Word for the Year

Author Sandra Wilson
Dec 16, 2025
2 min read

For me, picking a word for the year helps me focus on a specific aspect of my business, and/or personal life for growth or improvement.

For 2025, I picked the word ELEVATE as I wanted to focus on improving my social media presence and bring it up to the next level. Having this one word of inspiration helped me focus on that specific aspect of my business, even if there wasn't anything else I could accomplish.

Personally it wasn't my best year. The death of my husband created difficulties I had never faced before, and I have been challenged to discover a new life and future to dream about. So for 2026 I am going to pick the word BALANCE.

I am going to strive for a balance between self-reliance and teamwork - figuring out what I can do on my own, and finding the right team to help me with the things I can't do. This focus will help both professionally and personally as I grow as an author but also as a person living on their own for the first time.

As an author I know words have power and my word of the year gives me the power of hope and encouragement for the year ahead.

Big Words for Smarty Pants Volume 1 by Camron Tietcheu and Heather Newsome is a great book to introduce kids to new words - and maybe inspire a word of the year!

This book is a journey to discover some new, extraordinary words. Not only does it build the reader's vocabulary but it helps grow their brain and creativity too! The words are repeated and used in a sentence to help kids understand them clearly, and the book encourages kids to try them out for themselves.

I encourage you to pick a word for yourself for the new year. Maybe you will find inspiration in this wordsearch.