What would it be like if….you were living more intentionally?
First, how do live intentionally anyways?
In the Wikipedia sense, Intentional living is any lifestyle, based on an individual’s conscious attempts to live according to their values and beliefs. These can include lifestyles based on religious, political or ethical values, as well as for personal development, transformation and coaching.
Episode 46: How To Live More Intentionally
Living more intentionally is to live a life you feel is enriching to who you are – and is being true to YOU. In this episode I’ll help you do just that.
In other simply words living more intentionally is to live a life you feel is enriching to who you are – and is being true to YOU.
Why do we want to add more intention to our lives?
So you can be more intentional about getting more of what you want (even when others seem to be controlling your fate). Here’s the thing. Everyone on the planet seems to be split in 10 ways at once right now. That’s because we’re in the midst of a pandemic. Some may say, “it’s just evolution”. Others are seeing their lives being torn apart – both from the inside, and outside.
But on some level, we’ve all faced with major change that have put us out of our daily comforts. So by setting some regular intentions, or living more intentionally, you have a way to feeling more in control. Who doesn’t want to feel like they’re in control of their destiny?
Top 4 Ways To Live With Intention
Step 1. Create A Favourable Environment
Every morning is a new day, full of choice and opportunity. But self-motivation is different for everyone. So go easy on yourself when setting up new intentions and routines. Find out what drives you to be happy. In order to make a powerful choice to begin a sustainable new habit, it’s a good idea to create a favourable environment that’s flexible for everyone involved. Let’s say you have a family of four. Your idea of a new fitness routine might be different from your spouses.
Having said that, you have to take responsibility for the choices you make each day.
Napolean Hill states that you can choose to have certain thoughts. Therefore, you have the power to be mindful of your daily habits, attitude and choices. Also, your past circumstances don’t necessarily have to dictate your life in the future. You have a choice as to how you live your life. You can decide how you will show up in the world. Likewise, you have a choice on whether you repeat the same pattern of living that you have been for years…in the same way that you make a choice that every morning is a new opportunity for new thought programming.
As I said earlier, in order to make a powerful choice to begin a sustainable new habit, it’s a good idea to create a favourable environment that’s flexible for everyone involved.
Step 2. Decide What You Want To Guide Yourself To Success
While this step might seem over-simplistic, it can actually be a difficult thing to do because this step requires a bit of dreaming. And it also requires flexibility, as I just mentioned above.
In order to stop feeling powerless to the life you currently live, you’ve got to be able to release the beliefs that are holding you back. Evaluate what you want, and what your options are. Often times, early morning or bedtime is a great time of day to evaluate these things.
Once you make a decision for what you want your life to look like, consider the skills you need to get there.
Make a key decision about the feelings you want more of, instead of allowing yourself to be on auto-pilot – which is the opposite of living an intentional life. You may need to consider a new routine that allows you to spend some time in reflection each day to assess if you’re living life with intention, or living with old patterns. Decide to spend time with people who will uplift you and empower you and then go for it. You were born to live your life — determine today to be good at it. After all, you probably will only get one shot.
Step 3. Learn To Meditate For Increased Brain Coherence
Have a listen to one of these 3 podcast episodes and see if meditation might be a viable option to living intentionally:
1. 5 Interesting Facts About Meditation
2. Bring-on 2019 With A Super Mind
3. Create Your Own Meditation Space
Do you have an intention to slow your life down, and be more present? If so, how can you fit in a meditation course to help you sit down and focus on the things that matter the most in your life, daily.
Meditation is an excellent way to help you find more passion in your life, and help you connect your brain with your body. It can be difficult to gain perspective sometimes. We all need to slow down the pace at some point during the day, in order to give our bodies the rest. When one spends time in meditation, they can identify with their daily conflicts and obstacles. This all makes intentional living totally attainable, and say.
Being too busy to meditate is a common theme. But the truth is, meditation can help bring new meaning to your life, and help you define your higher purpose in a more subtle way. This one activity can help your entire family gain perspective, fostering a more balanced family life.
Step 4. Create Regular Rituals That Involve Free Time
Daily regular rituals are great ways to help ground you in living with more intention. The reason why ritual helps ground you in intention is because you’re showing up for yourself. Being willing to commit to a daily practice of taking “time-out” during this challenging time can be healing.
If a 20-minute meditation doesn’t interest you, can you request 10-minutes from your family when you get home to foster your own autonomy. By taking charge of your time, you’re showing those you love that these are important behaviours we should all take-on.
Most of us have daily rituals and habits that we may not consider as moments of mindfulness, and moments of intentional living. If you can learn to shift your perception for a moment, and control your time, and thoughts, you are gaining some serious traction towards healthy behaviours…ones that everyone will appreciate! 🙂
Having ritual is extremely important to living with intention. It’s the one thing that you can do right now, to have a lot more time for you in your life.
Why Are We Here Anyways?
For most of the world, it seems easier to do things on auto-pilot and take care of “business” as we should. While some might consider the COVID-19 pandemic as a great ‘opportunity’ to make changes, there are others who have been forced into many different roles and responsibilities that were largely unexpected. You know you want to more purposeful and productive. Naturally, you feel passionate about working towards something different, but you might feel stuck.
Or perhaps you might want what you see constructed in the media – but it’s just not attainable right now. If you were to allow yourself the time to take a step back, and approach your life one moment at a time, you might find yourself feeling less stressed about creating what you really want. When was the last time you really thought about this for yourself? If you’re already dreaming of living a different life, or being in better shape, great. It all comes down to you taking that one tiny step – towards releasing the beliefs that are holding you back.
Without a solid intention, doing life on auto-pilot can be stressful causing you to have trouble self-regulating your emotions, especially after working many long hours as most health professionals do. On the one hand, you want to make a difference in this world and help others. On the other hand, the challenging day-to-day responsibilities make life far too stressful.
This moves you further away from being present in your life and living a healthy lifestyle with intention. Instead of practicing moments of mindfulness and presence, you lose focus on what you haven’t yet achieved. This can continue to hurt you. Feelings of lack take-over. This can cause you to feel that you can’t accomplish your endless list of ‘goals’ and ‘dreams’. I’ve been there!
Sadly, this day-to-day lifestyle is a common theme in people’s lives today. Each morning, you wake-up wanting something different. Yet, you continue to be thrown in to the next moment without taking a step-back and really pursuing an intentional life. Does this sound familiar? Suddenly, the next family holiday comes around and you have a family gathering to prepare for, which keeps the cycle of auto-pilot going just a little bit longer. Life never magically improves enough though. Here’s the thing, without taking action towards achieving different results, you will not live a mindful and intentional life.
What would Napolean Hill Say About This?
Yes, I love everything about Napoleon Hill’s messaging!!! Napoleon Hill became highly influential with his book “Think & Grow Rich”. He made the following statement:
‘Human beings have the ability to control their own minds completely.’
What he infers is that humans have the ability to open their minds to different ways of seeing life and it all begins with a thought. Small daily actions and intentions can work for you, and your thoughts have the ability to work against you. It’s up to us to choose which thought impulses you want to have. That means, you have the choice to live intentionally every day.
A Few Last Thoughts…
Each day is a new opportunity to form new habits and create something new in your life. If you’re not living the life you imagined, try to have more awareness of what’s not working. Once you master the principles of awareness, you can create more of what you want each day, and the day after that . Eventually, these moments accumulate and suddenly, you look back upon your life and will realize that the smalls shifts you made created tremendous difference.
Praise the process.
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