I think we’ve all heard the word intention. It’s a popular concept these days.
But what exactly does it mean?
According to dictionary.com, intention means done with intention or on purpose; intended: of or relating to intention or purpose.
So what does this mean to me? It means to me that everything I do happens because I wanted it to. Not because someone else wanted it to happen to me.
Obviously, there are a lot of things that will happen even though I don’t want them to, but I can still choose my reaction to that.
That’s still intention.
I’ll go one step further and say that living a more intentional life means that I determine my priorities and my values. Once I’ve done that, it should (in theory) be fairly easy to live intentionally.
A couple of years ago, my husband (Bernd) and I decided to begin each month by looking at the calendar. No, we didn’t just look at it to see how many days there were, but so that we could decide exactly what would be happening in the coming month. At this time we also decided on what was valuable to us. With those things in mind, we have tried to plan our calendar and make those things a priority for each month.
That takes intention.
Before we started looking at our calendar intentionally, we would simply flip over the calendar to the next month and start receiving most of the phone calls, texts, and events that piled into our lives. It could sometimes be very overwhelming. When you don’t have a plan in place and someone asks for your time, you say yes because there’s room on your calendar. Before you know it, the month is over and you didn’t get a chance to have your family day or whatever else you set as valuable to you.
4 Steps to a More Intentional Life:
- Determine your priorities and values.
- Spend time putting a plan into action. Plan what your month will look like.
- Learn to say no to the things that don’t align with your priorities and values.
- Stick with your plan.
For us, determining our priorities and values was the easy part.
Saying no is something that isn’t always easy.
Sometimes reading a post like this can make the intentional life sound easy.
It’s not. It takes discipline. It takes changing yourself.
It takes being willing to say no even when it might offend someone.
How about you? Do you see value in living an intentional life? What are the steps that you take to live an intentional life?
If you enjoyed this content, I’d love if you’d take a moment to share with a friend of via social media.
