Stating Your Intentions

I try to live as intentionally as possible. What that means for me is I want to be extremely thoughtful about every choice that I make, weighing the short and long term implications so that I take action in ways that most serve me. 

In practice, my intentionality is limited by my awareness. I can do my best to make good choices, but that's only as good as how aware I am of the options I have and my understanding for how things will play out. 

With all of that in consideration, that’s why I see ‘intentionality’ as the marriage of awareness and discipline. The more aware or conscious I am, and the more disciplined I am to acting faithfully on my best options within that awareness, the more intentional I believe that I am.

An intention is just an idea. From the options available to you, it’s what you’ve determined you want. In some ways, setting an intention primes your unconscious to act in alignment with it, but in more ways it leads to having unmet expectations for yourself. 

That means you need to do more to translate intention into action. After all it’s following through on the intention that brings it into your reality. 

One thing that I’ve found has really helped me with that is stating my intentions. When you do that, you take something that’s happening internally and give it an external voice. It enrolls other people in the intention and changes the environment around it. 

No longer can you pass up a commitment with no consequences, now there’s a real possibility someone will ask about it, and you don’t want to disappoint them.

I’ve used this in big and small ways. From telling a mentor that I was committed to writing the first draft of my book to telling my wife that I was only going to check one thing on Instagram. Literally sharing the intention with someone else makes you so much more compliant to following through on it.

And when you do that, you’re living intentionally. Your life is filled with more of the things that are important to you. You show up in the ways that you want to. And to me, that’s what it’s all about!

If you’re curious to see how my intention setting system works, which I call my Self Improvement Scorecard, click the link in the description - I’ve got a video all about it!

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