My 2025 dictionary revisions

I adore the power of words.

I love how shifting one word in a sentence completely changes the energetics of it. If you are someone I give unsolicited advice to and give edits on how to speak to yourself in a more empowering way one of my loved ones, you already know this about me.

I have little capacity for people I adore to speak negatively about themselves. I am constantly editing when a friend, family, or client says “I am so bad at that” to “that is not at the top of my skill set.”

It is not in my skill set to idly let an opportunity pass by for someone to see themselves in a more expansive way.

This past Sunday, my husband embarked on a task not-for-the-faint-of-heart in helping our 4 year old attempt to ride his new bike without training wheels. As my older daughter and I rode up blaring the wicked soundtrack to give moral support to them both from our esteemed seats as the wise counsel of 2 wheel bike riders (a skill I had to relearn myself last year), I heard one of my most favorite sentence additions.

yet.

“I can’t ride without my training wheels” - Wells whined from his shiny new santa sent bike while wearing his spiky dinosaur helmet that is so ridiculously adorable it solicits a smile out of even the most stoic of passersby.

“No, you can’t ride your bike without training wheels yet.”- my 6’5 dreamboat of a soulmate, Michael, rebutted. Let me tell you what my friends, there is little more attractive to me that a very tall man crouched at a very uncomfortable stance to provide stability to a somewhat non compliant child while issuing beautiful mindset reframes to an impressionable brain.

If you haven’t watched Carol Dweck’s Ted Talk on the “Power of Yet” that has been viewed over 16 million times (most likely 1 million of them are me), I highly suggest you set aside 10 minutes in your upcoming week to do so.

Adding the humble 3 letter word to your sentence can change the course of your mindset immediately.

So without further ado, these are the language revisions I am taking into my new year.

Word of the year: tangible. I think in the year 2025 we have reached critical mass of the amount of advice, hottakes, thoughtleaders, and gurus than we could ever possibly need. What will shine instead is watching people put those said words into fruition in a more tangible way. This is reflected in my own life with my new independent business agency aimed at taking time consuming tasks off of entrepreneurs plates and instead having them executed in a more detail oriented way by skilled data analysts. Saving time, money, sanity. I no longer wanted to simply tell business owners how they should be spending their time, I literally and figuratively want to give them more time back. If you or someone you love is a retailer, I am looking for 2 more people to join our pilot program. You can learn more at our temp website here. I am straight GIDDY about this boring to the naked eye but oh so fueling to me project.

Next reframe: performance monitoring over boundary building. I’ve been reflecting heavily on what gives me energy vs. what drains it. I used to lean on terms like “boundaries” and “energy vampires,” but I’m letting those go. Instead, I’m focusing on how I show up, rather than assigning blame to others and thinking the solution is to limit my exposure to certain people. When I spend my energy trying to be the wisest, most grounded, or most experienced person in the room—either to sway someone’s energy or to prove myself because I think they have a limited view of who I am and what I’m about—I’m the one who ends up drained. As much as I love to prioritize spaces and relationships that fuel me, I don’t believe life is about avoiding discomfort entirely. Instead, I’m excited to take the energy of performance monitoring and use it to turn the reflection back on me and how I can handle situations better.

Next up, Independent business in lieu of saying small business. I stole this one from and I am just going to drop her words below because, no notes.

Lastly, opportunities > problems. When you audit the way individuals run their businesses and projects for a living- it’s easy for findings to come across negatively coded. I am taking a mindful approach to call them opportunities. Areas that you are spending too much time in that could be outsourced, backend broken flow that affects customer experience, communication streamlining, etc are simply opportunities to run more smoothly without having to reinvent the wheel.

And on that note, I will wrap this one up even though I could go on for days. We have an opportunity to clean out our waste land of a hall closet on this rainy Saturday while the kids are at the grandparents that I am excited to see a tangible outcome from :)

have great day!!!!!
victoria

*written in quickly and unedited because I am trying to remember that this is a newsletter where I am simply sharing thoughts with you lovely people in hopes they resonated with you or you share yours back with me. not performing, not perfecting, just sharing. please forgive any typos or erratic flow*