Well-intentioned

Good morning!  In preparation for the week, I spent some time yesterday identifying and setting my intentions for the week.  What do I plan to achieve this week?  When one is a student or a working adult, there are always tasks to be completed and deadlines by which to complete them.  It’s quite easy to set daily intentions based upon those deadlines.  For example, if you are a student and you have a research paper due in two weeks, perhaps your intention for one of the early days is to create an outline of main paints you wish to address in the paper.  The next day’s intention might be to find five resources that will help you to write the paper.  And so on.  A large task, the research paper, is made easier when broken down into small, daily pieces.  I think the same can be true of any task.  If we can break it down into smaller, easier to manage portions, overall completion seems simple and even seemingly impossible jobs suddenly become realistic.

What about you?  Do you set intentions for yourself?  Someone recently asked me to explain “intentions” because she had never been trained on them.  I did a bit of research this morning and found that there is a very wordy, verbose description that is used to compare the two.  What it comes down to is that goals are the things we want to accomplish and intentions are the small steps that will get us there.  Don’t ask that definition to hold up in a professional discussion with leadership trainers.  It is an oversimplification of a larger discussion, but it works for our purposes.

So, what are your intentions this week?  Think about a goal or two that you want to complete.  Then, think about one or two small steps you can take towards the completion of the goal.  Those can then become your intentions, either day by day, or in the case of a large task, over the course of an entire week.  

Lastly, as the image above shows, the intention is empty/baseless/incomplete until combined with actions.  Actually attending to and completing the work gives power to the intention.  So, set your intentions, and then go out and do them!  Happy planning!