S3 E71: My 2023 Word of the Year + Reflecting on 2022
I still love the practice of choosing a theme word for the year, to help guide new year intentions and goals. It can be a wonderful filter for what feels intuitively right to do and create, whether in place of or along with more structured planning and goal setting.
In this episode I share about my intentions for my 2022 word PLAY, how it turned out in practice, why I’m excited about my new word for 2023, and some tips for choosing your own word of the year.
Did you pick a word for 2023, or previous years? What’s been your experience with it? Tag me on Instagram @rebecca_hass (or send me an email), and we can share ideas!
MORE FROM REBECCA
Creative Wellness Letters (my every-other-week notes of encouragement for your creative life)
Compassionate Creativity Coworking Club (try your first session for free!)
Sign up for the free Feel Good Creativity Unchallenge (5 days of super easy creativity + wellness prompts)
My PDF workbook: Fuel Your Creative Work With Compassionate Productivity
RELATED RESOURCES
Unravel Your Year workbook from Susannah Conway
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Hello and welcome to episode 71 of Being A Whole Person.
Welcome to 2023, if you're listening to this when it first comes out! I'm still in "Happy New Year" mode even though it's the second week of January. It's OK to get a slow start if you are feeling that way, too. .
I'm still on a break from the podcast, but I'm popping in here with this new year episode because I really wanted to share about my word of the year for this year, and reflect on last year a little bit. That always feels funny to do later than January. So after this, the podcast is going back into winter hibernation, and I'm planning on coming back with new episodes in the spring sometime, TBD on the date, but if you subscribe you will get it right in your feed, regardless.
So before I talk about word of the year stuff, I just want to affirm that however you choose to do goal setting for a new year, including not doing goal setting at the New Year, is totally okay, and there's a lot of hype around all of this.
I have a previous episode where I get more into detail about gentle goal setting and I will link to that in the show notes. So if you're interested in some more “how to” sort of stuff with tips on how you can do that, definitely go back to that episode.
I'll just share, or re-share, that I used to be a hyper goal setter at the beginning of each year and I would write all these things in every life category that I wanted to do. And that's cool, I love setting tangible goals, but the problem that I ran into is that I didn't really revisit my goals very often during that time. So I'd look back on it the next year, and I'd go, "Oh, I totally forgot that I even wanted to do that," so it wasn't super helpful.
If I had been hyper focused on making all of those things happen, I think maybe my head would have exploded, because there were just too many things that I wanted to do, and it didn't match the energy level of a normal human being.
I've kind of changed my approach over the years, and I've become a bit more focused on intentions and habits than specific goals at the new year. Although, I do a weekly check in, I do a monthly check in. I'm always setting goals and checking in with them throughout the year, so it's not about this new year necessarily.
But I do want to affirm, too, that if you feel a boost from the New Year, if you love that fresh start energy, that is a real psychological phenomenon. Anytime we have a change in our routine, if you took some time off for the holidays and you are getting back to it in January, that is a fresh start. It can be a great time to do a little reset, and kind of reevaluate what you've been doing.
I'm slow to commit to my goals this year. I was sick over the winter break, and the first week of January was just sort of a recalibration week. That means that this week, the second week of January, I have been much more able to do this deeper inquiry. Last week it felt like my head was very foggy and asking myself deep questions was a total no-go. And this week I'm just kind of sinking into all of these questions. I'll talk a little bit more about that when I talk about my word.
So if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you might remember that my word was "play" in 2022. What I said my hopes were for the word at the beginning of last year was kind of an antidote to how heavy things felt with like the Omicron surge and just enduring the whole pandemic thus far. It felt kinda heavy. I needed a word with more lightness to counter all of that.
I also have a tendency to be that stereotype of the oldest child in a family, the responsible, reliable person. With that sometimes comes getting weighed down in all of my "shoulds" that I think other people are putting on me, and they're not, actually. You know, that really can suck the fun out of everything because it feels like everything is an obligation, and not something I'm choosing.
I was craving more play and more experimentation, not necessarily in a calculated and scientific way, more exploration, more freedom, less overthinking, and because I'm a pianist, more literal play. I wanted to get back to a better daily habit of playing music because I was not in as good of a habit at that moment. And I wanted to do more writing simply for the joy of creation, both writing words and writing music, but especially writing music.
Basically, I just wanted to have the underlying spirit be "How can I make this more fun with whatever I'm doing?", even if it was something simple like writing with a colorful pen or wearing a colorful outfit, since colors really bring me joy. I think a lot of that stuff did happen with play being my word.
I've done a word of the year every year for several years now, and some of them have been really resonant, and have led to a lot of really tangible action. Others have just kind of fizzled out and not felt right, and that's okay. However it works is however it works.
Sometimes I had chosen supporting words, or had chosen a different focus for a certain month or something like that. If you want to hear more about my previous words of the year, I'll link back to that episode, as well.
So how did the word play actually work in practice? Well, I took on a project of reconnecting with myself as a composer throughout the spring last year, and that was really great. I let myself just really have fun and lean into whatever felt intuitively good to play that day. I used lots of different cards as prompts because I have lots of different oracle decks and creativity decks of cards.
I wrote a piece about my cat, Tsuki, who we also adopted last year. If you've been listening for a while, you may remember that we lost our cat Rusty in February of 2022, quite suddenly, and he was my relaxation mentor.
So when we were getting a new cat, it took a while to find the right one. We spent several weekends at the Humane Society and at different shelters trying to just make sure that we felt a connection with the right cat, and I thought I was hiring for this position of relaxation mentor in our next cat.
It turns out that Tsuki is more into teaching me about curiosity and play. He has tons of energy, and a friend of mine said perhaps his title is the "Minister of Mischief." I think that's actually completely perfect. So he completely embodied my word play. He is constantly playing and doing things that seem wacky and like, "Why are you doing that?" But it's because he lives to have fun, so he's a great model for this word.
As for the literal side of play, I played a lot more piano overall in 2022 than I did in 2020 and 2021. I returned to my beloved California Brazil Camp in August. They took a couple years off because of the pandemic and that was just amazing, to get to play Brazilian music 24/7 with amazing peers and teachers. Then that also led to a pretty cool Brazilian gig as a soloist with a small chamber orchestra and the Berkeley Choro Ensemble here. So it felt like I was really engaged in music in a really deep way that felt like I was in my zone, and that was really amazing.
I also made it my goal this fall to invite some friends, new and old over for some, just, playing music, just jamming, just playing for fun.
So I really feel that this word did the work that I wanted it to do, even though I couldn't have conceived of exactly how it would have come forward a year ago.
Oh yeah, and I also started working with kids a bit more in the fall, had more piano students, and started accompanying more children's choir rehearsals. Kids are great at play and fun inherently.
I experimented with a new offering called Compassionate Creativity Club, sort of a membership. It wasn't quite right in the format that I tried it, and I don't know what form that'll take in the future, but the spirit behind that really helped me clarify the spirit behind my work in general as a creative coach. It helped me really embrace that spirit of experimentation and having fun with creativity, which I know filtered out to my work with clients, too. So overall I think play was a great word last year.
Part of my review of previous years is just taking the monthly reviews that I do each month, and just compiling them together into one big document. I do this in the program Notion, so it's really easy to duplicate everything and then move it around. And I find that a lot more motivating to finish doing than I did when I had to, like, manually retype things. So I'm working on compiling all that stuff to reflect on the year, and I'm not doing a whole lot of formal reflection of the last year, except for probably some of Susannah Conway's Unravel Your Year workbook, which is a free thing she puts out every year that I really like, and this year it feels like a lot to do, like a 30-40 page workbook.
So I think that I will take the parts that resonate and I will compile my reviews and that'll be good. Sometimes I have piled on too many “shoulds” about year-end review and planning and then I don't want to do anything. So permission to do what works for you is always a good thing.
As for planning of 2023, I started in December with a piece of paper with the heading “2023 Possibilities" because I wasn't quite ready to commit to anything. But I wanted to get my ideas all in one place and be able to consider all the possibilities and all the brainstorming that I had done without feeling like I needed to do all of it at once, or even like I needed to do all of it. I just wanted to kind of survey my thoughts, so that list is ongoing.
My word for 2023 is visionary. I am both excited and a little freaked out by this word, which I think makes it the perfect word. To me, visionary is an invitation to become more intentional. And I strive to be intentional in what I do always, but I really want that to be my focus this year. It feels like over the last few years of pandemic, it felt like just kind of treading water, which is okay and was suited to the times that I was in.
It's not like I didn't do anything new over the last few years, but there was a lot of just sort of standing still, figuring things out, experimenting and trying things, which will continue, of course, but now I'm ready to have some more concrete plans.
This is also partly motivated by the fact that I'll be turning 40 this year, and I'm excited about that. I don't freak out about birthdays or anything, but milestone birthdays just kind of get you in that reflective mode, too, and get you thinking about, “What's my contribution been to the world so far?” and, you know, what do I want from the next decade, what's important to me, all that kind of stuff. So I think that was a partial motivator for the word visionary as well.
So far, the word visionary is looking like committing to a daily weekday journaling practice. For some reason, I have always struggled to make journaling a practice, and I was more of what Emily Thompson from Being Boss calls an “SOS journaler.” I would just journal when it felt like things were wrong. And that's always fine and useful, but I think to tap into this energy of having a vision, I need to be more in touch with what I'm thinking and have this dedicated time and place for receiving messages about what should come next, so journaling is an amazing way to do that.
I've actually felt a bit frustrated by my journaling this week because now that I'm making a more active effort to process what's in my mind, part of me thinks I should have it all figured out right now. Because I'm actively processing this, I should be finding all these answers and having all these epiphanies. From 3 days of journaling, that's not necessarily the case.
I've decided that I am collecting questions this week. Collecting questions is the most important first step when you're like what should happen next? Because if you ask good questions, that really increases your chance of finding an answer and finding a good answer, finding the answer that feels right to you at that moment. So it's OK that I have more questions than answers. That's going to keep happening. I'm going to keep trying to ask good questions, and just show up to write about whatever feels present and important at that moment.
I'm also recommitting to piano practice in a different way, which is playing or improvising slowly enough to really hear what's in my mind's ear. This is something I've worked on and continue to work on. As you musicians who improvise might know, it's really easy sometimes to just sort of get your fingers moving and just play a bunch of stuff that is fast and cool sounding, and, you know, it goes with the chords and you're playing chord outlines, and you're really intellectualizing what is there.
There's always going to be some element of that, but I want to be able to really hear what is happening in my mind's ear, so to speak, and translate that to playing through my fingers. I know that if I play too quickly and try to play impressive stuff that I sort of bypass that skill. So I really want to work on that to see where my musical vision takes me this year.
I know that I'll end up being more intentional about having clear practice goals in the areas where I want to improve things. At times over the last couple of years, it just felt impossible and unappealing, like I would just make my goal to show up at the piano, whatever that would look like. That was a great goal for coming out of these times when I just didn't have enough space or energy or anything.
So now I'm excited about practice, planning, and logging what I'm doing, and making little nerdy practice goals. I say nerdy strictly as a compliment. Nerdy is always a compliment. So that's what I'm excited about with this word "visionary." I don't really know what else will happen, of course, because I can't see the future, but I am looking forward to figuring out what the vision will be, and seeing what will happen.
For me, a good word of the year usually has this element of challenge and a bit of this element of discomfort, like just pushing that growth edge. So this is it. That's right where I am right now.
If you are looking to pick a word, it's not too late. You can pick a word for 2023 if it is January thirteenth, the day this is coming out. You can pick a word of the year in June if you want to. You can pick a word of the month. You get to do whatever you want and you don't have to be held back by the Gregorian calendar. In case you're feeling like, "Oh no, I'm behind on all of this," you're not. You're just in the right place and you get to start today, however you want to.
My only advice besides that for picking a word is, brainstorm really open-mindedly first. Then you will settle into whatever word feels right in your gut, because it'll feel a little bit magical. It'll probably be kind of multifaceted because there will be different things that excite you about that word. It'll just feel juicy. You'll know when it's the right one. And then say you pick that, you think it's the right one, in a few months, you don't think that anymore? You can pick a new one. That's okay too.
So if you picked a word of the year, I would love to hear about it. You can send me an email at hello@rebeccahass.com anytime you have insights about the podcast or comments, I love hearing from you about anything related to creativity. You can also find me on Instagram at @rebecca_hass. I'm not spending as much time on Instagram posting, but I am checking in there, so if you send me a message I will get it and I will reply.
So, the podcast is going back into hibernation for a bit. I hope you enjoyed this look into word of the year, and if you want to stay in touch until then, the best way to do that is to sign up for my newsletter called Creative Wellness Letters, which I send out every other Monday. It has lots of great encouragement and tips for staying connected to creativity. So I'm wishing you all the best in 2023, I'm looking forward to being back in your ears in the spring, and until then, be well.
Pianist and composer