What is your Pet Word of the Year - a powerful tool to create your best life with your pet family

In this kickoff episode for Season 7 of Let's Talk to Animals, Shannon guides you through the process of choosing a Pet Word of the Year. This process taps into your pet parent intuition and charts your course forward to create your best-ever life with your pet family. 

As you listen you will learn:

• What makes the Pet Word of the Year process different - and special
• How to use this process in many important situations, from adding a new pet to the family to resolving behavior issues to helping a pet through their end of life transition
• Prompts for visual, auditory and other learning styles so you can find the way that works best for how your brain is wired
• What to do when your brain starts trying to pick apart the word you choose
• How to work with your Pet Word of the Year to tap into its power all year long
• How to use the accompanying free Guide and guided meditation to discover your personal Pet Word of the Year

✅ GRAB YOUR FREE PET WORD OF THE YEAR GUIDE HERE ✨

Related episodes mentioned in this episode:

• 8 types of pet soul agreements
• Pet soul agreements do your pets have soul contracts with each other
• Developing your pet parent sixth sensory toolkit

Are you animal communication curious? Have I got something special for you! My new Animal Communication Adventure to Mastery student learning program just launched! This program is designed to be a gentle, yet thorough, serious, yet lighthearted path to interspecies fluency that pairs beautifully with my ongoing live Animal Communication Adventure Practice Circle for developing student practitioners. Visit animallovelanguages.com and click on programs to join us.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Vision For 2026
• 1:17 From Idea To Intentional Pet Life
• 3:15 Pets As Partners And Teachers
• 5:02 Applying Insight To Pets In Spirit
• 7:02 True North And Word Of The Year
• 9:18 Why This Works: The Brain’s Filters
• 13:27 Avoid Tunnel Vision With Issues
• 15:57 One Word For The Whole Family
• 18:17 Using The Tool For Specific Journeys
• 20:31 Meditation Download And Intuitive Senses
• 23:17 Prompt 1: Breathe And Free Associate
• 25:35 Prompt 2: Revisit Your Original Dream
• 27:29 Prompt 3: If Your Pet Is In Spirit
• 30:09 Reframe Challenges Into Opportunities
• 32:29 Daily Anchor Feeling And Consistency
• 34:29 Prompt 4: Hear Your Pet Whisper
• 36:29 Trust Intuition And Embrace The Word
• 38:29 Words Have Power And History
• 40:09 Share Your Word And Next Steps
• 42:39 Closing Blessings And Calls To Action

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:04

Welcome back to Let's Talk to Animals, the podcast all species can enjoy together. My name is Shannon Cutz. I am an animal sensitive and intuitive, a Reiki master practitioner, and an animal communication teacher with Animal Love Languages.com. And for our purposes here today, I am also your friendly neighborhood hostess and guide through the wild, wise, and wonderful world of interspecies communication. Call me crazy, but I truly believe that animal communication has the power to save, heal, and restore our planet for all species to enjoy and share. When we learn to communicate with one another, we begin to realize we are so much more alike than different. We care about each other. We become friends. On this podcast, we talk about what the animals have to say and share and why our pets truly are our partners, empathic friends, and teachers. I am so glad you have joined us here for this fresh new episode of Let's Talk to Animals. So let's dive in. Hi, Shannon here, your friendly neighborhood hostess for Let's Talk to Animals. And happy 2026! I am so excited to kick off season seven. Oh my goodness, talk about 2020 hindsight, looking back to when this podcast was just a good idea, a gleam in the eye. And that's exactly what I want to talk about with you today. To kick off our 2026 together, to give you a framework for setting up for your best life with your pet, the best version of life with your pet. And not just a big picture intention version, like, wow, I think it would be fun to start a podcast one day. I might call it Let's Talk to Animals, but the day-to-day granular experience of parenting your pet or co-parenting your pet or collaborating with your pet, partnering with your pet, charting a course forward moment by moment, day by day, to give you the best possible energetic frequency, vibration, setup, if you will, to maximize your time together, remembering that in the context of the world that I live in and speak from, which is intuitive animal communication, our pets are our partners, empathic friends, and teachers. And it's awfully hard to learn the lessons that our animals come into our lives to teach us in their entirety, in their fullness, if we have a narrow range of vision. If we, for instance, are in the habit of perceiving challenges that arise as problems instead of opportunities. If we're in the habit of self-criticism or self-unkindness when we are called to navigate a challenging pet decision or unexpected outcome or scary opportunity, we are not on our own side. We're not our own best friend. We're not standing firmly in our own corner. And this happens, right? Many of my animal communication students come into Animal Communication Adventure to Mastery, my signature student program. And their number one struggle is how do I treat myself? How do I communicate with myself? Am I being kind? Am I being encouraging? Am I recognizing that there is learning in progress here? And learning never goes flawlessly. It goes as it needs to and as it is intended to to maximize the learning opportunity and our own human potential. And the same holds true for our bond, our relationship with our pet. So in this first episode of 2026, I'm pulling together so many of the major themes that we have talked about in previous seasons and especially in season six and taking a look at the big picture of our life together. What is the dominant vibrational frequency that we want to parent our pet from, love our pet from, partner with our pet from? What is our highest possible potential outcome for life with our pet? And I want you to know that this applies even if your pet is in spirit. You might be listening along and you might be thinking, well, I don't have a pet, a partner, empathic friend, and teacher who is in an embodied state right now, who is sitting next to me in their furry or feathery or scaly or shelled or finned body. That is perfectly okay. You can still follow along with this episode. Our pets never stop reaching out to us, efforting to teach us, to share their wisdom and to guide us. And what I love about intuition is it works both proactively and reactively. It works progressively and regressively. In other words, intuition education works just as well when we're working from 2020 hindsight. If I would have just seen this for the fullness of what was unfolding in our life, I would have realized all of the gifts. And that's not to come from a place of, again, self-recrimination, self-condemnation, beating yourself up, being mean to yourself. It's about recognizing your potential. And maybe you couldn't see it then because you were in the thick of it. You were in the lesson, but you can see it now, which means you have it forever in your awareness going forward. So this is another way that our pets, our partners, empathic friends and teachers continue to teach us, continue to guide us, continue to show us what is possible when we adjust the lenses, the prescription of the lenses in our glasses through which we observe and perceive and interact with our world as it's unfolding when what we see, even when what we expect to see changes, often what we actually interact with changes as well. So, how are we going to do this? Because this is a tall order, right? We're setting up 2026, living my best life with my pet, living the biggest, brightest potential that my pet and I have come together to live, living into the fullness of our soul agreement together. If you're not sure what I mean by soul agreement, go back and listen to the episodes where I talk about eight common soul agreements that we can share with our pets and soul agreements that our pets may share with one another. Those are both in season six, and that will give you a lot of insight into how I work with soul agreements and what I mean when I use those terms: soul agreement, soul contract, soul partnership, those kinds of terms. So go back and bookmark those to listen to after you get done with this podcast episode. But what we're gonna do right now is we are going to set you up for the very best and brightest year with your pet, the deepest, most impactful, most transformational, most enjoyable and loving partnership with your pet. And we're gonna do it through a tool that I call word of the year. Now, you may have encountered word of the year in other formats. I have done word of the year for myself for more than a decade, usually around December of every year. I start getting curious, as December's also my birthday month. So I do my life review and I start getting really curious about what my word of the year might be for the coming year. And I also do a life review of well, how well did I do following the true north of my word of the year for this year? And that is a whole other episode, and I'll probably do some other posts on that, if not a full podcast episode. But in this particular episode of Let's Talk to Animals, we are gonna apply this tool to your bond with your pet. So here's what we're gonna do we're gonna choose a word of the year together. I'm gonna serve as your guide today while you walk through the process of choosing a word of the year, like a guiding light, a signpost true north on your GPS for the whole coming year with your pet. And that is whether your pet is here or whether your pet is in the spirit space. You are still together, body optional. I remind my pet reincarnation pet parent clients this a lot. When we have a body, it's an extra perk. They're cuddly, they're cute, we can cuddle them, we can scratch their neck feathers, we can scratch their shell, we can take amazing photographs of them. But body optional, the body is just something nice and extra to have. Our energies are always together. If the love is still there, your bond is still there. So don't turn off this episode just because your pet is in spirit. I promise you, it is still extremely impactful, perhaps even more so. And you may surprise yourself to discover how deep it can be and how amazingly your pet can still show up for you and you can still show up for them in your ongoing life together. So, word of the year, this is a big picture true north. This is like if you're in your home right now and you think right now of the place you love most on earth, this is the destination that you put in your GPS. This is where we're heading to. For me, that would be Cape Cod. I'm in Houston, Texas. So my favorite place on earth is a bit of a stretch. We have to recognize that the word of the year, this isn't something that we're gonna check off our to-do list tomorrow. This is something that we will be interacting with and building a relationship with all year long. And I encourage you once you choose your word of the year, to actually get a little note card and write it down. Put it in an area that you visit daily. If your pet is still in their body and there's a special area where you keep their toys or their leads or their food, wherever you go to daily, interact with it there. Put your word of the year there so that it remains foremost in mind and heart this year and continue to see how your relationship with it grows and transforms as the days unfold for 2026. And by the way, if you're listening to this in 2027 or 2028, if Let's Talk to Animals is still around, then do this exercise with me now. I do it every year for myself. And starting this year, here's a fun fact: starting this year, I'm gonna be doing it for my pet family together with you. So I am choosing a word of the year right along with you, right now in this episode, for the fullness of the potential that I share with my interspecies family to live our best life together, to tackle challenges with grace and poise and ease and intuitive guidance and remembering to turn within. I'm a pet parent too. And when my pets are compromised in some way, I tend to go up into my left brain fight or flight, just like everybody else, and freak out. So I too am working with you on this challenge and opportunity to chart my true north forward for how I want it to feel, being a member of my interspecies family each and every day. What am I contributing? What am I giving? What am I receiving? What am I being gifted? How is that energy exchange flowing? Does it feel even? So all of these are subtle factors that play into your word of the year choice. And I'm going to give you several prompts to help you identify your word of the year. Now, before we get started and dive into those prompts, I want to just share a word about why this works and why it's so powerful. Why have I been picking a word of the year for myself for more than a decade now? Why am I so passionate about offering you the chance to pick a word of the year for your pet or pets for your interspecies family for the coming year? Number one, because the vibrational frequency on our planet is so we're gonna treat this word of the year like a true north. It is the highest and brightest possibility for our relationship with our pet. And this works not just because the vibration of our planet is shifting, but also because of how our human brains work. This is something I dive into in a lot more detail inside my Animal Communication Adventure to Mastery student program. But for our purposes here today, what you need to know is there's a little portion of your brain, a neat little gizmo in the brain, and it's called the reticular activating system. And if you've ever seen a horse walking with blinders on, you already have the basic idea of how the reticular activating system supports us, how it works to guide us. We are bombarded with literally billions and cajillions of bits and bytes of information all day, every day, especially in the culture we live in today, where it feels like we never unplug and we never turn off. And our brains, as powerful and amazing and mysterious as they are, they still don't have the capacity to process all of that data in conscious real time. And so much of what comes to us, comes at us, even comes through us, is not seen. It's not recognized, it's not interacted with on any conscious level because we just can't. And here's a really simple example of how this works. A few years ago, I needed a new car, and I decided that I wanted a blue Toyota RAV 4. Up until that point, I had been kind of oblivious to how many of these particular cars were on the roads beside me as I drove around. But after I made that decision, suddenly it was like I am seeing them everywhere. If you've ever had that experience, you know exactly what I'm talking about, and it's a little freaky. This is your particular activating system springing into action to support you, to show you more of what you've told it you want. So when you tell your particular activating system that you want more peace, prosperity, health, calm, love, connection, harmony, whatever it is that your word of the year for your pet or your pet family ends up being, when you tell your reticular activating system that word, it will immediately start bringing you evidence of that word unfolding. The vibration, the frequency, the dynamic energy of that word will begin to show itself. And this becomes especially important when we have issues with our animals. Why? Because when we have issues, such as right now, one of my animals is a little too plump again. And when I'm interacting with her, sometimes I feel like that's all I can see. Oh my gosh, you still look so fat. You still feel so fat. When I palpate your abdomen, I still feel fat pockets. And I'm just tunnel vision because I've told my reticular activating system that this is a vital issue with Miss Pettal, my cockatiel. And so I have to work really hard when I'm interacting with her to not focus overly much on that, which is a drop in the bucket of our life experiences together. And most vitally, and most definitely not the most important thing about our bond. Those of you who know my story know that Petal is the reincarnation of my soul bird Pearl, who was the reincarnation of my soul bird Jacob, who was the reincarnation of my childhood soul bird Perky. So Petal and I have been together throughout most of my incarnation this time around. And her weight, whether it's on the high end or the low end, yes, it's important. Yes, we're dealing with it, yes, we're working on it. But neither she nor I need to be focusing on that all day, every day. So I need to anchor back to my word of the year for my pet family. And this is a word of year that will guide you through any issue. If you've got one animal, if you've got nine or 10 animals, like some of my animal communication students, this is so important that you don't try to overcomplicate this. So why am I spending so much time on the setup? Because that is what we do. We humans, we think if a little is good, more is better. And I can just hear it in my head. I can see it. Some of you are gonna be going, Great, I have nine animals. I'm gonna pick a word of the year for each one of them. And what I guarantee you will happen is that your reticular activating system will go off and start hunting gerbils. It will go running around trying to match this to that and that to this. And very quickly you will lose your true north because we cannot keep up with on a daily basis, most of us, that many different true north. Our GPS doesn't understand, I want to go to 10 places at once. It only understands I want to go here. Yes, each animal in your family is equally important and they do absolutely deserve their own word of the year. But here, what we're working with is a word of the year for your entire pet family. If somebody is too fat and somebody else is too skinny, and somebody else has been diagnosed with something, and somebody else doesn't like somebody else, and someone else is jealous of somebody else, and somebody else is escaping out the back fence all the time. The word of the year that we choose together, it's going to chart your course through all of that and so much more, as well as all of the snuggly, wonderful, cuddly, cute times. So this is more like a mindset and a heart set to guide you through each bit of it and all of it. Now, if you want to go back later and take a look at maybe you've just added a brand new pet to your family and you're just getting to know them, and you want to choose a word of the year to guide the development of your bond. Or if you have an animal who is in their golden years and you're guiding them through their end of life experience, you can take this same two. And you can choose a word of the year to guide you through how you want that experience to go for them, their palliative care stage, their end-of-life experience, their transition, their entry into the spirit space, maybe even their return to you through the joyful reunion of pet reincarnation. So we can use this tool in specific strategic ways for situational issues that crop up that are important and deserve their own energy and frequency and guidance system. What I don't want you to do is scatter your energy so far and wide that when we come to the end of this year, you look back and you say, I got nowhere and I have no insights to glean from this experience. So let's start with one word of the year for our whole pet family, whether all of your pets are in spirit, you have a pet or two in their bodies at home with you, or you have an entire menagerie. I happen to have four pets in my inner species family right now, plus two humans. So we're a micro menagerie, I guess you could say. And I will be choosing a word of the year to cover our whole family vibration for the year. So let's dive in. Now that you understand the basic premise, the concept, the word of the year, it's your true north for the whole year. We're going to specifically apply it to your pet or pets, whether here in spirit, whether you have one pet, you have 12 pets, it's going to serve as your true north, guiding you through the year, through anything that might come up, whether it's a tempest in a tornado or a true hurricane that blows through, or the greatest and most magical opportunity of your life and everything in between. We're going to choose one word of the year, regardless of how many individuals make up your interspecies family here and in spirit. And then you can break out and use this same tool for bigger situations that you may be walking through with a particular pet in your family, and you can chart a true north through those situations as well to give your reticular activating system something to cling to, a firm foundation so it won't freak out or scatter your attention and your energy too thin. So now let's get to our prompts. And I want you to know that I've also included as a free download, as a part of this kickoff episode, a meditation that walks you through the steps of choosing your word of the year for your pet family. So especially if you're listening to this while you're driving or out walking one of your pets, or you're at work on your lunch break, or you're multitasking, cleaning, or prepping lunches or doing whatever you're doing, just know that if you can carve out a handful of minutes later to download the meditation, then you can also use that as a guide in a quiet moment to help you feel, sense, hear, see, even smell, taste, or simply know. We're using all of your intuitive senses here to detect your word of the year. And if you're not quite sure what I'm talking about when I say intuitive senses, then go back and listen to the podcast episode I recorded in season six about developing your intuitive sensory toolkit. And I'll link that up for you in the show notes here below as well. But just understand that the moment that we set this intention, which we're doing right now to identify your word of the year, your word has already entered your aura, your auric field. It's already there in the 5D, waiting to be unveiled. And so from here, if you are still listening, if you made it this far, know that your word of the year is waiting in the wings to come out on center stage. And all we need to do is refine your awareness so that you perceive it. And there's several different ways that we can do this. So the first way, which is the way that I actually love and resonate with the most, and you will find your own way. These prompts will help you, depending on whether you are a little bit more comfortable with clairvoyance, clear seeing, with clear audience, clear hearing, with clair salience, which is clear smelling, clair gustance, which is clear tasting, clairsence, which is clear sensation, clear sensing, clair empathy, which is clear feeling, or clair cognizance, which is clear knowing. Now, clair cognizance tends to be my strongest or most dominant intuitive pathway. Doesn't mean that that's the only one I have, doesn't mean that your strongest or dominant pathway is the only one that you have. It just means that's the one that's gotten the best workouts over the years. So this is my favorite way to detect my word of the year. And it's actually the way that I used to identify my word of the year for my pet family. I'm not going to tell you what that is in this episode because I want you to have the experience for yourself of coming up with your word of the year. But we can compare notes later on in the comments. If you want to drop a comment on this episode or leave me a review or tag me on social media over at Love and Feathers and Shells or at Animal Love Languages on Instagram and Facebook, respectively, then I would love to hear it and we can swap word of the years that way. So the first way is simply to close your eyes. And again, if you're driving, if you're operating heavy machinery, please don't do this right now. But you can close your eyes if you're in a safe space to do this, or just soften your gaze and exhale all the air out of your lungs. And then inhale a nice deep fresh breath and exhale, exhaling all the air out of your lungs, extending that exhale. We're moving into parasympathetic breathing. Rest, digest, reconnect. Intuitive breathing. With your next in-breath, I want you to imagine that you're filling up with all the love of your pet or pets. Just filling up with their love, with their energy, with their support, with their empathy for you. Just fill up as much as you can as you breathe in. And then as you breathe out, breathe all of that love back to them. We're gonna do that one more time. Breathe in all of the love that your pets feel for you, all the care that they want to give you, all of the connection that you've felt. Breathing in, breathing in, breathing in. And after you feel completely full, even over full, you breathe out again and breathe all of that love back to them. Now open your eyes and very quickly say out loud, my pet word of the year is. And just speak the next word that comes. Make it a true free association. Peace, positivity, clarity, abundance, fun, joy, love, anything that comes to you. And this is going to be the moment when some of you decide that you need two or three words. And I would encourage you to whittle it down. But start with a free association. If you even want to keep a little notepad handy and you jot down the dominant words that come out, the ones that come out first that just flow and jot those down and then study them. Notice they might have a common theme. And go back and do this breathing exercise again with these words in your conscious awareness now. And notice which of those words just stands out when you open your eyes. Just open your eyes, look at the pad of paper, notice which word your eyes fall on first and trust that that's your word of the year. This is actually how I chose my word of the year, as I mentioned, because I have a really strong inner knowing. I just know often with clear cognizance because it comes in so quickly and our conscious mind doesn't catch it. Doing the breathing and pairing it with a spontaneous verbal statement is the best way to grab it and pull it into our conscious awareness. Now, let's do another way. This is for those of you who are more visual. I want you to soften your gaze or close your eyes and take your memory back to your original dream before you met your pet or pets who are in your family now. Back when you were dreaming about having a pet family, building an interspecies family. Back when the idea of filling your world with the love of beautiful animals was just a gleam in the eye. Go back to that dream and sit with it. Imagine it is coming to life. Remember who you were then. Remember what you were craving out of that bond, that connection. And pick a word that best captures that hope, that potential, that dream that you had for sharing your life with a pet or with multiple pets in an interspecies family, and make that your highest vibration true north. This will be your word of the year. Now, here's one that is specific to a pet in spirit. If your pet has transitioned to spirit, you're feeling like I just don't have any tangible conscious grasp of what it would look like to continue my bond and develop it and further evolve it because they're in spirit now. They're not here with me in a body. This is what I want you to do. Again, soften your gaze or close your eyes. When we do this, we're telling our beta-focused brain, our conscious brain, hey, we're going into alpha for a little bit. So you can take a five-minute coffee break, do whatever you want to do. We're going to go ahead over into alpha. We're heading over into our right brain hemisphere. And we are going to connect on what Einstein called the imagination to intuition pathway, which is using our imagination, regardless of which pathway it comes through on. We're going to use our imagination as a gateway to get to, to access our subconscious intuition, because imagination and intuition share the subconscious right brain pathway. So I want you to soften your gaze, close your eyes, head over into that alpha brainwave state, into that subconscious state, and imagine that your pet has just let you know that they're coming back to you. Just imagine, maybe you've had a session with me, maybe you've had a dream about it, but in some way you just know that your pet is coming back to you. And your heart is filled with dot dot dot. What is your heart filled with? Speak that word out loud. Maybe it's awe, maybe it's wonder, maybe it's gratitude, maybe it's joy, maybe it's love, maybe it's something else. Identify what is your heart filled with? And if you come up with something like disbelief, which is common, we don't want to chart a true north through a whole new set of 365 days using a word that has what we might consider a less positive or a minimizing or a diminishing frequency. So, how can you reframe a word like let's say disbelief into its most positive form? Whether you want to go and look at synonyms and antonyms online, or you want to just ask yourself if disbelief was a good thing, how would it be a good thing? Maybe it would be opportunity, maybe it would be openness, maybe it would be awe, maybe it would be joy. So reframing these challenging words can open us up to the opportunity in what might feel like a problem or a stumbling block. So if you're encountering these words that may feel a little more limiting, for instance, if my word of the year for petal first popped out as weight loss, I might reframe that as whole bird health. I want healthy, happy pet, healthy, happy petal. You don't have to stick with the very first word that pops out, especially if it doesn't fill you with joy, a word like disbelief or a word like weight loss typically doesn't go, yay, I so want a whole 365 days of that. But dig a little deeper and look for the opportunity in that word. What yif is hidden inside that problem or that challenge or that stumbling block or that obstacle that's temporarily in your path? And when you identify that, you're on the trail of your word of the year. In fact, that is another prompt that you can use to reframe an obstacle that you're facing right now in your pet family or in your bond with your pet and look for the diamond hidden inside the rock. So maybe you're dealing with family aggression, interspecies family aggression right now. Everybody is not getting along and playing nice together. And so your word of the year might be separation or danger or safety. And here again, we want to reframe that. What would that look like if danger was removed? What would it look like if safety was installed? What would it look like if we learn to separate our energies and just get along? Well, it might look like harmony, it might look like friendship, it might look like collaboration. So reframing issues or challenges as gifts and opportunities can help guide you right to your word of the year for your interspecies family. Here's another one. If you are somebody who is very detail-oriented, you like to know where the forest is, but you really are interested in the genus and species and life path of each tree. So we have to understand where our set point is and work within that framework because that's how we're designed. Maybe that describes you. So here we're looking at 365 days. And yes, we've got an overarching impression maybe of how we want to feel at the end of it. Best case scenario, biggest opportunities realized, most amazing gifts delivered, received, signed for, opened, and enjoyed. But we still have 365 days ahead of us, right? And not all of those days guaranteed are gonna feel like that. So identify no matter what is going on on any given day, especially if you're in the midst of a challenge right now and you're like, this just is not landing for me. This is not how it feels to be in my inner species family right now. I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling angry, I'm feeling frustrated, I'm feeling overwhelmed, I'm feeling too busy, whatever it is. Okay, identify one feeling or experience, even if it's just for a millisecond, a micro moment that you want to add into every day that will make walking through this temporary period of inner species family challenges not just bearable, but even inspiring, maybe even encouraging to the level of wow, I didn't know I had it in me to turn our family life around like that, or to chart such a beautiful course through my pet's end of life, or to find this new resource that has actually established inner species family harmony, where I thought for a moment there that it was impossible. What is one feeling state that you want to anchor to, even if it's just for a moment, just the moment every day when your eyes fall on your word of the year for your pet family, that you want to be able to look back over the last 365 days and say that happened every single day. Maybe it only happened for 60 seconds, but it happened every single day because I insisted on it. I made sure of it. Maybe that's gratitude, maybe it is peace, maybe it is connection, maybe it is insight. The goal is to take a look at where you are now and ask yourself, what feeling state do I need the most and am getting the least of right now? Maybe it's rest, maybe it's faith or trust, maybe it's guidance, and let that be your true north. One moment every single day. We can't pull it off for 24 hours a day, every single day, but we can manage one moment every single day if we know what we're aiming for. And finally, for those of you who are Claire Audience, soften your gaze, close your eyes if you're able to, and it's safe. Do a couple rounds deep breathing. And as you do, I want you to reach out with your inner ears. Of course, you can use any of your senses, but this is especially for those who are Claire Audience, and just detect the sound of your pet approaching you. Maybe you hear the tap tap tap of their toenails on the ground. Maybe if you're me, you hear the flap, flap, flap of mighty parrot wings. Maybe you hear the clunk, clunk, clunk of a shell, or you hear the rustling of your pet as they jump over the newspapers and the pillows and land at your side. So notice what auditory cues that you're getting that your pet is drawing near to you. Keep your eyes closed, your gaze softened, and imagine that they come right up to your ear and they whisper a word to you. Secret word in your ear for you alone. What word do they whisper? And let that be your word of the year together. So you can try any of these prompts, you can try all of these prompts. But again, I want to come back to don't allow your beta state, conscious left brain thinking mind to overcomplicate this for you, because your left brain mind is not intuitive. Those of you who are studying animal communication with me, you know this already, and you know why. For those of you who are curious, that is something that I dive into inside my student program. We talk about why your left brain mind is your MVP, your most valuable player, but it's not because it's intuitive, because it is not. So don't let your left brain mind jump into the mix and overcomplicate this and overthink it. And what about this word? And that word is similar, but it's a little bit more elegant or this or that. If your word of the year is a word that you don't commonly use, maybe that's just exactly what you need: a word to catch your attention, a word to capture your interest, a word that pulls you out of your day-to-day mindset into new potential and possibilities. So allow your word of the year for your pet and your pet family life to be what it is and trust it. Intuition is what happens when your left brain mind is busy overthinking things. So just remember if your word of the year came through and maybe it's a word that you're less familiar with or less used to using, allow it to pull you into a new frequency. Maybe do a little research, learn a little bit more. About that word and its origins. Before I started down this path as a professional animal communicator, I spent 10 years as a professional freelance writer. So I am definitely a word nerd and a word geek, and I love to research the origins of words. At some point, long, long ago, there were people dreaming up words to describe experiences they were having or concepts they wanted to talk about or objects that they wanted to name. And they were adding these words to dictionaries so that we can use them today to talk with one another. So words have power. Each word has a dominant vibrational frequency and a gift and a message. The question is, is that the perfect gift for you? Is that the message that you've been looking for? Is that your personal true north? So I hope you've enjoyed this episode. If you are ready to share your pet word of the year, please leave a comment on this episode. I'd love it if you'd leave a review as well. It really helps our little podcast stay strong and visible out in the exploding podcastosphere. Please tag me over on Instagram at Love and Feathers and Shells or come find me on Facebook at Animal Love Languages and share your word of the year. If you're listening and you want to post a screenshot of your word of the year and tag me, I would absolutely love that. And we can trade notes and celebrate moving into this next beautiful 365 days with our animal families, enjoying the heck out of limitless potential and possibility together. So thank you for joining me for our first episode of 2026. It's been an absolute honor and delight to guide you through word of the year for your pet and your pet family and work my own pet word of the year process right alongside of you. And stay tuned. Lots more fun to come, lots more great episodes planned for 2026. And I cannot wait to share them with you. So sending you happy New Year's blessings, sending you and your pets all my love. See you very soon and bye for now. I have so enjoyed sharing this episode with you. If you're new to the Let's Talk to Animals community and you've enjoyed this episode, please do leave us a review on your favorite streaming service or drop a comment wherever you'd like to listen. I love to hear from you, and your feedback truly helps me shape future episodes based on your interests and needs. If you're not already in my weekly love letters community, head over to Animal Love Languages.com to opt in. Your welcome email will include$25 off your first pet session with me, and you'll be the first to know when a new podcast episode drops. If you're interested in learning more about the work I do communicating with animals, offering pet Reiki, and teaching animal communication, please visit me at Animal Lovelanguages.com. Click on Schedule for Pet Sessions and Programs for all the information about my new Animal Communication Adventure to Mastery student program and the live animal communication practice circle I run for student practitioners. And I look forward to welcoming you back here very soon for a fresh new episode of Let's Talk to Animals. Okay, all my love. Bye for now.