Since seeing the #oneword hastag in my twitter feed on new years day, I’ve been subconsciously wondering what mine might be for 2017. A lot of others I saw resonated in some way with me: #present; #resilient; #balance, #discipline, #focus…these are all directly relevant to me as things I aspire to practice this year…but each on their own didn’t quite fully encapsulated all that I want or need for the year.

But when I was out for a walk last night purposeful came into my head. And this, finally felt right for me.

Why purposeful? 2016 was for me hugely chaotic in almost all aspects of life, for many and varied reasons. Whilst the challenges left me exhausted and burnt out, I also learnt a huge amount – about the importance of asking for and accepting help, and the generosity and care of others, about the type of person I am and how this can lead me to take on too much for too many people, about letting go and just being present. That you can only look after someone else if you take good care of your own health and wellbeing first, and that building resilience is about carving out time to do this very thing. The importance of applying balanced focus to your family, work, self and social, and the benefit of talking (to the right people), questioning, reframing and reflecting on situations to see potential solutions, the helpfulness of adopting a mindset of experimenting – a cycle of ‘trying things out’>reflecting on how well it worked>and adjusting or trying something different if it doesn’t (repeat), and the effectiveness of building behaviour change through small, doable, sustainably repeatable actions (habits). Of having clarity on what needs to change to make things better, and clearly articulating what you need from other people to make this happen. About people leadership – how incredibly challenging it is to do and do well, that it’s something which needs to be worked at consciously and honed constantly, what ‘good’ people leadership might look and feel like, and how important dedicated support and a good mentor is for developing good leadership skills….And how a schedule of constant back to back meetings is the single most unproductive and unsustainable way to work (yet lots of leaders still seem to do it – sometimes because it’s the cultural norm of the work environment…but that’s a whole other conversation).

For me, 2017 is about purposefully keeping these lessons front of mind and applying them, purposefully setting a clear big picture long term goal (“the dream”), purposefully making the short and mid term goals and plans needed to get there, and purposefully using the discipline of daily habits to make it easier for me to get there: to build resilience against challenges, and the focus to stick with it.

I hope 2017 isn’t as chaotic as 2016 was – but merely hoping won’t make it so. However, being Purposeful about it just might.