“10 Phrases That Define 2022!”

ABOUT JIM CARROLL

Jim is the world’s leading global futurist, keynote speaker, business trends, and transformation expert, recognized worldwide for his compelling motivational style, delivered on stage or via his world-class virtual broadcast studio.

In his 30-year career as a speaker, Jim has shared his insight with over 2 million people worldwide. Jim is represented by the same agencies that book global icons such as Barack and Michelle Obama, George W. Bush, Ervin “Magic” Johnson, Ryan Reynolds & Tom Brady.

Jim’s clients include NASA, Disney, the World Bank, Mercedes Benz, the PGA, Blackrock, the Wall Street Journal, Pfizer, Microsoft, Cisco, and over 1,500 more. He shares his highly customized, industry-specific insight with CEOs, senior executives, government leaders, and leadership teams on the real trends that matter, and the innovation pathways to align with new disruptive realities.

What’s going to happen in 2023? Read my series, 23 Trends for 2023!

Posted January 1, 2023 -> My 10 Great Words for 2023. Read them now!

Describe 2022!

What’s going to happen in 2022, when it is pretty evident that volatility is the new normal? I find myself wondering about that as we start to enter our third year of the global pandemic – and living in a reality that involves a strange contradiction of attitudes towards where we find ourselves at this very moment in time. And so, I’ll launch into my “10 Phrases That Might Define 2022!”

Here’s the genesis of the idea: way back in 2005, I wrote a blog post, “10 Great Words for 2006“, that outlined my thoughts on how to align to an accelerating future. The words were steeped in optimism, brewed in the cauldron of hope. They became a huge hit and formed the basis for many of my keynotes over the years. In fact, the list became the closing segment of many of those talks, as I noticed an increasing number of people writing it down out in the audience – so I rolled it into a nice-looking PDF.

It also became a power story I tell on stage!

Since that time, for many years, years, I’ve come up with a list of words that can help to define my attitude or approach to the coming year. And so last year, enveloped in the endless uncertainty of the pandemic, I hit the virtual home broadcast studio and filmed the list of words that I planned to use to guide me into 2021. The words? This is what I came up with:

• reinvent: this will be a core focus for me as I go forward into the year; my life and business is increasingly virtual and I need to continually align with that!
• reflect: to accomplish that, I need to reflect – to continually look back at what I did as part of this reinvention process in 2020, and what I can do better
• rethink: relentlessly question assumptions, challenge habit
• reimagine: my business model, my future, my activities
• redesign: once I reimagine my future, I can redesign it to fit!
• retouch: to do the best job at this, I must continually touch up and refine my work
• rework: that requires constant innovation and challenge
• reinforce: and to get there, I need to reinforce, enhance and accelerate my skills
• realign: your goals, your skills, your strategies to this new reality
• redo: we all get a redo in 2021 because 2020 was such a challenging, interesting and difficult year!

Here’s the clip:

I find lists like these to be a powerful motivator for action! Try it out – come up with your own list!

So where do I find myself now? I’m pondering the last word on my list for 2021 – redo – because it looks like we might get to do it all over again! With that in mind, what’s my thought process for 2022? Maybe it’s the current reality as we find ourselves trapped in a never-ending cycle of Covid waves, a weary population, and an uncertain environment that implicates the certainty of our future, my mindset is focused on these issues.

Words to describe 2022

• hopeful resilience: we’re all developing an outer shell of determined resistance to the complexity of our world, demonstrated by our battle for hope. This leads to …
• relentless optimism: this is both good and bad – we have to fight to be optimistic in the face of unwavering challenges. But we know that this is happening in the context of…
• pervasive volatility: if the last two years have taught us anything, it’s that the unexpected can always be expected – and just when you thought it was over, a volatile future keeps coming back at you … leading us into a mindset of…
• restless determination: in the face of this volatility, we find ourselves determined to try to move forward – until we feel slammed about the head and decide to pull back on our initiative, which causes us to fall into the trap of the…
• sporadic pursuit of opportunity: we find ourselves caught in a pattern in which we are moving forward, and then pause until we decide to start moving forward again until we pause, leading to…
• the paradox of active inaction: causing ourselves to fall into an ongoing trap of action followed by inaction followed by much of the same, so we focus on developing…
• flexibility, adaptability, agility: the only way to battle through the paradox is to adopt a mindset in which we can adapt, move fast, align to new realities, accept our ever-changing, more complex world… but this becomes difficult because we need to always be…
• focusing on avoiding squandered opportunity: because our focus on what we can do to keep active in the face of uncertainty defines our future, but this can be difficult because we find our optimism shattered because we are…
• battling the presence of incessant incivility: it’s become so bad that people are now disagreeing about the need to agree to disagree and to go against that we must focus on….
• manufacturing personal invincibility: and so my action plan going forward is to continue to feed my factory of optimism.

Does that make sense? That’s what I’m carrying with me into 2022!

Closing off, here’s the original 10 Great Words outline – visit 10 Great Words:

10 Great Words