2026: The Year of Balance

How do you stay steady when you can't make the ground hold still?

I choose a word every year. I like it better than a list of resolutions because it can be both broad and specific. I can come back to it over and over again as a directional intention.

Previous words of the year have been Cultivate, Journey, and Launch. For 2026, I chose Balance.

You see, I spent the second half of 2025 burning the candle at both ends. Moving to NYC, work, theatre, travel, working out. Everything was at 100%, and I could feel myself burning out. Balance meant math to me: pull back to 80% across the board as an act of self-care. A couple of my theatre "kids" actually came over on New Year's Day and decorated my whiteboard with doodles of "2026: The Year of Balance." Those doodles are still there. I've kept them up as a reminder to myself.

Then in March, I left my corporate job and struck out on my own to start a fractional & consulting practice. It was scary and unscripted, and my tidy 80% plan did not account for this sudden change in direction.

While I was in the middle of the tumult, I reached out to my counselor for a few check-in sessions. At the end of our first session, he said, "I know this is hard, but you seem really balanced."

He had no idea that was my word of the year, but his comment totally reframed it.

I had been chasing Balance as distribution: how much of me goes where. He saw steadiness: a core that holds while everything under it shifts. I think of it now like a horseback rider whose torso stays even while their legs and hips move with the horse. Distribution needs circumstances to cooperate. Steadiness comes with you.

The uncertainty hasn't resolved, but I've stopped waiting for the ground to settle before I call myself balanced.

If you're standing on shifting ground right now, you may be steadier than you feel. It took someone else saying it out loud for me to see it in myself.