Now we have talked about living your life on your terms and how that can bring you happiness and fulfillment. Now I want to dig just a little deeper and look at how intentional you are with your life. This is just as important as living your life on your terms. Because if you aren’t living your life with intention are you living your life on your terms?
Earl Nightingale Talks about intentionality in his famous recording the Strangest Secret. He points out that if you have a ship and you have a full crew. You are going to get to your destination at 9999 out of 10,000. However, if you just let the boat go with no crew or no destination you will be lucky if the boat even gets out of the harbor. Much less success if it ever makes it to any port.
That is you living with or without intention. You are the boat. Are you wanting your life to be on your terms? Or are you just wanting to think about it and not try? If you want to fulfillment and joy you dream about then you are going to have to start being intentional about what you dream, think, and do.
Living intentionally is, you living your life the way you want it to be lived. Many of us just float. We go with the flow. The problem with that is when we float in the river of life, we aren’t moving but life is. Before you know it 20 years have passed and your kids have moved out and you never took them camping as you talked about. You find that you are full of regret for not pursuing anything meaningful.
There is good news. We live to be about 86-95 years old. So if you are 40 years ol you still have over half of your life to live. So stop sitting in your pity puddle and change that. It’s not too late. You do have to start practicing the art of being intentional.
How to be intentional
So how do you start living intentionally? The process is easy but the execution takes work. This is because you have to be paying attention to so much more than what you do now. You have to take the time to decide what you want and then pay attention to the thoughts you have about that idea. You have to make so many more decisions about what you are or aren’t going to do.
You have to decide or cut away parts of your life that are holding you down. These are the parts that are preventing you from reaching that dream or goal you are after, and you have to double down on what you want. This often causes more thoughts from people around you, and you have to figure out how to be OK with that. Need help doing this I can coach you through that.
Ask Questions
Turn back into that curious 3 year old you know. Ask questions about everything you do. There are some big questions you want to always ask but ask the small ones too. These questions help you to look at your thoughts about the circumstance you are facing. This is self-coaching. When you can ask yourself questions and look at what the CIrcumstance is followed by your Thoughts, feelings, actions, and ultimately your results. The results you want to be you reaching your goal, or achieving your dream. Can you do that? Yeah, but you have to again be intentional on what you allow to be thought and what you don’t allow. If you can do that you are well on your way to living an intentional life.
The Big Questions
As I mentioned there are some big questions you want to ask yourself at regular intervals. These are questions that help you answer the questions of living an intentional life. These questions get you focused on where your goal is. Where are you in relation to that goal?
Does this serve me?
This question is the question that will help you separate the wheat from the chaff. What do you want? The choice is yours keep it or drop it. Now this will be used often and in some very difficult ways. You may have to decide if your close friend serving you. Is their chaos benefiting you at all? As I said this will create thoughts not only for you but in those around you. Those thoughts and the respective emotions you feel aren’t always going to be the best feeling.
Yet our life is 50/50 we are going to have half of our life be painful and that is OK because that is actually what makes our life so wonderful. That we have these terrible times and on the other side we can be truly happy and joyful because we did go through that really shitty time.
That is why dodging your pain and suffering doesn’t serve you. You have to ask does this serve me? And if so, how?
When you are going through those tough times allow yourself to feel those emotions. That is the reason we have them. That way we can experience life to its fullest with the bitter-sweet tears of pain alongside the sweet refreshing kisses of success.
Is that True?
This is another question you want to ask yourself. Use this when you are really struggling. When you say something critical about yourself, ask Do you believe that? Then write down the answers. You may be surprised that you actually don’t think that your boss is out to get you.
Your wife isn’t as cold as you tell yourself. This wonderful question knocks the crap off of your feeling of self-pity. And you will feel self-pity often. Because living your life with intention will be full of mistakes. You will find out that you are heading down a dead end and you didn’t listen. So you have now lost 2 weeks’ worth of work. You will want to gang up on yourself and just pummel your self-confidence into goo. This will help you stop and step back and give you a 5-by-5 break and examine what is the truth and what is thought.
Do I still want this in my life?
Part of being intentional is removing parts of your life that you don’t want. Hence, is this serving me, question. Yet sometimes we need a different question that focuses on what we have in our life. That is when you find something that you may not want but are not sure if it is serving you or not. You can make some pretty important decisions on the question do I want this in my life? If so why? If not why? Look at those thoughts you put out. Write them down so you can see them and examine each thought that comes from your mind.
If you find out that you don’t want it and you have examines each reason why. Then you can drop it and not think of it ever again. That is possible.
How are you going to do that?
What if
When you are doing your daily examination of where you are ask yourself, What if…
What if you got to your goal?
What if you were happy?
What if you did find love?
What if you were able to be a part of your kid’s life again?
What if, allows you to dream and you have to be able to dream to live a life of intention?
Understand You have the Power
One of the biggest obstacles men face when they are trying to live their life with intention is that they believe they don’t have any power. They are a victim of something terrible. Some horrible injustice has befallen upon their head and they are cursed. It is terrible! They will never be able to recover from this disaster.
Really? Is that True? Does thinking that serve you in any way? How? Do you want to be that victim? NO? Then what do you need to do to change?
See there. You can use these questions to get yourself moving again. Because you always have your power. Even a 5-year-old has all the power they need in life. The first time you try to force them to do something they don’t want to do you will see how much power they have. You are the same way. You have a choice and that is all life is choices. You can choose to do something this way or that way. Either way, it is dependent on you to execute the plan. If you don’t use your power can’t live with intention.
I was talking to a person on Reddit this week and they were giving their power to their parents and didn’t believe they had any ability to stop them. Now they were still in the mindset that they are 100% victims and because of that they will not be able to grow. They will live their life on the terms of those who they believe are doing them an injustice instead of on their terms and through their own intentions. You don’t have to do that. You have all the power in your own mind. Yeah, you have to pay attention to what you are thinking and how you are thinking it. This is tough, to begin with. However, it will get easier as you keep focusing on your thoughts.
