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Elevate Your Life with Strategic Intention Setting—a guide From Authentic State Coaching
Set your unique intention with a 6 minute guided meditation, and know what you need less or more of to achieve your intention. Intention setting is an incredibly powerful coaching tool.
Setting your intention helps to focus the mind at both a conscious and unconscious level. It counteracts the clutter of the mind, and the dirty ‘should’s’ we set ourselves. It taps into your intuition and your higher knowledge.
Download the guided meditation…
Learn the value and science of intention setting—and download a free intention visualisation.
In our fast-paced and often chaotic lives, finding ways to stay focused, maintain clarity, and achieve success can feel like an uphill battle.
Setting an intention is the deliberate act of defining what you want to achieve and how you want to show up in a specific situation, project, or even your daily life. It's about consciously choosing your mindset and approach to align with your goals and values. Intentions go beyond traditional goal-setting; they are about how you want to feel and be while pursuing your objectives.
You can harness the power of intention setting before you start your day, your week, a meeting, task, year or practically any time you start something new.
Intention Setting—a Life Hack
Intention setting is simple, but done right (by keeping your intent top of mind across time), it can be an incredibly powerful life hack.
Setting your intention helps to focus your mind at both a conscious and unconscious level.
Intention setting contains energy, emotion, imagery, and meaning that you might not have previously discovered. It can teach you, about you. It helps counteract the clutter of the mind, and the unhelpful ‘should’s’ we often set ourselves.
By setting your intention, you tap into your intuition and harness the power of your unconscious mind (your wisdom-powerhouse) to look for opportunities.
The Science Behind Intentions
The power of setting intentions is not merely anecdotal; it has a scientific basis. Neuroscientific research has shown that when you set an intention, you activate specific neural pathways associated with that intention. This mental priming increases your awareness of relevant opportunities and choices, making it more likely for you to take action aligned with your goals.
Intentions engage the reticular activating system (RAS) in your brain. The RAS acts as a filter for incoming information, highlighting what you consider important. When you set an intention, your RAS begins to prioritise data that supports that intention, effectively boosting your focus and awareness.
How to Set Your Intention
Step 1: Trust your Intuition – always, always, always trust your intuition. Ok?
What is your intuition? Your intuition is the first thought that enters your mind once you have cleared the internal ‘judgement’. It is the little voice in your head (not the loud critic, but the quiet wisdom). Trust the impression, thought or hunch that comes to you.
Your intuition will speak to you. It might take time or practice. Listening with a clear mind and a trusting heart is sometimes the tricky part – you’ve got this. Trust yourself.
Step 2: Close your eyes. Take several deep breaths and connect with your body. Listen into your body.
Step 3: Ask yourself “What do I want for my self in the coming year?”
Choose one to three words for your intention for your coming year.
Let yourself feel into the question. Allow your truth to rise to the surface.
Once you have your intention, ask the second question.
Step 4: Ask yourself “To achieve (insert your intention word), what do I have to let go of?”. Ask and allow for a word, or message, to come through for you.
Step 5: Ask yourself “What am I going to do in the next 12 months to achieve (insert your intention word)?”. Ask and allow for a word, or message, to come through for you.
Tips for Intention Setting
Be Specific: Your intentions should be clear and specific. Instead of a vague intention like "I want to be successful," say, "I intend to excel in my career by achieving a promotion within the next year."
Use Positive Language: Phrase your intentions positively, focusing on what you want to achieve rather than what you want to avoid.
Set Realistic Goals: While intentions are powerful, they should be realistic and achievable. Set yourself up for success by setting attainable milestones.
Visualise Your Intentions: Create a mental image of yourself embodying your intentions. Visualisation can reinforce your commitment.
Write Them Down: Put your intentions in writing. This act of commitment can make your intentions feel more tangible and concrete.
Review Daily: Make it a habit to review your intentions daily, ideally in the morning or before important tasks. This reinforces your commitment and keeps your focus sharp. Remember, your mind is your responsibility to feed, clean and program your mind.
Get Your Free Intention Setting Meditation
If this is new to you, I’ve created a 6 minute guided Intention Setting audio meditation for you! All you need to do is just listen and allow.
Enjoy the process. If it helps, think of this like a playful little experiment!
Be sure to join me on Facebook, to get more inspiring tips for a greater you, and a greater world.
Looking at 'normal' with fresh eyes
In a world where society has pivoted so that many of our holidays, such as Easter, Christmas or Halloween fill the profit bank of business, rather that contentment bank of people—maybe it’s time to do a little more reinterpreting of the meanings of our holidays, at a personal level.
If traditions are not providing you with an authentic sense of comfort and belonging, maybe its time to re-examine the meaning for yourself? You can create your own traditions, with themes surrounding love, connection, gratitude, friendship or whatever brings you a sense of comfort and belonging. Inspiration is all around you…
Stories are a powerful way we reinforce ourselves and each other what is ‘normal’ and morals, ethics, rights, and wrongs.
Across the ages of time, mankind has reinterpreted and re-written stories and traditions. Many folk tales have been rewritten, and today sit in our bookshelves as fairy tales with the meanings quite different from originally intended. The same thing has happened with our holidays and traditions.
That’s fine. Unless we have lost something valuable in the process.
Personally, I don’t really relate to Halloween. Sure, it is fun to fancy dress, face paint, sugar rush, booze rush. But why do we do it? Why do it? Just because “it’s what we do”? Hmm…
Like a handful of others I know, I prefer to connect to what some say is the origin of Halloween, ‘Samhain’ (pronounced “SOW-in” or “SAH-win”). And in doing this, connecting to something that is more authentic for me.
Samhain can be described as an ancient Celtic tradition that was rewritten or reinterpreted by institutionalised religion.
Samhain can be said to be a time when ‘the veil between the human and spirit realms is lifted’.
Enter the dress-up; the ghouls, the ghosts and the gross! And candles in pumpkins—it is said that candles were once placed in windowsills to ward off ghosts. Samhain also points to ancient rituals connected to nature. Of fires and celebrations.
Rethinking what our traditions mean
In a world of diminishing meaning, of increased inauthenticity, and value of appearances over substance, I like to rethink what our holidays mean. And make them meaningful again.
So this Halloween, I have set time aside for reflection, connection, and not to forget… celebration.
With family, including young ones, we created our own little ceremony. We lit a candle, looked at photos and spoke of our ancestors. We thanked those who have loved us past and present for being in our life. Without them, there would be no us.
I’ve taken time out to be with nature today—to be grateful. And later will drink a splash of spirit in celebration of the beauty and cycles of nature.
In a world where society has pivoted so that many of our holidays, such as Easter, Christmas or Halloween fill the profit bank of business, rather that contentment bank of people—maybe it’s time to do a little more reinterpreting of the meanings of our holidays, at a personal level.
If traditions are not providing you with an authentic sense of comfort and belonging, maybe its time to re-examine the meaning for yourself? You can create your own traditions, with themes surrounding love, connection, gratitude, friendship or whatever brings you a sense of comfort and belonging. Inspiration is all around you.
Inspiration or creativity is sometimes about just following the thread—keep an intention in mind and follow the line to see where it leads you… and when you want to, stop. And reflect on where you have been, and where you want to go next. With a little creativity, you can write (or rewrite) the next tradition in your family.
Image credit: White.RainForest
Are you on the ‘love-hurt’ merry-go-round?
Spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle says “There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body.”
Most of us would say we want to live without pain. However Eckhart suggests we have a ‘pain body’ that seeks pain. And just like the needy monsters in the series ‘Stranger Things’, this pain body wants feeding. The hunger of the ‘pain body’ is only satisfied when we experience strong negative emotional reactions.
The ‘Pain Body’
Spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle says “There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body”.
Most of us would say we want to live without pain. However, Eckhart suggests we have a ‘pain body’ that seeks pain. And just like the needy monsters in the series ‘Stranger Things’, this pain body wants feeding. The hunger of the ‘pain body’ is only satisfied when we experience strong negative emotional reactions.
The Emotional Merry-Go-Round
Does this sound familiar?
Do you and your partner bicker or argue too often?
Do you both push each other emotional buttons, and end up angry, hurt or defensive?
Do your relationships bring out feelings of shame, unworthiness, disappointment or feelings of being unloved?
Are you and your partner ‘finger-pointing’ to each other (pointing ‘blame’ or ‘responsibility’ of how you each feel, back to each other)?
Have you ever stayed too long in a relationship that fired emotional triggers, or find that time and time again, you are with different people but in the same relationship, with these same arguments?
These are examples of relationships that feed the ‘pain-body’ (the hurt creature) that lives inside you.
Relationships are not supposed to be painful. Like a ‘love-hurt’ merry-go-round, sometimes we can get stuck in a cycle of ups and downs. Our relationship is great, then a something starts the arguing and hurt, before things settle down. Then another emotional trigger starts conflict and pain, before it calms down again… you get the idea.
Are You Keeping an Eye on Your Shadow Side?
Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875-1961) told us we all have a ‘Shadow’ side; the unknown dark side of the personality. This hugely influential Swede believed to truly grow as a person, one must remove willful blindness to one’s own Shadow side. Jung believed that by not wanting to look at our Shadow directly, many people project them onto others; meaning that the qualities of others we struggle with in our most intimate relationships, are qualities we are not willing to acknowledge in ourselves.
That is, qualities we have not resolved in ourselves, like a lack of kindness, acceptance and love for our selves, are replicated from our external world. So for example if you haven’t 100% accepted yourself, you will attract others who will not 100% accept you; or if you are not kind to yourself, you will attract people who are not kind to you. This perspective shares a confronting and hard truth. We live in a culture of comparison, achievement, distraction and denial, so rest assured, you’re not alone here.
Your pain-body is part of your Shadow side. When we are upset reliving old emotional pain, we are feeding our pain body.
The thing is, we often point our fingers at others in blame or as the cause of our hurt. Sure, he or she may have behaved like a complete dingbat, however it’s the extent of our reaction that is significant.
The crux of the matter is that the emotion you experience in your body, in response to your relationship today, is often due to deep-set pain from your experiences of the past and your inherited emotional biology. Past experiences of fear, loss, rejection, betrayal and other hurts and trauma become the emotional ‘imprint’, from which we unconsciously seek to repeat in relationships again and again.
You might be asking, do I really have a ‘pain-body’ that says “feed me!”, at the cost of crippling you moving forward in love, work and from being the greatest possible version of yourself? You may be asking “why would I (subconsciously) sabotage our relationships and those I love most?”. The simple answer is, because most of us don’t know we have a ‘pain-body, and we don’t know how to stop feeding the ‘pain-body’.
How to Manage Your Pain Body and Emotional Triggers
So how do we deal with the pain body?
At best, clearing the underlining, unwanted hurt (pain body) from the past, and addressing the root of the issue gets the quickest and best results. To do this you need to allow a trained healer, therapist or coach to guide you through the process. It can be a quick but profound process. Shifting the root emotional memory that has been locked in the body releases the self-limiting belief that acts like the magnet to negative behaviours.
Secondly, be mindful of ‘awareness’, ‘observation’ and ‘presence’.
Be aware when you are reacting to someone with feelings of hurt, anger or if you are offended, and consider it a ‘teachable moment’, what can you learn about yourself in that moment. This is difficult but not impossible.
Observe your feelings rather than react from your feelings.
Be present. Simply observe it and be the witness. Don’t judge it, be the space for it. Then gradually, its energy will decrease.
Try this as a personal experiment across the next couple of weeks and see what happens for yourself.
Self Directed Healing
At Authentic State Coaching, we are passionate about removing patterns of pain and trauma, enabling people to embrace their best self and greatest life in health, love and careers.
Through ‘Self Directed Healing’ we help people clear old triggers and dissolve the ‘pain-body’. This is like a life-hack; a quick and long-lasting remedy to your pain body. Imagine being set free from old hurts and unhealthy relationship patterns.
Read more about Self Directed Healing here.
Image Credits: Stijn te Strake | ScottWebb
It's OK to be selfish
Unless you’re in the 1% of the population that thinks like a psychopath, sometimes what's good for you, is the best for others. It might sound crazy but it’s true. Putting yourself first, can be the best service you can do for your kids, partner, boss and others who lean on you.
The next time you want to do something that makes you feel good, whole, or points you towards the path that you really want in life, think; it Selfish or Self-full?
‘Self-full’ is allowing yourself to fill your own energetic and creative cup first. By filling your own energetic tank and connecting to yourself you are inviting your authentic self to be present. Your energy and inspiration then over-spills into the lives of others.
How many people do you know are running on empty? Exhausted, snapping at their nearest and dearest, picking up viruses, or putting on a brave public face—getting home at the end of the day to tune-out in front of the telly, self-medicating with a drink or ‘two’… or any other common coping strategies.
Unless you’re in the 1% of the population that thinks like a psychopath [1], sometimes what's good for you, is the best for others. It might sound crazy but it’s true. Putting yourself first, can be the best service you can do for your kids, partner, boss and others who lean on you.
The next time you want to do something that makes you feel good, whole, or points you towards the path that you really want in life, think; it Selfish or Self-full?
‘Self-full’ is allowing yourself to fill your own energetic and creative cup first. By filling your own energetic tank and connecting to yourself you are inviting your authentic self to be present. Your energy and inspiration then over-spills into the lives of others. Rather than running on empty, you have an authentic capacity to love, attend to, and serve others; those that you love, your family, workplace and the world around you.
Being Self-full requires boundaries. Saying no, and sometimes re-teaching the people around you what you will and won't do. Of course, these changes are most successful when expressed firmly, with sensitivity, and with a sense of compassion for yourself, and others. Consistency is the key here.
Only you can give yourself true permission to live your greatest life.
Every now and then, when your energetic and inspiration cup needs filling, be a bit Self-full; take time out for you. Prioritise putting yourself first every now and then, and watch what happens to your frame of mind, energy levels and relationships.
No content on this site, should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.