Why “Cloud 10” is our mantra for 2024
Every year, I like to choose a word or mantra that we can rally around as a team.
In November, as I was flying home from a speaking event, I gave myself the flight to think about what that could be for 2024. By the time the plane touched down, I was certain I had it: elevate.
I thought that “elevate” embodied everything that I want to see us accomplish this year. We want to take our brand, our systems, the experiences that we create for our clients, and ourselves to new heights.
I sent the team a message announcing my idea and explaining why I thought it should be our word for the year, and I asked everyone to think on it so we could talk about it in our upcoming team meeting.
I expected that in our meeting, everyone would say yes, love it, let's do it—but that’s not what happened. Cheyenne, our Chief of Operations, said that “elevate” wasn’t really resonating with her. She liked the essence and the theme, but the word itself wasn’t giving her that, “Ooh, I'm so excited!” feeling.
. . . and I digress for a moment. Here is yet another great example of the power of feedback. I'm so grateful that Cheyenne spoke up because it’s so important to me that everyone on the team feels equally excited and ignited by our intention for the year.
I’d had a feeling that there was something about the word that could be better, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it, so I’d decided to just move forward and not get hung up on it. But when Cheyenne said that, it reaffirmed that maybe we could take it one step further. Thanks to her, we now had the opportunity to explore and figure it out together.
In that same meeting, we used a brainstorming tool we love called Crazy 8s. We settled on “elevate” as our overall theme and challenged ourselves to come up with fun, different ways to put it into words that would inspire us and remind us of our goals. What word or phrase would evoke the feeling we wanted to have? What would inspire us to make 2024 our best year ever?
And that is how we landed on (drumroll, please . . . ) Cloud 10!
The thing about Cloud 10 is that it's even better than Cloud 9. If being on Cloud 9 means feeling elated, happy, and like things couldn’t get any better—what could be even better than that? What if we could reach heights that we can’t even imagine right now?
Cloud 10 is about rethinking the “limits” we think exist. In fact, it means no limits. We get to choose how high our standards can be for ourselves, for our team, for our business, for our clients. Cloud 10 captures the idea that we get to create our future and our destiny as a team, and it can be anything we want it to be.
This year, whenever we find ourselves saying, “I wish we could do this,” I want us to stop and think, well, why can’t we do that? What if we could do it? That’s what Cloud-10 thinking is. It’s how we create our dream company and our dream jobs.
But if we want to get there, we have to continuously challenge our mindset. We can’t just accept that things are the way they are; we need to stop and think about the best outcome and what needs to change to reach it. Even if it's more work, even if it requires more conversations, even if it means doing things differently than we've done in the past, we’ve got to talk about it, explore it, and do it. That's how we’re going to bring ourselves to new levels of happiness and fulfillment and create out-of-this-world experiences for our clients.
As the leader, I know it starts with me. If I don’t adopt a Cloud-10 mentality, I’m not really giving anyone else permission or empowering them to bring our mantra to life. So, in our first week back to work after our holiday break, I made sure that I started strong. Here are three examples of Cloud 10 moments that happened that week:
In our first team meeting of 2024, I announced that we will be experimenting with a four-day workweek this summer (spoiler alert: There's a blog post coming about this next week!). This is something we’ve always talked about, so why not make it happen?! Cloud 10 right there.
On an afternoon where I was scheduled to have a meeting with Cheyenne, I happened to look out the window and see that it was a beautiful day. I found myself thinking, “I wish I could go for a walk right now. That would make it a really awesome day.” And then I thought, why can't I go for a walk? I knew that my day was flexible, and Cheyenne’s was, too. So I reached out and asked if we could push our meeting back a little bit so that I could go for a walk. Cheyenne was all for it. That simple change made it a Cloud-10 day for me, and my hope is that my actions give my team permission to do the same the next time they have the same thought.
Another example relates to our content-creation process. Editing videos for social media has been an ongoing frustration of ours. It’s definitely out of our strengths, but we have a “can-do” attitude and are always up for the challenge. But why continue doing something that is frustrating? Why not hire someone who can do it better than we can and free up our capacity? We made the decision to partner with an amazing videographer to help us edit videos and create a system for us that will make creating video content easier in the future . . . Cloud 10!
So that's what it's all about. I told the team that by the end of this year, I hope we can look back in awe. I hope that we can say we soared past what we thought was possible. I hope we can say that we are happier and more fulfilled than we thought possible and that we took our clients and the experiences we create to new heights. I hope we can look back and say that we built the most beautiful version of our company yet. It's all in our hands—and it starts with our mindset.
Do you have a word or mantra for your team this year? If not, I hope this post will inspire you to think about it. Setting a collective intention can be so powerful. (And if ours inspires you, feel free to bring this idea to your team!)
Big hugs,
