Setting Intentions

Intentions

Once you understand what gives you meaningful purpose in life—and have developed the belief that you are able to create a future where you live mostly in this purpose—then your work becomes largely about aligning what you do to be congruent with that purpose. In other words, if you can practice bringing purpose to your day-to-day thinking and behaviors, the stronger its influence will be. And, the congruence between your purpose and thoughts and behaviors will make it easier, more exciting for you to go after goals, to overcome obstacles with ease, and be more flexible in how you think. And that adds up to greater well-being!

So how does intention setting—and self-regulating toward your intentions—fit in?

Intention setting is the act of making an explicit intention to align your goals, projects, decisions, behaviors, and resources, in the present, to a future that will provide maximum purpose and engagement in your life.

Intention also brings awareness to your personal self-regulation— the act of bringing awareness to the present moment to flexibly activate, monitor, inhibit, persevere and/or adapt your behaviors, focus of attention, emotions and cognitive strategies to stay in alignment with the intentions you have set (and in alignment with your life purpose!). Self-regulation allows you to productively respond to cues from inside yourself, your environment, or others, in ways that more fully realize the intentions you have set.

In Forum, you’ll learn the art of intention setting, and how to set intentions on the grand and and small scale.