At the end of every year, I take the week between Christmas and New Year to review the previous year (what went well and what I’d like to do differently) and to set my intentions for the year ahead.
Yesterday, I had my annual strategic planning session for Cyndi Bennett Consulting with my trusted advisors, during which we walked through last year’s business review. It was such an encouraging exercise to see how amazingly God worked in my business last year.
As we turned our attention to 2026 and the strategies for moving forward, one word kept popping up: Collaboration. It wasn’t something that was forced, but rather, it was an acknowledgment of what the Lord had already initiated in the latter months of 2025.
Collaboration Defined
I began meditating on “collaboration” and what it means to me.
At its core, collaboration means working jointly with others to produce or create something. It comes from the Latin collaborare — “to labor together.”
The dictionary defines it as “the action of working with someone to produce or create something.”
Psychology Today describes collaboration as “a working practice whereby individuals work together for a common purpose to achieve business benefit.”
But my favorite insight comes from Brené Brown, who says: “Collaboration is not about getting people to do what you want. It’s about creating a space where everyone can show up, contribute, and feel ownership over the outcome.”
That piece about “feel ownership over the outcome” captures what distinguishes true collaboration from cooperation or coordination. In cooperation, we work alongside each other toward compatible goals — doing our own thing but helping each other. In coordination, we organize our efforts so they don’t conflict. But collaboration? Collaboration involves shared ownership, shared decision-making, and shared creation of something new. Something that wouldn’t exist through individual effort alone.
And collaboration requires something vulnerable: the willingness to be influenced and changed by others’ input, and some surrender of complete control.
For someone who spent years learning to trust my own authentic identity, the idea of surrendering control while still maintaining that identity is revolutionary. Collaboration doesn’t ask me to become a chameleon again — it asks me to bring my full self to the table and allow that self to be shaped by the process of creating together.
For trauma survivors who’ve fought so hard to find safety and autonomy, collaboration is an act of profound courage. It’s saying: “I trust you enough to share control. I’m willing to be changed by this process. What we create together matters more than what I could protect alone.”
The Progression
As we walked through my 2025 business review with my trusted advisors, the first thing I noticed was how “collaboration” continues my growth progression. I started in 2023 with the word “unhindered,” with the intent of removing the obstacles of my past trauma that stood in the way of my healing journey. In 2024, I progressed by selecting the word “connection,” which connected me to myself and allowed me to connect with others. In 2025, I chose “community,” where we could have a group of like-minded people with similar goals walking on this courageous journey together.
Looking back, I can see how each year built on the one before — not by accident, but by design.
2024: Connection connected me to myself and allowed me to connect with others. After achieving a felt sense of safety in my body for the first time in 2023 — something I never thought possible — I was finally free to build genuine relationships. The relationships I had became deeper. I became more open to connecting with others, moving beyond the mile-wide, inch-deep relationships that had characterized my professional life. Connection meant I could finally be seen, heard, and valued without the constant guard that trauma had required of me. For the first time, I experienced true belonging — not just joining groups or teams, but an internal sense of home.
2025: Community took those individual connections and wove them into something larger. With my authentic identity solidly in place, I could finally look outward with different eyes. I found my people — other trauma survivors who understood that career development isn’t one-size-fits-all. Other professionals who got that going slow isn’t going backward. Community meant we could have a group of like-minded people with similar goals walking on this courageous journey together. We learned that safety comes through connection and mutual protection rather than isolation. I built spaces where we could support each other’s growth without competition or comparison — where we could come out of our self-imposed armor because we felt “safe enough” to take a chance.
2026: Collaboration is where connection and community become co-creation. It’s not enough to know people or even to support each other while we each work on our own goals. This year is about building together — combining our different strengths, perspectives, and wisdom to create something none of us could build alone. Collaboration means we’re no longer just supporting individual journeys — we’re designing and building shared spaces, frameworks, and solutions that benefit everyone.
Each word prepared me for the next. I couldn’t collaborate without the safety and mutual support of community. I couldn’t build community without first connecting to my authentic identity and then to others. I couldn’t connect authentically without first becoming unhindered by my past trauma. And now, standing on this foundation that the Lord has been building year by year, I can’t imagine moving forward any other way.
What Might Collaboration Look Like in 2026?
I’m still discovering what collaboration will mean in practice, but I can already feel it shifting how I think about my work.
Maybe it looks like co-creating solutions with clients instead of providing answers. Maybe it’s collaborating with other professionals who support trauma survivors — therapists, coaches, advocates — to build something together that serves our shared community better. Maybe it’s inviting others into the problem-solving process for challenges I’ve been trying to tackle alone. Maybe it’s about building partnerships that expand what’s possible beyond what I could do on my own.
I suspect collaboration will show up in unexpected places — in how I develop programs, in how I approach my writing, in how I think about serving the trauma survivor community. The beautiful thing about choosing a word for the year is that it reveals itself gradually, showing you where it’s needed most.
I’m curious to see where 2026 takes this.
Let’s Build Together
One of the things I love most about having a word for the year is watching how it comes alive through the community around me.
I don’t know all the ways collaboration will show up in 2026, but I know it won’t happen in isolation. It will happen through conversations, shared challenges, co-created solutions, and the willingness to build something together.
So I’m inviting you into this:
What does collaboration mean to you in your career journey?
Where are you craving co-creation instead of solo struggle?
What challenges are you facing that might benefit from collective wisdom?
Share your thoughts in the comments. Connect with others who are on similar journeys. Let’s discover together what becomes possible when we move from supporting each other to building with each other.
This is how community becomes collaboration.