Well, as I mentioned in my Intention for 2014 post, in addition to setting an intention for the year (“a better life”), I’ve decided to sign up for Ali Edwards’ One Little Word workshop for the year.  Some of my favorite bookish bloggers do this workshop, and I’ve always thought it sounded interesting.

What’s the Big Idea?

The workshop directs participants to choose a word for the year.  It can be a noun, verb, adjective, anything – just as long as it is meaningful to you.  All year, we will be seeking out ways to welcome our chosen words into our lives, to make them our own, and to think about them in new ways through Ali’s creative prompts.  The first task is to choose the word that will be at the center of things for the year.

Choosing My Word

In the first handout of the workshop, Ali explains that the process of choosing a word usually happens in one of two ways: either you spend lots of time reflecting, debating choices, mulling over options and generally thinking, thinking, thinking, or… the word finds you.  In my case, I didn’t really choose a word.  My word found and chose me.

I always thought that if I did participate in “One Little Word,” I’d be battling my indecisive Libran tendencies and would take six months to even come up with a short list.  But that wasn’t the case at all.  As soon as I got the idea to sign up this year, a word popped into my head, and I knew I didn’t need to think about it anymore.  I’d found the perfect word for 2014… or, rather, the perfect word had found me.  My One Little Word for 2014 is:

BOLD.

“Bold” sums up what I want to be, and how I want to approach life, this year.  I want to take on challenges and own them.  I want to achieve things.  I want to kick down walls.  I want to do more, be more, accomplish more, than anyone outside my four walls thinks I can or will.  I want to scale mountains, run miles, write pages, and be freer than ever before.  I want to walk up to the fences that I’ve set up for myself, or that others have set up for me, and then boldly dismantle them.

Being bold, according to Wiktionary, means being “courageous, daring” and also “presumptuous.”  Synonyms include “audacious,” which is a word I’ve tried – not always successfully – to embrace in the past.  It’s just not something I’m always good at.  I’m not particularly loud, nor do I love being the center of attention.  I’m usually content to sit on the sidelines and cheer for others.  In recent years I’ve come to feel that anytime I am open about what I want to do or who I want to be, I get burned for it.  As a result, that’s not my adult persona.  But I’m not looking to change my entire personality here.  I’m just looking to live better.

For me, being bold doesn’t simply mean being courageous.  Being bold means being courageous with a heaping helping of presumption.  Presuming to do what others think is impossible.  Boldness means courage with a bit of audacious in-your-face thrown in.  Boldness means saying “yes” to yourself and going after what you want, without apologizing.  Boldness means choosing to make each day better than the day before.  Boldness means ignoring others’ negativity and tuning out energy vampires, and just striving to be the best version of myself without worrying about pleasing others.  That’s how I’d like to live this year.

Living Bold on the Blog

The workshop provides plenty of content and creative prompts, which I’ll be following in my personal journal and the class binder, and I plan to reserve this space for checking in regularly about how I’ve been living bold this year.  I’m going to do a monthly post about what things I’ve done to live my word – maybe roundup style, or maybe highlighting just one effort; I haven’t totally refined my vision there.  I might do more than that, but right now I don’t have any ideas about that.

I’ve also created a Pinterest board to collect inspiration for living bold.  You can find my pinboard here (and you can find my other pinboards here).  There are a few symbols that have popped into my head as representative of my word, and they tend to be big natural elements – mountains, waterfalls – and sometimes, people conquering those elements.  So expect to see lots of those types of images on Pinterest and also in my monthly posts.  (Like the picture of Great Falls, above.)

I’m looking forward to taking 2014 BOLDly by the horns!