Your Anti-Word of the Year
Everyone's picking a word for 2026. I'm eliminating one instead. Plus: how my Coles shopping technique explains my tendency to complicate things
I’ve just spent five days living inside an AI prompt.
If you asked AI to generate an image of "Utopia," it would give you Queenstown, New Zealand.
It is so perfectly rendered it almost feels fake, and returning to the "real world" has given me the exact jolt to kick-start my 2026.
This trip was with a great mate, Angela. Usually, my travel is for work, holidays with Chris and the family, or to climb a mountain (standard, ha ha). It’s incredibly rare for me to travel without a 'purpose.' We pre-booked absolutely nothing, which felt incredibly rejuvenating - and we still didn’t miss out on a thing. Highly recommend visiting once in your life!
You can choose your own adventure there.
Keen to indulge? Wineries, restaurants, onsens, leisurely walks around the lake. Definitely visit Ayrburn. I don’t even like rosé that much and still walked out with this bottle. The owner clearly sees what’s coming with an ageing population. He’s building residential apartments AND a private hospital on the property.
Want thrills? Luge, shotover jet, bungy-jumping, skydiving, mountain biking, steep hikes, so much.
Right, enough about holidays, here are three thoughts for you.
1. What’s Your Anti-Word?
Everyone’s talking about their word for 2026.
(Btw, I’m not against this exercise, it’s actually great and I highly recommend my friend Jason Fox’s program: The ‘Choose One Word’ Ritual of Becoming).
However, I’m going the other way.
I’m choosing the word I want out of my life. The word that I want *cues best Squid Games voice*, eliminated.
That word is “maybe.”
This landed for me while listening to a Tim Ferriss podcast episode featuring Derek Sivers. They were talking about simplicity, and Sivers made a distinction that stuck.
“My life changed when I learned what simple really means. Simple comes from simplex. The opposite of complex. Complex comes from the verb that means to intertwine.
This is important. Your life is complex when it is intertwined with dependencies. You are depending on things, and things are depending on you.
Your life is simple when it is not complex. It’s not intertwined with other things, but that means depending on less.
That means quitting, firing, unsubscribing, uninstalling, disconnecting, breaking ties, breaking commitments, and getting rid of a lot of the things you own.
But that makes life harder. And, hardest of all, it means letting go of big parts of your identity” - Derek Sivers
Listening to that, I had one of those uncomfortable moments of recognition.
Most of my “maybes” are just delayed no’s.
It’s just that I’m too chicken to say no upfront.
I’m delaying the inevitable because I’ve convinced myself that Future Leanne is more capable than Current Leanne.
It’s like when I go grocery shopping at Coles:
I think, “I only need a few things,” so I grab a basket.
Then I see more stuff I want.
Instead of going back for a trolley, I keep piling things into that basket.
Soon, my arms are shaking and the plastic is cutting into my palms - all because I didn’t want to commit to the trolley in the first place.
I tell myself, “Future Leanne can handle this heavy load.”
But really, I’m just making life harder for myself.
The same thing happens with opportunities.
We know in our gut whether we’re excited or not. But instead of trusting that instinct, we say “maybe” and let it sit in our mental shopping basket, getting heavier and more awkward.
Sean D’Souza has a great test for this: If the event/commitment was on tonight and it was raining, would you still want to go?
If not, it’s probably not a maybe. It’s a no that you’re avoiding.
2. The Empty Room Experiment
I spent the entire day yesterday emptying my home office.
Want a reset?
A nice practice is to pretend you’re painting the walls, so take every single item out of your room. Then, channel your inner Marie Kondo and set one rule: Nothing comes back in unless it “deserves” a place.
In the process of cleaning up, I found a career guidance report from when I was 15 years old (why I hoarded this? I have no idea but it’s in the bin now).
It said to function best, I needed “freedom to work independently” and suggested three career paths:
Media (Writing and recording)
Design (Creating models and frameworks)
Business Management (Consulting)
Looking at my life in 2026, that’s the exact Venn diagram of what I do.
Sometimes we already know who we are - we just need to clear the clutter to see it.
Btw, highly recommend you also take that time to clear the decks before jumping into the start of a new year.
I’m writing this from my home office now and it feels so incredibly light.
3. Your Calendar Doesn’t Lie
The best way to reflect on your year isn’t answering endless reflection prompts. I reckon we over-engineer the process.
The best place to start is by looking retrospectively at your 2025 calendar and asking: Did my commitments actually reflect who I wanted to become?
So, for this to work in 2026, you’ll need to:
Create a vision of who you want to become
Take actions that reinforce that identity.
Eliminate any tasks/commitments that detract from that identity.
This calendar audit works for individuals, but what’s interesting is that it’s exactly how I help organisations align their strategy to execution.
Most companies have beautiful strategic documents that sit in SharePoint while everyone makes random decisions based on what’s urgent.
The fix isn’t another three-day retreat. All we need is 2 x half days together to turn your strategy into something that actually drives daily decisions.
Hit Reply if you’re curious how that works.
Over to you
What’s your anti-word of the year - the one word you need to eliminate to make space for what actually matters?
As always, click the Heart 💙 if anything in this article resonated and I’ll check in with you next week.
🌴 Leanne “Goodbye Maybe” Hughes
p.s. Are we connected on LinkedIn? If not, change that by sending me a connection request. Or, follow more off-the-cuff stuff over on Instagram.
I now use a trolley (current and future me have learned not to underestimate how many things we need) but current me is still optimistic that it’ll all fit in one bag at the end 😂
My anti word is actually two - Be Careful. As a toddler mum of a very active, capable and brave young boy I need to stop trying to get him to act with caution and instead embrace his capabilities. He has no idea what I mean when I say be careful so it’s time to drop it from my vocabulary and instead start saying “be brave. Try. It’s ok to fail. There’s a bandaid big enough for every scratch!”
What a great start to the year 😊! Would you believe that basket happens to me as well (shhh!) but it happens at Woolies and Coles… it then flows into how many bags you need at the self serve check out and often dropping something! All because I just wanted to slip in and grab milk 🤷♂️