I have not participated in having a Word of the Year very often. I usually forget that I want to do that or haven’t been too interested in it. This year, I did forget again but I had a growing interest in it. My friend had found her word, so I asked her about her process of deciding.
She told me that she thinks of her goals she is working on and what God has been working on her about. She thinks about words that describe these things and prays about it.
So I set out to find a word. I prayed and reviewed my life and didn’t see much and then kind of forgot about it.
Then in the last couple of months, it has come to light for me that I tend to avoid things where I see looming failure. This was initially related to me logging my food. I tend to go for a while and then stop. In a coaching situation, we worked out that I didn’t like doing my food logging when I saw that I was going to exceed my quota of calories for the day. It was pulled out of me that I consider that as a failure of the whole day. I don’t count any of the good choices that day I made as success but just trashed the whole day in my mind. So I tend to stop logging after a while. After facing that realization, I have been able to move forward in my food logging, even when I exceed my calorie goal and I don’t see the whole day as a loss. I see it more as something that I should look at and learn how to plan better next time.
Then this last week, I was in a work situation where I made a dry-run presentation for an upcoming class. I received a lot of feedback that requires improvement in my presentation. Felt like failure again. I didn’t even work on my edits for a week because I was sulky. I realized that I was frozen up again due to what I label as ‘failure’.
That’s when I realized that my word of the year is Failure. Sounds kind of icky. I would prefer Grace or Love or anything but Failure. I’m kind of excited about it. I picture that failure is going to come my way and I’m going to need to dig into it and see if it is really failure or just that I’ve labelled a small piece of something that I’m really rocking as a complete dumpster fire. Giving myself that grace to look inward to see what’s in there and love and forgive myself and look to my Savior for His ministering gaze.
I also will face hard out-in-the-open failures but I’m going to learn to fall on my loving God each and every time and find out that He loves me always, always, always. Nothing I do changes His love for me. I’m going to learn to run to Him faster and really believe Him that I’m in just the right place He needs me.