Every year I usually trust the process and it works. My word will come to me in whichever way.
One year (2014 going into 2015) I thought my word would be tend and once I’d gone through the process, it ended up being enough.
This year (2024) I was listening to Ann Voskamp’s The Greatest Gift and on one of the days, she read two sentences within about 5 minutes that jumped out and grabbed me. The word “grace” was core in both of them and I thought, “ah, that’s what I want for next year”.
I then started seeing this word as applied to enneagram 1s on many of the enneagram teachers I follow (I also follow the hashtag #enneagram1 on instagram) and there was a lot of “give yourself grace” and so on.
So I was 96% sure my word was grace but remembering tend/ enough from ten years ago, I decided to go through the process and work through Susannah Conway’s Find your word challenge.
It was lovely and affirming and confirmed that my word was grace, but also that as supporting words, I have kindness, gentleness, ease and compassion.
So why grace?
- what do I need more of?
- what do I need less of?
I answered the first question immediately with grace and the second with pressure.
As an enneagram 1, I put a lot of pressure on myself to do things the right way and do the right things. If anything goes wrong and it does… a lot… the first question I ask is “what did I do wrong? why did I not see this coming?” and so on. Much, much more but let’s just say my inner critic is alive and shrieking at me all the time (plus real people in my life too).
An incident happened last year and I was blamed for something which objectively is absolutely my responsibility. When I shared this with a friend, she reminded me of the fact that I was undergoing radiation therapy during this time and could not possibly be expected to have it all 100% under control.
Here’s the thing – until she said that to me, I forgot that I was going through treatment and only saw the things I did wrong. It was a wake-up call because I would absolutely have seen this in others and shown them grace and compassion, but I didn’t extend the same behaviour to me. Isn’t that wild?!
I can give many more examples but they are all along this theme. The kids do something and I say to Dion, “I am failing as a parent” or during the cancer experience, friends behave in a way that is often not very much how a friend should behave, and I say “everyone’s got their own stuff going on”, showing everyone else grace but still beating myself up about not being 100% there for others when I am the one going through cancer treatment.
I think you can see why I need this word grace this year.
And last but not least, God has shown and will continue to show me grace. There are so many scriptures to prove this but here is the one I like most.