Guiding Word Of The Year For 2016

So, the month is halfway over and I haven't done my traditional guiding word of the year post. To be honest, I'm at a low point and really haven't felt like writing lately. But writing is my sanity so I'm trying. I've been choosing a guiding word of the year since 2013. It has worked out well for me for the most part. I haven't always been able to follow my word very well but I learn quite a bit each year.

My guiding word of 2013 was Action
My guiding word of 2014 was Growth
My guiding word of 2015 was Discipline

Choosing action worked out quite well for me. I ended up making many changes that had needed changing for years. I also did some major soul searching and was able to find a career direction and begin making steps towards it.

The next two years didn't work out as well. I picked growth in 2014 because I wanted to expand on what I had done in 2013 but I found myself spending most of the year continuing the action theme and not even having the chance to focus on growth. So when 2015 came around I really wanted to buckle down, break bad habits, learn new good habits, and generally progress in my life. So I chose discipline as my word. The problem, which I didn't figure out until the end of the year, was that even though I chose 4 of my life categories to focus on, I really didn't have any focus at all. I was all over the place with lofty goals and no real plan for how to achieve those goals.

So in order to remedy the problems of the past two years, I chose a word that I found myself using over and over when trying to figure out a solution.

My guiding word this year is:
Focus

I've always been a big picture person and have found it incredibly difficult to reverse engineer that big picture into achievable steps. Part of the problem is that the big picture doesn't include the details. Without the details, you can't make specific goals to get there.

So this year is about getting clearer about what I want. It will be about learning to set real goals. When I say real goals, I mean detailed, specific, and measurable goals. It's also about learning to prioritize. I can't fix and progress in every aspect of my life at once so I need to learn to choose what is most important and focus on that.