What Is Your Intention For Your Goals?

Goal vs. Intention

The New Year is under way and a lot of us have been working the last few days to stay on track with our goals and objectives for 2015.

The New Year always presents a clean slate enabling us to start over and try to get right what we didn’t quite accomplish in the last year.  For some, 2015 includes a different direction altogether.  Any time is a good time to start anew, but January seems to be when we give ourselves permission to wipe the slate clean and start over.  Setting goals and objectives are good ways to help us set a direction.

Here’s a secret:

In addition to setting goals for ourselves, setting intentions is the single most important thing you can do for yourself if you truly want to achieve your goals.

What’s the difference between a goal and an intention?

Goals are what you would like to achieve.  An intention is having your mind, attention or will concentrated on something or some end or purpose, according to Merriam Webster.

Another way to consider this is that your New Years resolutions and personal goals are what you would like to experience.  Your intention is your mindset and your plan of action.

Without a plan of action, your goals and resolutions become a well thought out wish list that you are hoping will come to fruition.  A wish list is not a plan and hope is not a strategy.

Hope is a desire or expectation for success.  Like its conjoined twin, faith, it needs to be put to work, for it is through your work – your intention, your plan of action – that hope and faith are demonstrated and your goals actualized.

How do we set our intention? Make up our mind to be all-in, fully committed and develop a plan of action.

Setting our intention is as much a spiritual act as anything else    Dr. Wayne Dyer suggests in his book, The Power of Intention, that intention is actually a field of energy, a silent partner that is accessible to all of us all of the time to aid us in fulfilling what it is we say we want.  Intention is a tool that can be put to work.

The act of setting our intention:

• Be clear and specific about what you desire.  When we are vague, it is difficult to provide direction and difficult for others to assist us in accomplishing our goals.
• Align your thinking and feeling.  Believe you are worthy of receiving it. Believe it is possible to have it.  When your thoughts and feelings are not in alignment, that is, you don’t believe you are worthy or that what you desire is possible, it is the same as a house being divided against itself.  A house divided cannot stand. Thoughts and feelings not in alignment cannot produce desirable results.
• Engage your power of imagination to see and feel your desired outcome.   Your imagination is the most powerful gift you have.  The ability to image that which is not yet formed in the outer.   What does it look like?  How does it feel?
•  Write out your intention:  Writing helps to impress it on your consciousness and is a reminder that you can look at every day.

Take some time to think through what you would like your end result to be and set your intention for that right now.

Today, I am declaring my intention to__________________

Use this as an affirmation to help keep you focused when the noise of the world becomes too distracting.

Here’s to YOU 3.0!    Be well and prosper!