#My3Words for 2025
In which we pick three words to guide our hearts and work for the next four seasons...
Happy start of the 2025 Gregorian year! As a planning and ideating nerd (Gemini Sun, heavy natal Saturn influences, 3/5 Generator with a Cross of Planning in my Human Design), I especially love this time of year of reflecting and setting intentions for the coming year.
There’s two rituals I’ve come to love and rely on in my Solar (annual) goal-setting and planning:
The first is Ixchel Lunar’s Boundless Vision program (which you can get as part of their awesome Time Devotion program), which helps me:
🩷 Revisit and refine my Initiated Collective Purpose (ICP) statements (which I still sometimes refer to as my MTIPs or MTPs interchangeably; the big world changing-healing intentions) and my Big Hairy Goals (BHGs, AKA High Hard Goals)
🩷 Anchor those into my body at a Heart and Sacral level
🩷 Attune my goals and day-to-day to the seasonal cycles and my personal daily rhythms.
It’s a constant practice of unlearning and replacing, but I love this structure compared to a more rigid, industrialized Quarter/Month structure because it invites me to get out of my head and connect to my body, nature, community, and the cosmos.
The second thing is Chris Brogan’s #My3Words challenge that he’s been doing since 2006 — in which we pick three words to be guiding points for our creative, professional, and community goals and work in the new year.
Chris is really good at archiving each of his 3-word sets, going back to 2006. I’m not nearly the archivist he is in that way, but my 2024 words are still fresh:
Cooperate: Championing distributed work, fostering strategic partnerships, and centering Queer, BIPOC, and Female voices through community-building, cooperative models, and intentional collaboration.
Cazimi: A nod to Astrology, Cazimi moments happen when a planet is directly conjunct with the Sun. Cazimi events carry symbolism of renewal and purification. As one of my 3 Words for 2024, Cazimi reflected my commitment to helping people and communities reinvent themselves, supporting joyful reinvention and bold reimagining of the future of work.
The Doctor: We’re big fans of Doctor Who and The Doctor’s whole kinetic and mercurial self. This was a reminder to balance structured goals with surrender and curiosity, saying YES to the present moment to unlock more Flow, creativity, and unexpected opportunities.
I like my word choices to be novel enough to keep me interested enough to use them as anchor points throughout the year. They’re personal to me, and I honestly don’t spend a lot of time sharing them with others (other than here as part of the ritual). So it’s OK if they feel a little esoteric to the outside observer.
These are mine for 2025 (for the Winter Solstice-to-Winter Solstice period) that I’m pretty chuffed about:
Gallup
Not referring to the polling company of the same name, but to Simon Gallup, The Cure’s bassist. Robert Smith & Co put out their first new album (Songs Of A Lost World) in 16 years on Nov 1 (2024), and it’s spectacular.
Robert’s writing, composition, and vulnerability are of course the heart of all of The Cure’s work (including SOALW), but I’m obsessed with Simon’s bass tone throughout the album (and equally obsessing about it across their other work, as I’ve been “Curevember-ing” and “Curecember-ing” their catalog since the SOALW teasers started dropping in October).
Simon has such a distinct signature tone and style that he’s spent decades crafting, experimenting, and iterating. I picked his namesake as a personal lodestar to do the same in 2025.
To be hyper-focused on putting the work in on my professional and creative BHGs for 2025 that are resonant in my heart.
To slay fear and keep self-doubt and self-sabotage outside the castle walls. To not spin out to a shiny new thing the moment something gets challenging or I get bored (a thing I’m constantly working on).
I’m still a devout Generalist, but honing my own signature vibe means digging into being more “inch wide / mile deep” in my projects and development in 2025.
Aperture
This one is both personal and transpersonal. “Become a practicing photographer” is one of my Big Hairy Goals I’m getting serious about in 2025, so this is a literal nod to that practice.
But on a personal level, it’s also a commitment to open/seek new perspectives (music, podcasts, newsletters, conversations, etc). I love connecting dots between non-obvious things in my writing, so opening the aperture to other experiences only helps me do that better.
It’s an intention to let more light in and be more visible, even though that scares the shit out of me a lot of the time. That includes doing some important growth work of seeking out community with Ixchel, more often, here in San Cristobal.
On a collective level, it’s a grounded reminder that I’m here to help others. To be a bridge and a connector. To help dismantle extractive work systems that aren’t serving the abundance and fulfillment of enough people or communities. Helping people and teams get more clarity in their work, projects, and organizations. Helping them turn chaos into calm through bespoke project, remote workforce, and change management solutions.
Mycelial
I wanted a nature-connected word among my three, and I had a few on a shortlist — Donkey, Starling, and Murmuration among them — before anchoring on this one. I chose it mostly its transpersonal vibe and themes, but it has personal resonance, obvi.
Mycelium is the information and healing superhighway of any healthy forest ecosystem — a vast, nurturing network of connection, communication, healing, nutrient/resource delivery, and regeneration with the collective.
On a personal level, it’s a word to remind me to always be deepening my somatic awareness, to lean into my Astrological and Human Design strengths, and to cultivate a greater connection to nature and its cycles. It’s about the personal growth work noted above, of connecting with community here in Chiapas.
In my audacious content goals for 2025, I want there to be a more natural merging of things I love in my personal life, of our life in LATAM, and any professional tips or strategic advice I’m offering. I’m 1000% about lifting the veil between those two worlds vs the compartmentalizing we see too often on “business” platforms like LinkedIn. I think we need more of the former and much less of the latter if we’re really going to thrive in our immediate and global communities.
Professionally, mycelium reminds me to do the work of being a connector and a bridge to serve others — particularly underserved communities and people reinventing themselves — with love and healing.
It’ll show up as helping people, teams, or organizations develop their resilience systems to navigate times of change or chaos with more Grace. It’s also about erasing borders and being a force for reimagining work as more co-operative and mutually supportive structures.
There you be! I’ll plan to integrate these into my Seasonal (quarterly), Lunar (monthly), and weekly/daily planning, and to revisit/review at the equinoxes and solstices to check in and how each is vibing and resonating.
But this is a good launch point to start. Here’s to a vibrant 2025 for each of us!