these words can have a direct connection with how we live our everyday lives and focusing on these three things is what I believe will turn things around not only in our lives but our homes as well.

 

Organize: I believe the more organized our home is the more smoothly our lives will run. Think about it, if we are constantly spending time searching for things that should have their own place then we are literally wasting hours of precious time each year. If we are always surrounded by clutter and chaos how can we expect our lives not to reflect that?

Having an organized home would no doubt make our lives run smoother.

This word alone is one that I believe could be life-changing for so many of us and keeping it at the forefront of our minds will help us to achieve it.

So for me, it is important to stay focused on having an organized home by whatever means necessary. If it takes six months to get it all done then so be it.

 

Simplify: Simplifying our lives in all areas by becoming aware of and putting a stop to the tasks that do nothing to better our lives then creating alternatives for those tasks if necessary.

For me this includes things like daily trips to the grocery store instead of planning it out and only going on one day I tend to make 3-4 stops per week which is a huge waste of time and money, getting sucked down the social media rabbit hole when I should be focusing on a project, watching too much tv when I have housework I could be doing, putting off writing posts until the last minute, etc.

Anything that does not move us one step closer to a simpler life is taking up precious time that could be spent with our families or doing something productive instead.

No, I don’t mean completely stopping things that we enjoy like watching tv but rather stopping the things that are a total waste of time or tend to stop us from reaching our goals.

 

 

Minimize: Learning how to live with less. Items and materialistic things do not make us happy and I believe we can be so much more fulfilled and definitely a lot less stressed by living with less stuff. (this was an expensive lesson for me to learn)

A huge portion of why I feel the way I have for nearly a year is due to having too much stuff… Stuff that never gets used, its just wasting away in some corner or shoved in a drawer doing nothing but causing more stress and mental chaos.

Imagine if none of that were there. If I had extra space for things I actually love.

Socially we’ve been taught that more is more and we that need every single shiny thing in order to feel accomplished, successful or just good about ourselves.

Due to that huge lie, I believe we have all bought and bought so much stuff that our lives are being clogged up by junk that we have absolutely no use for and contrary to the stuff that has been pounded into our brains we are still left with an unfulfilled feeling at the end of the day.

For our family learning to live with less will be a change, one we will all have to get used to but the benefit of only having items that we actually love/need/use will be so worth it!

 

These are words and actions that I believe will have a huge effect on our home but also branch out into other areas of our lives as well!

With each action, a domino effect will occur and before we know it practicing one word will lead to a whole string of words in the form of lessons learned and changes that begin to happen in our lives.

I wholeheartedly believe that creating the right environment in our home will create the right environment in our mind + body + soul!

Do you have a word of the year? If so I would love to hear what it is and how you plan to use it for change in 2019.

 

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