In my prior few blog posts, I’ve been exploring various ways for you to stay motivated in your reinvention, specifically goals, visions, and now, intention.
To recap, a goal is motivating and useful when you know the destination and have a ‘map’, i.e., a set of action steps, that will get you there.
A vision helps when you have a clear picture of what you want, but you aren’t clear about how you will get there. By continuing to hold your vision, and developing more and more detail about what you want, the ‘how’, or the action steps, become clear to you as you go along.
How do you keep motivated and remain confident that you’re on your ‘right path’ when you are in a place in your life where you don’t have a clear vision of what is next, and you don’t have any goals that are clearly the right ones either?
One of my clients expressed this when we had our Year End visioning session. She said that she couldn’t see what was next for her in her business. The interesting thing was that this felt right to her, not knowing.
She’s a very intuitive person and she’s definitely tuned into her inner guidance. She has her inner compass calibrated and working effectively, that is for sure.
And, indeed, when we explored how she was feeling, it definitely felt like we were going to be forcing something into place if we pushed to get a clear vision or goals.
So I asked her how she would like to ‘be’ in the absence of a vision or goals. She said that she wanted to remain open-minded, curious, and paying attention to her inner guidance.
This is an intention. It’s a commitment to a way of being, in this case, open-minded and curious.
It’s also a commitment to remain tuned into her inner guidance. What’s the ‘how’ of that? She will find out as she goes along.
When I asked her for her first step, she said that she would meditate every day for 15 minutes. This is her primary way of staying ‘tuned in’ to her inner compass.
A month or so later she said that she was going to get some body work done, massage and reiki, because she felt that this would support her listening to inner nudges and intuition. She also continued with meditation and journaling.
Most of us, me included, feel more comfortable when there’s a clear plan, or, absent that, at least a clear picture of what we want.
Sometimes there isn’t one, and if you try to force one into place, it may give you a short term focus, but it may or may not be heading towards ‘true north’, and you may expend a lot of resources and energy towards something that ends up on the scrap heap later.
Sometimes it is all about right timing. About six weeks after the first of the year, my client woke up one day with a clear vision of the next development objective for her business. Wild horses could not have stopped her, because it felt so right, so true, and so exciting to her.
Would she have ‘gotten there’, had she done some more visioning or goal-setting activities earlier? Of course, we don’t know, but I doubt it. All I know is that when I explored that possibility with her then, she had a very strong intuition that it was all about waiting until her gut told her what the plan was, in right timing.
The point I’d like to make about intention is that it really helps to have a clear intention, and a commitment to that intention, if you don’t have a vision or goals.
She didn’t just tell me that she didn’t know where she was going and that was that.
She committed to an intention that, for her, was clear: “I will remain open-minded and curious, and I will pay attention to my inner guidance.”
She then structured specific ways to live by that intention every day. She didn’t allow staying ‘tuned in’ to slip off her radar.
She lived by intention, and she discovered the ‘how’ as she went along, by being faithful to her intention.
And, she has pretty much lived happily ever after. It’s her view that we are living in times that are very fast-moving, and continuing to live by this intention is her way of keeping up to speed with how she and everything else around her is evolving.
Living by intention is a pro-active and active process, not a passive one. To have this approach work effectively for you, you will need to review your intention periodically to see if it needs refreshing.
What’s your intention?
Permalink | Filed under: Your Map, Your Compass, Being a Reinventer, Tools, Survival Tactics on May 31st, 2008 | Add a Comment | No Comments »
