Do you want to live with intention?

Are you living with intentionality? 

If you can’t begin to answer that question, I have a tip for you. 

This is an exercise that I do myself and with my clients all the time.

First, define the area of your life you would like to focus on. 

Is it parenting, leadership, a relationship, hitting your sales numbers, or losing weight? 

Let me give you an example that might help you decide. 

When coaching my business clients, we first take the time to get really clear about the expectations they need to meet for their job, what they ACTUALLY need to accomplish.  Most people don’t take the time to clarify what they want or need to accomplish, and they for sure do not actually put it into words. 

Without this clarity, you have nothing to be intentional about each day.

Without this clarity, you are just getting done what is on fire, or what came up in your email, not what is going to meet or exceed your bosses (or your own) expectations.

Now that we have clarity around where you want to go, or what needs to be accomplished, begin to break it down into small, achievable steps.

Wait, please hear me here!  This exercise of defining the steps is where most people go off track. 

The majority of people break their to do’s into large, easy to fail at steps. 

Let me give you another example to help you see what I am talking about.  I was doing this in my own life. 

I have a morning routine where I set 3 personal and professional goals daily.

Sounds great, right?

But I made the mistake of challenging myself personally and professionally every damn day. 

Then life would happen as it so often does and I would accomplish only a portion of what I wanted to get done.

I was setting myself up to fail every day.

Way to go Trudy!  I was using a routine I created to support myself to then beat myself up, every day.

It was a huge realization.

Now, I still set 3 personal and professional goals every day, but the difference is, I intentionally break them down so that, when life happens, I can still, with a bit of effort, complete what needed to get done, AND it moved the mark forward on that project.

I can almost hear you thinking, “If I break it down into small, doable items, how will I ever stay ahead of my responsibilities?”.

Would you rather meet each day afraid of failing, or falling behind, motivated to work by fear, or meet each day with intention and excitement to take a step forward?

What begins with the latter mindset is that you accomplish your goals, but then you feel motivated to continue, excited to see if you could bite of another bit of that project.

Afraid and working from fear versus accomplished and excited.

You choose.