Living with intention
Hi friends! An intentional life is a fulfilling, purposeful life, and I’d love nothing more than to help you get closer to it. So let’s talk about it.
What do I mean by “intentional living”?
Living with intention means being deliberate and mindful about the choices we make in all aspects of life. It's about taking ownership of our actions and aligning them with our core values and goals. It allows us to create a life that reflects who we truly are, proactively making choices that align with our values rather than simply reacting our way through life.
A note about privilege
Living with intention requires us to address an important aspect of our lives: privilege. Recognizing our privileges, whether they are related to race, gender, socioeconomic status, or other factors, is absolutely crucial for living intentionally and responsibly. Your level of privilege impacts your opportunities and life experiences. If you don’t believe this to be true, I encourage you to watch this video and read this article, and to reflect on your own privilege as you go through these exercises and consider how you might leverage your privilege to make a positive difference and create a more equitable, inclusive, and just world. Once we’ve identified our values, we must align them with actions that promote equality and social justice.
Clarifying Your values
First things first, we want to identify our values so that we can be really clear on our focus and intention. When you have a clear understanding of what truly matters to you, you can make decisions that bring you into alignment with those core beliefs. So our first exercise is identifying our five core values. These will be different for everyone, and these can evolve over time as you experience more and as your priorities change. There are a lot of quizzes out there on the internet that are designed to help you find your values, this is one I’ve used and I encourage you to explore those more if what I do here doesn’t work for you.
We’ll start by getting out a piece of paper. Scan through this list of values start by choosing your top 10. The easiest way I’ve found to do this is to give each value a rank of one to five, with one being the most important and five being the least. That will at least help you identify which ones you gravitate toward.
Once you have your top 10, you’re basically going to pit these values against each other to see which ones you really prioritize. Take each value and tally up how many other values it wins out against when you consider them against one another.
Once you’ve fully considered your top 10, it should be pretty clear what your top five are. Write those down on a new sheet of paper. These are the values that you’re going to make your life choices toward. They should feel like things you refuse to compromise on.
Let me know in the comments what your top five values are. Did they surprise you?
And again, these core values may change over time, they may evolve, and that’s okay. The things you value and prioritize in your early 20s are not necessarily going to be the same things you value and prioritize when you’re in your mid-30s. I know when I was 20, I didn’t value stability the way I do now. This is an exercise you can do again and again throughout your life to ensure you’re living in alignment with what you really value.
I have my core values written down in various places to keep them top of mind, to remind myself that I want to make choices that steer me closer to my values. I have them as my desktop background, they’re on my Notion dashboard, they’re on every vision board I make, I write them in my planner every week. Having them everywhere helps my ADHD brain to keep those neural pathways on track toward my values. Repetition is the name of the game in habit building, so having them in multiple places and reading them to myself whenever I encounter them has definitely helped me keep them front and center.
Setting Intentional Goals
Now that we have clarity on our values and priorities, it's time to set intentional goals. These are the milestones and achievements that align with your vision of a fulfilling life. I’m going to use the SMART goal-setting framework here, meaning my goals will need to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. If you aren't familiar with the SMART framework, there are about a million videos on YouTube that talk about this goal-setting strategy and I encourage you to check some of those out. It’s pretty straightforward, but we’re going to add a dimension to the SMART framework: Aligned. SMART-A.
We want our goals to be aligned to our values. So let’s take stability, one of my core values. For me, stability looks like a relatively steady and secure environment, financial independence, and consistency in my relationships and routines. I have not fully achieved all of these things, but that’s where goal-setting comes in. One of my big life goals is to be financially independent, meaning free of debt and able to live off of whatever assets I have without needing to have a full-time job, and empowered to share my resources with others - making a more equitable and just world - rather than living paycheck to paycheck just to pay my own bills. The dream. This is not a short-term goal, but it is fully aligned with how I value stability in my life and it’s also aligned with my desire to help provide for those who need it.
However, when I look at this goal, I think “wow, that feels fifty years away and it doesn’t mean anything to me right now” because it’s a very large and lofty goal without any actual action involved. So now we’re going to break down this goal into smaller parts so that I can start taking action on this value today.
To be financially independent, I’ll need a hefty safety net. That starts with saving and investing. Right now, things are kind of tight, so my ability to save and invest is limited, but not impossible. I can save a little bit every month, and invest a little bit every month, to start working toward that larger goal. A shorter-term goal, then, might be to have $1000 in a savings account by this time next year. My first action step would be to open a savings account if I haven’t already, and then to set up an auto-transfer from my checking account. If I want $1000 in 12 months and I currently have $0, I need to transfer about $20 a week into savings in order to make that happen. Can I afford that? It will require giving some things up, but yes, I can. This goal is specific, it’s measurable, it’s achievable, it’s relevant, it’s time-bound, and it’s aligned. Will a thousand dollars in a savings account give me financial independence? Lol, no. But it’s a step. And these little steps are what starts giving us the momentum to run.
So what you’ll do now is look at all five of your core values, and identify a few long-term goals that are aligned with them. And once you have those, you’ll break them down into shorter-term goals that have actionable steps. And then you’ll take those steps. And now you’re living intentionally.
Keeping your goals front and center is just as important as keeping your values front and center. If you write down your goals and put them away somewhere, you’ll never think about them again. Put them on a post-it and stick it to your computer monitor. Make them your phone background. Put them at the top of your Notion dashboard. Keep them visible so that your brain can always be working on them.
Cultivating Mindfulness and Presence
Living with intention requires being present in the moment and being aware of our thoughts and our choices. If we’re simply reacting all day long, we’re not making conscious choices, and we’re not living intentionally. So how do we become less reactive? We become responsive. We learn to respond to our environment and to challenges rather than react to them. We do this by becoming more mindful. By practicing mindfulness, we become more aware of our thoughts, emotions, and actions, allowing us to make conscious choices.
Some key mindfulness techniques include deep breathing and meditation. I really encourage you to find some mindfulness meditations on YouTube (I’ll be uploading a few of my own soon) and start with just 5 minutes a day of meditation. If you can work up to 20 minutes a day, you’ll start harnessing all the benefits of mindfulness - not just increased awareness and responsivity, but also reduced stress, increased focus, and improved decision-making.
I like to practice a mindful meditation right after I wake up in order to set the tone for the day and to drop into awareness of my state of mind. This helps me become responsive rather than reactive and to move more consciously through my day, keeping my goals and values in mind and steering myself always closer to them.
Living with intention is an approach to life that empowers you to make choices aligned with your values, passions, and goals. It's about creating a life that brings you joy, fulfillment, and purpose. It's never too late to start living with intention, so let's start making conscious choices and build a life and a world that truly resonates with who we are.
May the moss always be soft under your feet.
