Introducing SPARK: Where Personal Energy Fuels Collective Impact
Our 2026 Word of the Year
But first: What a Year of Vitality Taught Me
Last January, I chose Vitality as DRIVEN’s Word of the Year for 2025 – the year I turned 60, and I wanted to be sure I was doing everything I could to be ultimately vital.
I wanted to understand vitality, not as a vague feeling of "wellness," but as something measurable, tangible, and teachable. I spent twelve months exploring what it means to cultivate energetic fitness, meaningful purpose, and the power to grow.
Here's what I learned: Vitality is capacity. It's the foundation. It's understanding your five energy sources; physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and social, and learning to tend them with intention.
But here's what else I discovered, especially during the hardest months of ‘25: Capacity without activation is just potential energy.
You can have a full tank and still be parked. You can know exactly what you need and still not do it. You can understand your architecture and still not inhabit it fully.
So now, in 2026, we're asking a different question: What happens when vitality meets intentional ignition?
Our 2026 Word of the Year is SPARK.
SPARK is what happens when awareness becomes action. When choice becomes movement. When individual vitality ripples outward and creates collective transformation.
And before you assume this is just inspirational language, let me give you the science:
Research shows that feelings of agency – the recognition that you have choice in how you respond to life – are linked to human wellbeing through adaptive mechanisms that promote human development. When you operate from a place of vitality and choice rather than depletion and reactivity, you show up differently. More present. More creative. More resilient.
I've been practicing this in real time within the LAB, our community of practice where we explore what it means to tend our energy together. And here's what became clear through that practice:
The ripple isn't metaphorical. It's been our aspiration from the beginning that personal vitality creates collective impact. But I needed the science to validate what we were experiencing.
Studies on emotional contagion in groups show that positive emotional states among group members are associated with improved cooperation, decreased conflict, and increased perceived task performance. Even minor emotional cues profoundly influence work environments and relationships.
Communities where kindness, altruism, and positivity are prevalent experience higher levels of trust and social capital.
Translation: When we're at our best, we don't just live our best lives; we contribute to the vibration of the planet. And that's not woo. That's neuroscience. That's organizational behavior research. That's how humans actually work.
When you develop agency and operate from vitality rather than depletion, you literally change the emotional tenor of every system you're part of. (Still think your Monday morning mood doesn't matter? Science says otherwise.)
SPARK as Architecture
I'm a systems thinker, so of course SPARK became an acronym:
S — Self-awareness: Understanding your five energy sources and how they interact
P — Practice: Turning insight into embodied experience through repetition
A — Agency: Recognizing you have choice in how you manage and deploy your energy
R — Regeneration: Creating systems where energy renews rather than depletes
K — Kinship: The relational intelligence that transforms individual vitality into collective wellbeing
A spark ignites. It spreads. It illuminates. It warms. And when tended with intention, it becomes the fire that transforms energy into vitality— for individuals, communities, and the systems that connect us.
What SPARK Means for 2026
Each month this year, we'll explore different ways to spark your vitality: insight, intuition, curiosity, and more. These aren't random themes. They're pathways to recognizing the agency you have to enhance your five energy sources and live more intentionally.
You can follow along here and gain valuable practices. Or you can go deeper with SPARK 360 (the evolution of DRIVEN 2 Wellness), where we make the invisible visible, and you have the opportunity to commit to changes important to you— in community, which significantly increases your chances of succeeding. Members of our LAB are already experiencing this transformation as they employ their agency in daily life.
We're starting with the foundation of building inward capacity before moving outward. In early 2026, we're exploring personal agency: understanding what's been invisible, trusting what you know, and staying curious even when it's uncomfortable.
As the year progresses, we'll explore how individual sparks create relational intelligence, collective impact, and regenerative systems.
A Personal Note: Where Attention Goes, Energy Flows
I need to tell you something about this past year.
In March, I was navigating one of the darkest stretches of my life— the kind where getting out of bed felt like a victory. The kind where "thriving" seemed like a concept from another universe.
But I kept doing the work. Not because I felt inspired, but because I trusted the process. I showed up to my own energy. I noticed where I was depleted. I made tiny adjustments. And slowly, the light returned.
That's what this year taught me: Where attention goes, energy flows.
When you tend to your vitality, even in the smallest ways, you build momentum. And momentum becomes possibility. Possibility then becomes the spark that ignites everything else.
After a year of practicing Vitality, I'm ready to BUILD something big! And I'm committed to supporting individuals and communities who want to build their own vitality and resilience.
So, here's my invitation: Put skin in the game of your own life.
Our final DRIVEN 2 Wellness cohort (starting January 29) is the sixth iteration of this program— the send-off before it becomes SPARK 360 in April. Join this cohort to invest in your vitality AND get a taste of what we're building. Because regenerative systems iterate until they're ready.
It just takes baby steps to make BIG changes.
What's your spark in 2026? I'd love to hear. Reply to this post, drop a comment, or simply sit with the question and see what emerges.
Here's to a year of intentional ignition.
PS: Next month, we'll explore what it means to become conscious of your energy— not in an abstract, "Om shanti" kind of way, but in a practical "Oh, THAT'S why I snapped at my kid after three back-to-back Zoom calls" kind of way. See you then.
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