Welcome to the Limitless Entrepreneur Podcast. I’m your host, Nicole Laino. And welcome to the last episode of 2021. I’m excited to deliver this one, this is, it has been an amazing year. And it has been so interesting on so many levels. And I know that many of us have had challenges and have been faced with a lot of different things. And then some of us have had the best years of our careers, myself included. And the shifts that I experienced this year have been truly profound, and have been so far reaching in my life and in my world. And I’m so excited to dive into this episode, where we’re going to talk about choosing your Word of the Year, your Word of the Year for 2022. 

And why this is such a powerful exercise and why I like it better than, you know strategic planning and necessarily looking at every action item that we have to that we have to complete in order to have–to reach the goals and to have the year that we want to have in 2022. To think about that in December of the year before and start compiling this massive list of things. 

Now, if you have a really large team, that’s a different story, you’re going to need a lot more detail. But when your team is smaller, when you’re working on a slightly smaller scale, even with the goal of scaling, this honestly, this really has a profound effect. 

So choosing your Word of the Year, why we do it is this is an intention. This is an intention that we’re setting for how 2022 is going to go. Where is our focus going to be? Now y’all know that saying that, you know, the Tony Robbins saying that it’s where your focus goes, energy flows. And another way to say that, and another quote that is out there, I don’t know who to attribute it to, but what you focus on grows. 

And the word of the year is something that gives you your focus, where are you going to put your energy? What’s going to grow because you put focus on it? What is going to expand in you? What intention are you going to put out to the universe that this is who I’m going to be this year– that is some powerful shit. 

Now I know that there’s a lot of talk about goal planning at this time of year. And I love goal planning to a certain extent. But, I do it differently. I approach it differently. And the way that I approach it, and the way that I’ve approached it this past year, and stepped into this even further, is really based on alignment, is really based on not the traditional, “I’m going to reach this goal by this date” or having it be so linear, because that just honestly–it didn’t it didn’t work for me, I had those kinds of goals and it shifted me into masculine energy and into feeling like I had to be doing all the time. 

And truthfully, even when I was trying to lean back, I was burning out because I was either doing all those things to hit those goals. Or, I was falling behind or felt like I wasn’t doing enough. And when I shifted the way that I approach goal setting, it changed my mindset about it and it changed the way I approached things. And the second half of this particular year, of 2021, I saw tremendous growth while pulling back on the amount of things that I was doing. 

So, we actually I’m going to have a workshop January 6, called the Future Impact Statement. And it’s planning for exponential growth in 2022. These are unconventional, uncommon approaches to goal planning and planning out your year. And looking at the goals that you have and how you can approach them differently in this entire year. So we are doing that on January 6, if you are interested in joining us for that we would love to have you. So please jump into that you can get the link at the link in the show notes here. 

Let’s talk a little bit about our Word of the Year. Now my word of the year for 2021 was trust. And I chose that one at the at the end of last year, at the end of 2020 because I knew that I had been…I had been trusting in not the wrong things, but my intuition was telling me and I kept getting these these little nudges that ‘you have to find your way Nicole,’ ‘you have to trust yourself.’ And rather than thinking about expanding my team or giving people more work, if I thought about in the sense of saying trust, trusting my team, trusting myself, trusting the universe to co-create and meet me halfway. If I trusted in all of those places, where would it lead me? If when I started to feel stressed, or when I was wondering what to do, I reminded myself to trust, what would that do for me and to me? And that was that was, I love it, I almost wish I could choose it again. But now it’s part of me. Trust is a part of me. And I’m only expanding that. 

But now this year, I’m choosing a new word. And this year, though, the word for me, and I’ll get to my word in just a bit. But let me talk to you a little bit about what the word means. So why I like it, why I like the word better than actual goals necessarily, and I have goals, but I look at them differently. 

And why I think the word is more important to put your focus on then on the goals is because the goals are like the achievements, that is the what, that’s the thing that you are racing after that is the thing that you have your sights set on, and you’re in action, in pursuit of that goal. It’s the what. Now, the word tells you how you’re going to be and who you’re going to be in pursuit of that goal. And what I have learned, and what I’ve learned from, I’ve learned my own experience, and what I have seen both play out in my clients, and then with the people that I work with, and the other people that travel in my circles who are very successful in this industry, that it is so much more important who you are being and how you are being than what you are doing. 

What you do only matters as much as, it’s not nearly as important as how and who you are being when you are doing it. The result is so much more tied to the energy that you bring to things than the thing that you’re actually doing. Because that’s why five people can do the exact same thing, but who they are being and what they bring to it determines the result. And that’s what the word does. The goal is the what, the goal is the thing. And when we focus on the goal, we can focus on the very tactical, linear masculine energy things that we need to do to get that thing. And then we miss all the magic, we miss all the how, we miss all the who, and we don’t focus on and we don’t put any real emphasis on the energetic side of what we are bringing to this, who we are being. Okay? 

And goals can then cause a lot of stress, because if we’re not doing all of those things. So, an example of this would be–a goal would be to, you know, have $100,000 launch. Now this is a this is a very typical goal in this industry. I want $100,000 launch. Okay, so what do I have to do to get to $100,000 launch? What do I have to do? 

And we start ticking off the boxes, we start compiling the list of all the things we need to do. Okay, well, I need to post every day, and I need to send out emails, and I need to grow my email list. And I need to run Facebook ads. And I need to…and we start making this list of things that, as I’m saying them, aren’t you like? Yeah, okay. Yeah, okay, da, da, da, da, da, like everybody knows these things. 

This is not where the magic lies. Everybody knows the tools. But it’s in the person who’s operating the tool. Now, I can hire somebody who knows how to fix a banister in my house. But if I have this historic home, I’m gonna need a true craftsman to come in and recreate these pieces for me. The way he works with a tool, the way he looks at the wood, the way he looks at the surroundings, everything is going to be, it’s the art that he brings to this. And your business, it might feel like a business, it might just feel like some thing that you do, but when you start approaching it like it’s an art, when you start approaching it like you are the artist and that your stamp on this your energetic imprint that you are leaving on everything you do is actually what’s determining your results, you will start to see things shift very, very quickly and very, very dramatically. 

Now, when you have these goals and you have these goals set out you end up with a lot of stress because you start thinking well who’s gonna run the Facebook ads I don’t know how to do that maybe I need to learn to run Facebook ads and I need to learn this or I need to do this or I need to do that. And we can start getting into that energy of oh my god, how do I do that? I got to do this. I gotta do this, I gotta to do this. And we pack our days, and we pack our minds with all of this stuff, that’s not actually serving you. If it does, then please, by all means, go do that. But that did not serve me. It has not served a lot of the people that I know work with. And you know, and that I travel in circles with. 

Most of us have not had a ton of success with that unless you have lots of people to delegate all of this stuff to, or you have a very, very large budget where you can hire experts in every single field to do all of this for you. And I do recommend hiring people out to do this sort of thing. If you’re going to run Facebook ads, I highly recommend hiring somebody particularly now to help you through that so you’re not wasting money. But we really want to, we want to turn up the volume on everything that we do. And that is the energetic side of that. 

So the goal, you have it or you don’t. You achieved it or you didn’t. They feel like these milestones that we either, it’s a pass fail grade, it almost feels like. And it can set that bar in that sort of position, I either met this or I didn’t. And then that can cause us to feel differently about the way we approach things going forward. 

It can make us feel like maybe our next goal isn’t as achievable. And then that can affect our energy and how we approach everything else that we do. Now detaching from the outcome is always something that we want to be embodying, whenever we are setting goals, whenever we are doing anything. It’s about more than the outcome. It’s about who we’re becoming in pursuit of that outcome. 

But that goes back to the word, that goes back to embodiment, because the word is who you choose to show up being and embodying every day. The goal is this thing that you’re chasing, you’re either there or you’re not. You’re behind it, or you’re ahead of it. You’re at pace with it. That is that that is something that, it causes a certain feeling within us where we are in relation to this goal. But the word, the word is something I think about my word every day, every day I wake up, and I say it. So this this year, I woke up and I said trust, trust. I reminded myself of it every day. 

Why? Because I wanted to embody trust. What does it mean to embody trust? It means trusting my team to do things when I needed them to and when my instincts were telling me you have to do this yourself. It meant trusting that if I took a step, the universe would meet me halfway. So what does that mean? It means I took the step. It meant that when I second guessed myself about whether it was good enough, I said trust. And I embodied trust, and I moved forward. And then when the result wasn’t what I expected it to be, I said trust. And I allowed myself to keep moving in the energy of trust, rather than in the energy of fear. 

And when I started doing that, when I started to embody that, and it took a while to get to the point where I really felt like I was trust through and through. And now it’s just about deepening it and deepening and deepening it even more. But the word reminded me every day who I was meant to be this year. So it is when we choose these words, it’s so much more than a word. It is us choosing to embody something new. That’s in alignment with your goals that you look at, and you say, in order for me to get to that level, I will have to be this thing. I will have to embody this. And it is carefully chosen by you. 

So literally every day if you’re reminding yourself, of the most important thing is for you to embody this year, if you are reminding yourself of it, if it becomes your mantra. Think how powerful that can be. You can literally move mountains with one word. 

And doesn’t that sound so much simpler than a list full of goals and action items? That helps determine what those action items look like. Because when you have when you’re embodying something like, my word this year is power. Which means this was my very specific and deliberate choice to–I know that I have played small in some areas. I know that I have not stepped fully into my power, I know that I have allowed myself, and I’m proud of the work that I do, and I think I show up powerfully. However, I think that there’s a much bigger capacity for more. 

So that’s the focus that I have for myself this year. I want to shift my way of being in alignment with power. Because I know when I show up in greater power, I deepen my trust. And when I deepen my trust, and I show up in my power, I’m unstoppable. This is my next step to unstoppable. 

So what is your word? What is the thing you will choose to embody every single day this year? What’s the most important thing for you to lean into? Choose it carefully. Now we can lean into words like you can lean into words like unstoppable, which can be a great word. But as long as it means something to you. And it means something that serves you. Because unstoppable, I only bring that up because one, I just said it. And two, I know a lot of people choose words like that, unstoppable. And, and when we choose something like unstoppable, it almost sounds like we don’t stop. We don’t stop, we don’t take a breath, we keep going, we push. And careful with that. Careful with that.

Don’t get seduced by the idea that in order to achieve your goals, it means that you have to push harder than everybody else. Because that is a construct of a system that was built by other people and passed down to us and not necessarily the truth. There are a lot of people showing us right now, how it doesn’t have to be that way. That we don’t have to, you still have to work. I’m not saying, I’m not part of the lay in bed, do nothing all day and expect cash to fall from the sky. Because that, at least in my experience is not how it has worked. I have tried meditating all day. And while I have gained many things from it, money was not one of them. 

But you do have to show up, you do have to show up in your power. You do have to show up embodying a new level of you. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to work consistently all the time pushing. So choose a word that serves you. Choose a word that’s in alignment with the life that you want to live. Can you go to the end of 2022 and see yourself there and see what you’re embodying? See how your life looks? Do you look like you want to pull your hair out and have bloodshot eyes and you look like you haven’t slept in days? And you’re overworked and burnt out? I don’t think so. 

So make sure you choose a word that’s not in alignment with those things. How do you want to be? Who do you want to be? How do you want to live? Choose a word that’s in alignment with that. 

Now, hope you guys found this episode helpful. And if you want to dive deeper into this with us, please join us for Future Impact Statement, the planning for exponential growth workshop in 2022. It’ll be January 6. If you’re listening to this before, please come and join us. If you’re catching this too late, please stay tuned, we have so much more coming for you in this this 2022. I promise you there’s a lot in store for you, so much. Please be on the lookout and join our Facebook group, there’s a link to it in the show notes come over and you can stay up to date with us there all the time. 

Guys, it has been such a pleasure. We’re closing out 2021 with a bang. I hope that you have had the most prosperous year and you’re looking forward to your next most prosperous year. Even doing even bigger and better things in 2022 than you were able to accomplish this year. I want bigger and better for you always because it’s always available. I thank you for being a part of the show all year for being a loyal listener. Thank you. And I’m looking forward to continuing the show well into 2022 and beyond with you. Thank you so much for being here. Remember, you are only limited by the limitations you accept and when you stop accepting those limitations. That is when you become limitless. Now go out there and be limitless everyone. I will see you next year.