Hello and welcome to Unshakeable with Human Design, everyone! I’m your host, Nicole Laino, and this is our last episode of 2023. So, super exciting to be here with you, and really kind of surreal that we are at this point already. I don’t know where the last half of 2023 went. Honestly, it went by, it is a blur, I don’t know if you feel the same way.

But here we are, on the cusp of 2024. And this is an episode that I do every year, or at least I know I did it last year. Where I talk about my word of the year. Because I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, really. I have goals, obviously. I have a plan for 2024, we’ve done our launch calendar.

We’ve looked at the year and said this is what we want to be working on. But that process for me has even changed and been refined over the years. But one of the things that is clear for me is this word of the year. And the reason that I like the word of the year over a traditional New Year’s resolution, the New Year’s resolution usually is like, I’m gonna do this thing.

I Already feel like, there’s a lot of things I’m going to do. I have no shortage of action items. But what I have found more helpful and much more useful for me is this word of the year concept. And the reason for that is the word of the year is really the intention for everything.

It’s like this little umbrella that everything fits under. This one word that I give the year and if I’m planning something or doing something, I’m automatically looking at it saying, how does it fit with the word? Because this is the theme for the year.

This was the thing that I felt above all other things that my business, my life, my energy needed. So what I’m going to break down for you in this episode is I’m going to tell you what my word of the year is for 2024. I’m going to tell you how human design plays a role in this process of choosing your word and how it played a a role in me choosing my word and how I arrived at this this point here and through my human design.

And then at the end, I’m going to tell you how you can find your own word, the process that you can go through to choose your own word for 2024 so that you can have this overarching theme and then whenever something comes across your plate, whenever something is a question for you, you’re obviously going to be following your human design strategy and authority to make those decisions, but you’re also thinking about it from the context of, does this fit with the word?

With the theme that I’ve set for myself? Is it on brand for this year is sort of a way to think about it. I think it’ll become a lot clearer when I break down what my word is, and how it works, and then I’m going to take you through the process of choosing your own.

If you haven’t run your human design chart though, by the way, you can go to nicolelaino.com/chart. That way you know as we’re going through this, when I talk about being a 5/1, when I talk about being a manifesting generator, you know what all of that is and you know what you are. So that you’re able to follow along from those concepts as well.

So let’s dive in. My word for 2024 is, and I’m not going to say I agonized over it because I didn’t, but there were lots of words that I could have thrown out and where I second guessed it, I was saying like, oh, should it be a word like this? And I kept coming back to no, I just had total and complete clarity about this, that the word for 2024 for me is optimize.

Optimize is my word for 2024. Because I’ve built a lot over the last two years. I’ve built a lot over the last several years. But definitely the last two years have been really heavy lifting. A lot of creation has been done. I’ve been diving into a lot of concepts.

I have tried a lot of different things. And as a manifesting generator, I need to try a lot of things. My energy needs to play in lots of different spaces and that’s part of how I learn. It’s part of how I navigate the world is by following what feels good to me in the moment. And as a 5/1 I needed to deepen my expertise.

I needed to really become an expert. That one line really needs to be in place as a 5/1. I got certifications, I got several certifications in human design. Business certification in human design, working with teams in human design. I have really gone to the depths of my knowledge in this world.

I have put into practice what I’ve been doing and I have tried different launch strategies. We rolled out the human design lab membership. We have the VIP tier to that that I’m teaching. We have my mastermind. There’s so much out there that we have been working on building and trying different things with.

That now it’s time to optimize. And I felt this from a really deep place that this next year was not about building more new stuff. This next year was about refinement. It was about optimizing. It is about tweaking and refining what already exists. Getting rid of anything that doesn’t fit this core brand and business that I have built, that I really feel is in alignment with the expertise that I deepened as a 5/1, all the things that I’ve tried.

When you try lots of things, it makes it very clear which ones don’t belong and which ones do. So everything fits under this word, under this theme of optimizing. So if I get a hankering in the middle of the year to go building something new, now if I’m really pulled to that from a sacral place, and I have clarity on it through my emotional authority, I can move in that direction, I can do whatever I want.

But does it serve this overall theme of optimizing? Which is truly the phase that I feel like I am at. Where 90 percent of my energy is going to be about refining what already exists rather than creating new things consistently, right? So, what this means to me, optimizing, again, it’s the umbrella that everything fits under.

So, for me, it’s my processes, my launches, my programs, optimizing my message even more. Optimizing this podcast, the production of it, the way that we get it out to everyone. Optimizing its expansion and optimizing its visibility. How can I get it out to more people? And these are all things that we have been doing, but now in 2024, how can I do them even better?

If I wasn’t putting most of my energy into these other areas of building and creating, what would I be able to accomplish in optimizing and refining these other aspects if I put most of my energy there? That I get excited about.

That’s where my sacral gets excited, I start to develop energy, I start to build and create energy, which is what the sacral does when it’s turned on. I’m turned on by that. I am turned on by the idea of things getting better, of my clients getting even better results, of my podcast getting bigger and getting seen by more people, or listened to by more of the right people, by creating those connections with people.

I get really excited about that and then I’m able to work in that excited energy and I’m able to get more done in less time. So this is how that works from a human design perspective. I’m becoming even more obsessed with my client results. We’ve already started to make some of those changes.

We added private readings and one to one coaching sessions for my mastermind. Why did we do that? Because I was like, how do I get people results faster? How do I optimize things for them? And that might lead to a change down the road where we change it even more. But this is working right now.

The big question was, how can I make this move so much faster for them? How can I deepen their connection to their human design faster? How can we get them into the business building optimization aspects of the funnel building that we do even faster? How can we get them there faster?

And that was our answer to it, was there there had to be more one to one time. So you see, optimizing doesn’t all mean me spending less time. It means me spending more time doing the things that move the needle. And really putting my energy into that. And optimize might not be the word that you would choose for this, but for me, that lets me know that when I start to move away from it where it’s more about me brute forcing or just creating from that needing to build place, that doesn’t feel in alignment right now for me.

We get to choose where our sacral energy gets tuned to. People can get a little bit sidetracked or misinformed with the sacral energy. Like it’s these signs from God that are pulling you exactly where you need to be. We have choice. We get to choose what we want.

We get to put our thoughts, we get to put our intentions out there, and then sacral guides us to what we have energy for, if you’re a generator, or a manifesting generator. As a projector, you get to choose where you want to go and what you want to be recognized for. And then invitations will guide you to the right actions and the right people that you need to take and be connected with in order to have that intention come out. In order for you to have success in that area.

We do have choice. So this is my way of choosing, my way of tuning my sacral energy. This is what we’re focusing on now. So let’s get excited about this stuff. And if I’m not excited about it, then I can adjust. So, I hope that’s clear. How you can use strategy and authority.

Strategy and authority for us sacral beings, it’s telling us what do we have energy for. And I’m telling my body what I want to have energy for. I’m telling my body, this is where I want to go. I’m letting the universe know. This is where I’m setting my sights. This is what I desire to create for myself.

And that’s where visioning and everything else comes in, where I have big visions about what this could look like. And that’s how my sacral gets excited about the right things to do, rather than pulling me all over God’s green earth, spreading my energy all over the place. I’ve done that, I’ve experienced that, it’s time to move on from that.

Right? So, let’s talk about how you can choose your word. Because my word might be very, very different than yours. So this is the process that you can go through to choose your word for 2024. So, the first thing that you do is go through a post mortem of 2023. What worked, what didn’t, and why? What do you wish you could change?

What do you wish was in place? What didn’t feel good? What felt great that you want to do again? And go pretty deep here. We can do very surface level analysis of the past, and that leads to surface level results in the future.

If you can look in the past, if you can look at what you’ve done, what you’ve created, and realize you don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, that there can be ways that you can shift and change things, so that you’re moving into 2024 taking the best of it with you, and fixing whatever didn’t feel good, and what areas you needed to shift. It really, really helps.

It’s a nice time at the end of the year to be able to reflect on this stuff. Because once the year starts, we get into that momentum again and we forget to do these post mortems. We forget to say after the end of the launch, really what worked, what didn’t, and why. Really what worked after this, what didn’t, and why.

In the moment, we’re moving so fast toward things that we forget the past leaves clues. And this is a nice time of year to look at the entire year and say, what clues did this year leave me? And another thing that I like to ask at the end of the year is, where was your energy naturally turning in the fourth quarter?

You might have felt like your energy was asking you for something, like, I really feel like I need a certain thing. For me, I had other words that came up, there’s always the words like unstoppable and these power words that we can use.

People will pick these words. And none of that felt right to me. Part of it was other people’s voices coming up in my head being like, oh, it should be something like this. And then I kept coming back to it and I was like, no, I feel like my energy all through Q4 was like, optimize, optimize, optimize, optimize.

That was the word my intuition kept kicking up to me. So, did you have an intuitive kind of guidance, particularly toward the end of the year, that was saying, this is where we need to start charting our course for, right? So, what did you feel? Did you feel anything like that in the last quarter of the year?

That your energy was naturally begging you for something else? And are you giving yourself enough space, time, and energy to really allow what it is that you want to come in? We want to hit the ground running like gangbusters in 2024. Everybody wants to hit January running, and we can.

But sometimes there’s a fair amount of space and comfort that we need to create in our energy so that we can have the results that we really want to call in. Do you feel like you have the space to take things in and are you incorporating that into this theme that you’re setting for yourself?

And that can certainly be part of the goals that you set for yourself for 2024. The last question that you can ask yourself is, what area do you feel needs the most attention right now? What is the area in your business that you feel needed attention, more energy, greater results?

What wasn’t working? I really encourage you to go deeper here. Because a lot of people will say something like, I need more clients. I need more followers.

I need more attention. I need a bigger audience. It all has to do with more people paying you. Get it. Who doesn’t need more of that? I don’t know an entrepreneur that’s like, I have all the clients I need. I’m good. Revenue is fine. I have no desire for more. Said no entrepreneur ever. So recognize that’s a very surface level answer.

But need more clients. Can you go deeper than that? Can you go to, I feel like my message wasn’t converting. Or, it isn’t connecting with my ideal client. Maybe it’s not bringing in the right people. What defines right people versus the people that you’re getting? What’s not correct or what’s not aligned with the people that it is connecting with?

Are you finding that people are not converting but they want to? Okay, well, you have to go deeper. You have to go deeper into exactly what is it about your message that’s not working? What is it about not having enough clients? How is it that it’s not working?

Do you not have enough people reaching out? Do you not have enough people in the funnel? Are not enough people coming into your email list? Do you need a top of funnel strategy? Lots of offers maybe means that you’re spread too thin. If you have people coming in, but they’re not converting, or they’re not coming over to the email list, you’re getting some engagement, but not the level that you want.

They’re not coming over into your email list, into your workshops, into your launches. If that’s the problem, Then maybe it’s the messaging that needs some help. If you have lots of offers, and you feel spread thin, and people aren’t buying them, then again, you may need some refinement there.

You may need to look at what’s not working there. So a word that might overarch this might be clarity. It might be unclear what you’re selling to the people who you want to connect with. Are you clear on who you want your message to be connecting with? Are you clear with the offers that you have?

Is it clear to your ideal client that the offers are right for them? So this is how you might end up at a word like clarity. And then you’re saying, okay, what areas of my business need clarity first? And am I working on those and can I make those the top priority to start off the year?

Can I make those the top priority to get clarity on? And it’s not getting clarity in your mind, it’s creating clarity in your business. Because when I say clarity of message, the clarity of your message is totally determined by can people understand it? Not just about are you clear on it, but can you say it in a way that people are connecting with it?

So that’s an example of how you can go through this process to end up at your own word. It might be that you need to build a lot, and it might be creation is your word. And it doesn’t have to be one word, it might be authentic expression. There can be so many words that take over this as a theme for you for the year and give you that guiding light, that North Star of saying, am I on brand for this year with this thing that I want to do? With this action I’m looking to take? With this collaboration that has come across my desk and come into my experience?

Are these aligned? Might be connection? Do you feel like you have people that are connecting with your message? Do you have a network? Are you really leaning on the network? Does that feel like an area that feels expansive to you? Or does it feel like a trigger to you when you think about, do I have the right people around me supporting me?

These are the ways that you can go about, about really creating that theme for your year. And really honing in on it and really getting it into your body and making it an automatic filter that you’re passing every single decision through. It’s your strategy and authority and it’s like, is this in alignment or how can I make it in alignment with this greater intention that I set for my year.

So, I hope that you found this helpful. I really love the word of the year. I do connect with it consistently through the year where I’m like this and usually, honestly, by June, I feel like I have kind of accomplished what I set out to with that word. That whole first half of the year, it shapes everything that you do and then it is on autopilot for the rest of the year and your energy just starts seeking out like what’s the next thing?

What’s the next level up in intention that I have? So I hope that you found this helpful. I hope that you choose your word. Please send me a DM on Instagram and let me know what your word of the year is or tag me in a story. I’m @nicolelainoofficial on Instagram. Send me a DM or put up a story with your word of the year and tag me in it so that I can see it.

Because I would love to hear what intention you’re setting for 2024. What are you looking to accomplish? What is the greater theme that you are charging into this new year with? I would love to know. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for being a listener to this show, for listening to this episode.

I’m wishing you the happiest holiday season, the most beautiful new year. Thank you for being here and being part of this Unshakeable with Human Design family. And remember, in order to have an unshakeable business, you must first become an unshakeable human. So thanks for letting us help you on your journey of becoming Unshakeable with Human Design, everyone.

We will see you next time. See you next year!

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