What’s Your Theme For The Year?

Have you ever created an annual theme for yourself that strategically aims your energy and consciousness in a particular direction? Think about it! In our world of myriad distractions something like following a personal theme a focus can be very helpful!

Many major corporations use annual themes to define their missions: Nike says “Just Do It”. Toyota says “Let’s Go Places”. GE says “Building A Better Tomorrow”. What do these themes accomplish? They provide a platform for moving forward by clarifying the main mission of the organization. They define “where we’re going” both now and into the future.

Do we, as individuals, do this with the same vision and enthusiasm as our major corporations? My bet is we don’t…we don’t think of our personal life pathways as able to be architected and constructed like big corporations envision their pathways. But they can be, we can do this, if we set out to do it thoughtfully and intentionally.

Let me give you an example of what I mean…my personal theme for 2017 is Try Something New. Please note – this is NOT the same as a New Year’s resolution. To clarify the difference, let’s examine a New Year’s resolution…what are the two most common New Year’s resolutions? Everyone knows them…lose weight and get in shape. Yet how many folks make these resolutions in January only to abandon them a month later?   The trouble with New Year’s resolutions is that they are most often too sweeping, too impulsively conceived, and too difficult to be consistently undertaken successfully. On the other hand, trying something new can be done every week, without necessarily all that much effort. Asking friends over for lunch on Sunday afternoon, taking a few hours on a Saturday morning to visit a local indoor horticultural exhibit during these cold winter months, or spending half a day renting bicycles to ride a rails-to-trails trail up in the mountains…all of these are easy-to-do new things which can reflect the choice to have my personal theme of 2017 come to life.

What would stand in the way of your thinking up a theme for your own life in 2017? Maybe it would be your preference to be reactive rather than proactive in many of your life choices. It’s easy to be reactive rather than proactive – you simply hit what’s pitched at you. The problem here, of course, is that you’re not designing your own tracking through life – you’re being provoked by the environment to react to different inputs – instead of defining yourself what inputs you’ll be putting energy into. This is a huge dilemma and many people remain trapped by it, day in and day out.

Another major obstacle might be the human tendency to shy away from change. All humans seem to have a preference for the familiar, keeping to what they’re used to in life. “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” and “if it’s good enough for mom & dad then it’s good enough for me” are two well-worn examples of maintaining the status quo, but the problem with them as life guidelines is that they become over-used. We’d all still be using wind-up pocket watches and land-line rotary telephones if keeping to the familiar was truly an eternally flawless and perfect modus operandi. It takes courage to vary from the usual, predictable and well-worn ways of doing things we’ve become accustomed to.

What could be some benefits of having a theme to orient yourself with during 2017? First off, humans always make out better by having structure in their lives. Like a marker on a roadmap, having a theme we’re recalling each day as a personal guide helps us center ourselves attitudinally. I had a client a number of years ago who wrote his annual theme out on a 3×5 card and taped it to the inside of his medicine cabinet. He was reminded of his theme every morning as he got ready to go to work. Second, when I was a whitewater kayaker I remember a trick taught to me by other kayakers when running a challenging stretch of river: fasten your eyes on a calm place downriver and then, in your mind’s eye, visualize pulling yourself toward it as you paddle. Having a creative theme that you remind yourself of each morning and then “paddling toward it” during the day can be a new way of actually working toward getting to your goals for the year.

I hope this strategy is helpful as 2017 gets underway. Remember, there are always two parts to moving ahead in life – the first is conceiving of the goals, and the second is actually working toward the goals…and the creation of a theme for the year can help in achieving both.