I was talking with a client recently, and towards the end of our session she stated that she wanted to set a couple of intentions to which I would hold her accountable. For this client, this is less about specific action steps and more about a heart attitude towards the actions that she knows will make a difference to how she sees herself and how she presents to other people.
Intentions are more about aims and purpose.
They point us in the general direction and allow us to move along the tragectory that we want but without beating ourselves up if we fail here and there along the way.
I like the idea of intentions as there seems to be more grace for when we don’t necessarily stick to our specified actions each day. We can instead look at the overall tragectory of a week and see whether on balance, we have moved in the direction we intended.
In my recent musings I was talking about how autumn can be a good time for a reset.
What does it mean for you to reset your intentions?
How might that help you go into this next season with a greater sense of hope and optimism that you might achieve what you want to achieve?
Look up intentions in a thesaurus and one of the options is hope. This fits with the idea of giving ourselves grace to make the changes we want but without the striving, the self recrimination when we get it wrong, the guilt.
Imagine that one of your aims for this autumn season is to get fitter.
There are a number of approaches we can take, depending on our starting point and our desired outcome.
We can choose to be quite target driven, and set ourselves clear goals and targets for how often we will exercise every day, and for how long. For some, this is the most helpful way to go.
The idea of setting an intention of getting fitter allows scope for more grace and freedom. Rather than a regimented daily target, an overall intention creates space to not manage what we want to do one day, but to get back on track the following day. The end of the week comes, and we see that we have met our intentions by an overall pattern across 7 days of greater activity and exercise.
You get the idea.
Of course, there is scope to let ourselves off the hook far too easily when we set intentions if they are not specific enough, or we don’t have enough motivation to achieve them. Ah well, we say, I intended to do that but never quite got there…
But what we are tallking about here is setting ourselves a couple of simple intentions that are specific to us, clearly defined so we know what we are aiming to achieve, and have an outcome that is desirable for us.
Setting intentions is about being purposeful in what we want to do and who we want to be. When we set an intention – for instance, I am going to choose to focus on gratitude today in all my interactions – we are being proactive in setting the tone for the day, rather than being a passive participant in whatever happens to us.
It might be that I want to read more. A goal would be to read a new book every month. An intention would sound more like “read to further develop my knowledge and broaden my understanding”. Make this even more specific, and the intention becomes more powerful – my intention is to further my knowledge and understanding of the psychology of the brain, for instance. How I go about doing that might vary hugely and gives freedom and scope for different ways of learning that are less restrictive than specific goals I might set myself.
What do you want to achieve this season?
Who is the person you want to be, and to what extent is your day-to-day behaviour lining up with that?
What results to you want to gain from achieving that – what would the best outcome be?
Having worked that out, be clear and specific about one or two intentions you can set yourself. Write them down, revisit them regularly, and see how that helps you move forward over these next weeks.