Words to Live By
I’ve never been much of a goal-setter. Maybe broad aspirations – “be happy”, “have savings”, “do fun stuff” – but not super-specific goals like “own three houses” or “become a CEO”.
Part of me suspects it might have done me good to have a five-year plan, but another part of me finds people with five-year plans boring. I worry they’re closed off to spontaneity, not open to alternative paths.
Those of you who are, like me, freelance or self-employed will get it when I say our working lives rely a lot on “getting picked for things”. We know what we can do and want to do but someone has to choose us to do it.
So we pitch for each job, hoping we’re neither pricing ourselves out of the market nor selling ourselves short. You’re a little kid at the netball court, hoping to be picked for the team.
It builds resilience, we develop skills and tools, have back up plans, support systems, maybe a therapist.
I’ve been freelancing for thirty years so it feels familiar to me, but now I see more people beginning to live this way with less job security, more “precarity”, a word that keeps turning up in current conversations to describe how precarious life is for increasing numbers of us.
This sounds gloomier than I mean to be - I love my freelance life. You celebrate when they choose you, try to be philosophical when they don’t, evolve, and embrace the challenge of making a calendar of random events work together. There is magic and wonder when it all falls into place.
So, no five-year-plans or even New Year’s resolutions for me. But I do like to think of a broad “theme” for each year. If I think of my life as a book, I’m looking for a chapter heading for the next bit. I choose a word – or words – to focus on, to give the next twelve months a flavour.
One year, I borrowed the quote, “Don’t be perfect, be brave” and kept it front of mind, encouraging myself to adopt “default position yes”, and give things a shot even when I wasn’t sure I could pull it off. That was the year I gave my Imposter Syndrome a real run for its money.
For 2024 I chose “well-being” – by which I meant putting the focus on my physical, mental and spiritual health by prioritising yoga, mediation, therapy and being active. The plan was I’d make an easy habit of those things rather than choosing Netflix or staying unnecessarily late in my office.
Ironically (was it ironic?) it turned out to be a tough year for various parts of my body and so my “being” felt less “well” than before. But by December it was turning around.
There will be a new word for 2025, plus I’ve set myself another project.
At those jobs I get picked for to host conferences, I hear companies and industry sectors talk openly about their “values”. Not just the goods or services they provide, but how and why they do these things, what they stand for as a company, and what they will stand against.
They use those values as a filter to shape their decisions – how they interact with customers, and what they will do for their employees.
It seems to me that, individually, we should be able to readily describe our personal values, too. This summer, I’m going to ponder this and find more words to live by.