It’s healthy to be as excited about your career as possible. One of the tools we’ve come across over the years to help you stay focused and upbeat is called the ‘Word of the Year.’ 

As team leader, I implemented the Word of the Year for our team using the Bible as inspiration. Galatians 5:22-23 reads: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things, there is no law.” I told my team that they each had to pick an individual word from this passage to focus on this year and together, we would pick a team word. 

My beautiful wife and team member Diane Castro chose ‘self-control.’ Our job, as a team, was to help her and guide her on the process of honing her self-control. I recommended paying attention whenever the topic of self-control comes up during her readings.

Rick Martinez is a certified financial planner, a family man, and a person of faith, and he picked the word ‘patience.’ He wanted to have more patience, to be able to trust in himself and God.

Steven Martinez, my stepson, is a certified financial planner who also chose to focus on the word ‘patience’ for 2020.

As a team, our goal for the year is to be kinder to each other, to those we serve, and to those who serve us.

The word I chose for myself was ‘joy.’ I just want to be filled with more joy this year. As you may already know, we lost a wonderful human being when Kobe Bryant died recently, but what kind of joy can be derived from that tragedy? Well, I feel joyful when I think about all the wonderful memories he gave me as one of my sports heroes. In that way, joy will be my guiding light for this year.

The Word of the Year for our whole team is ‘kindness.’ As a team, our goal for the year is to be kinder to each other, to those we serve, and to those who serve us.

You can try this exercise for yourself. Your Word of the Year doesn’t have to be Galatians 5:22-23 or the Bible at all; you can choose words like ‘excitement,’ ‘health,’ ‘focus,’ ‘re-commitment,’ ‘family,’ or whatever you want.

I’d love to hear what you choose as your Word of the Year. If you decide to implement this in your business, I’ll be glad to send you the resources we’ve used to get the most out of this tool.

As always, if you’d like a stress test or a second opinion on your retirement plan, we’d love to do that for you free of charge. All you have to do is reach out to me to schedule a time to start a conversation. We can see if it makes sense for you to go through our full process that has helped hundreds of retirees enjoy their retirement to the fullest. Until then, take care!