You’ve heard it said: our intention creates our reality And let’s be honest, most of us think we’re being intentional, at least some of the time. And yet the truth is that the majority of people are living on default and repeating the same experiences over and over again. Sound familiar?
One of the main ways we can overcome the Groundhog experience is to be more intentional. The wonderful Gary Benoit and I recently shared a podcast on how to stay on track with your intentions over the summer period. You can listen to that here. Today, I’d like to share with you 5 strategies to live more intentionally, no matter what the time of year! You can create a life you love. Use these strategies to catapult your progress.
1. Create by design
2. Focus your attention
Once you know where you want to get to, you need to keep checking the focus of your attention. Lots of people create visions and dream big and then fail to direct their attention to those results. Energy flows where attention goes. Understand the power of that! Your attention is your highest attraction modality.
Most people don’t realise they have a choice about where they put their energy and attention. And despite having a vision, their attention is more often on their current situation, conditions and circumstances.
Is that you? If it is, I want to share this radical thought with you today… You don’t have to think the thoughts you’re thinking. You don’t have to focus on your current conditions. You have dominion!
You also have free will.
Today I invite you to exercise your will and put your attention – your thinking, your curiosity, your energy, your time – on the results and outcomes you do want. Don’t leave it to chance! We have a negativity bias in our brains, so you have to choose to be intentional and direct the focus of your attention.
3. Embrace your sacred friends
The Dalai Lama coined the phrase “sacred friends”. We all have people in our lives and situations that we like and that are easy to love, easy to forgive. And we all have people and situations that are not so easy to like, love or forgive. The latter are our sacred friends.
Your sacred friends are essential for your growth. It is those people and situations that cause you to dig deeper inside, to find or develop the capacity within yourself to love and forgive and overcome. We actually need these contrasting experiences to enable and empower our growth. So don’t resist your sacred friends. What we resist persists, and it puts you on the vibration of more of that which you are resisting.
Instead, embrace your sacred friends. This doesn’t mean you have to hang out with those people or pretend you like a situation that you don’t want in your life. What is does mean is that you choose your response to them, you choose to take the learning and set your intention to find the good, find the silver linings and expand your heart and your awareness.
4. Notice what you’re noticing
One of your mastery tools for transformation is the capacity to Notice What You’re Noticing. In psychology, we refer to this as metacognition – the capacity to notice what you are thinking as you’re thinking it. In the Buddhist tradition we refer to this capacity as the “Witness Self”. In my coaching programmes and workshops we spend a lot of time learning how to improve our noticing capabilities and how to work with what we’re noticing.
For today, in service of being more intentional, I want to invite you to pause more regularly to make time to notice. As you navigate your days over the coming weeks, whether on holidays or carrying on with your normal routines, pause regularly to ask yourself – what am I thinking in this moment? What am I feeling? Is it serving me? If it is serving you, keep going and consider how you could even uplevel your thinking and emoting even further. If it isn’t, ask yourself this question: What can I think, do or say that will uplevel my experience in this moment? Then go do that.
5. Live from your Dream
You must create a coherent frequency between where you are now and the results you intend for. Part of this is emotionalising your intentions. As Neville Goddard put it:
The person in your vision feels good about the results they achieved, he or she thinks in a certain way, acts in a certain way. The person who already has the results you’d love how does he or she do the dishes, take the garbage out, drive to work or to the shops? How does that person dress or exercise? How does that person interact with family, colleagues, with him- or her-self? To create the coherency, you must think and behave now, as you believe you would when your vision has been realised.
Let’s take an example of this that is resonant with the time of year. If you wanted to have a holiday in Italy this summer how could you approach that as the person in your vision? First of all you’d be feeling the joy of being on holidays in Italy and then you’d be thinking and acting from that energy. You could block out the dates in your diary, ask for leave at work, start looking up and planning your itinerary, put some savings aside if need be, start to learn some of the local language. All of this is possible even if your current circumstances suggest that the holiday is unlikely. The person in your vision acts as if and that is how coherence is established and stablised. You can read a bit more here about ways in which you can act as if to create the trip of your dreams. And know that you can apply the same approach to all aspects of being more intentional about new results you’d love.
Relating to your intentions, firing them with emotion and acting as if helps close the loop and allows your vision to be made manifest in your lived experience with more speed, ease and grace.
Experiment with some or all of these 5 steps to be more intentional this month and let me know the difference it makes for you!
If you would love to explore these transformational ideas and strategies in more depth, join me for the Vision Workshop Live in Cork, Ireland, 18-20 October 2024 – Bookings now open and super early bird tickets are available here.
Be intentional! Sign up here today!
Cover Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash