What is your intent?
How do you want your life to be different 6 months from now or a year from now than it is today?
What do you want your relationships to feel like?
What do you want your life to feel like?
If you don’t have a clearly defined destination experience, you will likely end up in a random place. Or at least in the same inner world of emotional cycles and thoughts as you were in last month and the year before that.
One of my mentors would talk about how most people spent more time planning a 2-week vacation than they did the next 10-20 years of their life.
Working with Intent and Goals
I remember listening to a psychologist describe the importance of getting small things “right” in relationships. He described working on how you and your partner want to be greeted. After a workday, what do you do to re-connect that is satisfying, and what would you change? Does one of you need 30 min to decompress the stress, take off the “work armor” before you can relax and listen? Or even some exercise to discharge some mind chatter. Does one of you need to share the emotional cycles of the day right away? Does that work for both parties? What does the other need in return to make that work? Have you talked about this and worked out a good supportive connecting routine? Maybe you do this once a day, maybe between things you check in 3 times a day, morning, after work, and when going to bed. That’s 1,000 times a year. Get a small thing right like this, and you changed a thousand moments in a year.
If you don’t consciously define and create these things, your unconscious beliefs will create them for you based on the strongest habits of your past.
Eva and I intend to create a course to help you have those types of connecting conversations. I want to share the practices, so you can put the mind-chatter aside and really listen to your partner or friend and make a good connection, and your partner will learn how to be present for you as well.
We haven’t made as much progress as we like on the course. Life shows up to get in the way. The past two weeks, it was a stomach bug. Like getting anywhere worthwhile, we keep coming back to it and chipping away at it. It’s important so that it won’t happen overnight. Big important things take time. It’s necessary to add some small steps to get there. Feel the progress in small steps. It’s also important to have a clear destination to keep you focused, or you will drift away over the days if you let your attention wander.
It’s a destination, and there will be storms to go around. Winds that will require tacking directions and adjustment of sails. Repairs to be made as things break. We routinely check the navigation charts and plot progress with long-term goals. If you don’t prioritize your long term goals, then the day to day chaos and old habits create your future.
This past week we brought a new intent into the Relationship Connection course. We need to include working on the relationship with your Self. How do you treat your Self? We know the importance of growing the love and acceptance you have for yourself. If you don’t have love and acceptance, you won’t have much you can offer your partner or family.
The end of the year might be a good time to work on some new goals for yourself for 2021. Take some time to chart a new destination for your Self, Relationships, Happiness, Fun, Education, Growth, Finances, and whatever else you want. Maybe you get there this year. Maybe you don’t. But for sure, if you don’t set your intent for a destination, you won’t be any closer 12 months from now.
What goals do you have, and what progress are you making?
The more clearly you define your destination, the clearer your intent, and the faster your progress will be.
After you define what you want, how you want your relationships to feel, and what you want your life to be like, there are some other important steps.
- Do you believe it’s possible? If not, begin an inventory of the limiting beliefs/perceptions in your mind that are in the way.
- What can you break down into small steps to mark your progress and celebrate wins along the way?
- Do you have the skills to accomplish the tasks to get there? If not, begin making a list of skills or resources you need and where to get them.
- For help with those skills you need, find someone who has done what you want to do and is willing to share with you how to do it.
If you want to identify the limiting beliefs that hold you back from achieving your goals and change them, you can learn them in my Self Mastery Course.
I go deeply into this process of building a new life the way you want in the Self Mastery II Course