2026: The Year of Coherence

(or, what happens after flow)

I don’t do resolutions. You know this about me.

As the new year dawns, I realize that the last 5 years have taught me many important lessons. You don’t arrive at wholeness all at once. First you integrate, then you flow, and then if in the words of my 4 year old niece "if you have a brave body", you begin to cohere.

In 2024, my word for the year was Integration. That year was about honesty. It definitely was not about ease or elegance. I intentionally let all the parts of my life exist in the same room at the same time without pretending they didn't know each other. It was a year of grief, joy, collapse and creativity. It was a year of motherhood and leadership and pain and loss. Integration is messy and continuous. I am still doing the work of weaving parts of Kim into the bigger vision. I still have to remember daily to choose alignment over performance. But I've learned how to how to stand in my truth without armoring up.

Integration gave me back my center.

In 2025, I stopped gripping so tightly. Flow taught me how to move like water. I followed my intuition and let love lead my way. Joy emerged more than strategy. It was the first time I did not have detailed plans. I sat in uncertainty and felt everything. I let myself rest for what seemed like the first time in 48 years on earth.

Flow is a relationship with the integrated parts that continue to emerge. It reminds me that momentum comes from resonance. It’s the art of being in conversation with life instead of trying to dominate it.

Which brings me to my word for 2026 - Coherence.

Coherence is what happens when the signal stabilizes. When the noise falls away. When inner logic and outer life finally start speaking the same language. Coherence is about sense making. It’s the moment when patterns become visible in real time. When choices feel less like experiments and more like expressions. When your work, your relationships, your creativity, and your values stop competing for airtime and start reinforcing one another. From a systems perspective, coherence is when independent parts synchronize into a higher-order whole. I'm just getting started but from my (human) perspective, it feels like relief.

There’s another word circling this year too: Consolidation. By this I don't mean shrinking. I don’t mean playing it safe. I don’t mean sanding down the weird, the wild, or the sacred. I mean harvesting.

Consolidation as compost and refinement. Consolidation as choosing what continues and what completes its cycle. In this age of infinite possibility where AI is amplifying everything, I'm choosing coherence as the differentiator. 2026 is not the year of speed or scale but the year of sense-making. 2026 is the year of discernment and ensuring that there is integrity across all Kim's layers.

We’re surrounded by tools that can generate endlessly. The real work now is integration at the level of meaning. The point of AI is not to make us faster or more efficient. The point is to make us clearer, more authentic and hopefully more human.

Coherence is how I prevent fragmentation of my attention, identity, culture. It’s how I use all that I am to help build systems that feel right. It’s how I remain in relationship with the things I create. This year I will make it a point to ask myself, Does this belong together? If the answer is yes, it stays. If it’s no, it blesses me and moves on.

After integration and flow, coherence feels like coming home to who I’ve been becoming all along.