The Power of Setting Intentions: 5 Reasons Why Families Love to Adopt Intention Setting Practices
“Intention setting” has become an increasingly popular practice over the years in the fields of mindfulness and personal development. Whether you choose to adopt a practice on an individual level or as a family as a whole, intention setting is a powerful practice that can provide more direction and greater ease as you work towards your goals.
Here are 5 reasons families all over the world love adopting intention setting practices:
Intention setting encourages you to be more mindful of what you are doing and where you are headed.
In the midst of raising children, working, traffic, taking care of yourself and all the tasks and demands in life, it’s sometimes easy to lose track of what you really want to be doing. There are a lot of distractions in our world, and intention setting helps keep you focused so you can reach success with ease.
Intention setting helps you to be more effective with how you use your brain power.
You may be familiar with the statement, “wherever your intention goes your energy flows,” which basically means that your personal energy, or brain power, follows wherever you direct your thoughts or focus. Being intentional with your thoughts will encourage you to take actions that are more in alignment with what you really want.
Intention setting is easier than, and a great complement to, goal setting practices.
Goal setting practices are also increasing in popularity. You may be familiar of some such as the SMART model, which requires an outcome to specific, measurable, and time oriented. Intentions can complement goals in that they can be specific, but they could also be more broad or big picture. They can be measurable and time oriented, or ongoing. Intentions can be a bit more flexible in application, which may be helpful when you have a busy life and need an easy place to start reaching your immediate goals. The way I think of it, if goals are like the pins at the bottom of a bowling alley, intentions are like the arrows or guidelines that keep you focused in the right direction when you are throwing the ball; they help you stay focused and present to what you are working towards and your brain power stays on track.
What you focus on expands
Our brains process the world through our own unique set of beliefs, thoughts and filters; they pick up on unique specific details to affirm the way we hold our reality in our mind because that is what it knows how to do. If you are generally a positive and optimistic person, you’ll probably notice that you see pretty positive and optimistic people around you, and have pretty positive experiences in general. You probably have had an experience where you went into something with an expectation and saw what you wanted to see. If you go into your day thinking it is going to be a long boring day, you are more likely to perceive it a such. If you go into the day believing it is going be be an amazing one, you may find that you have more positive experiences as your brain was primed to focus on them. If you are not mindful of what you are doing, where you are going and why, you risk your mind wandering off or getting lost in things that don’t matter or that are not in alignment with what you really want. If you are intentional with what you focus on, you can prime your perception to start picking up on more of what you want.
Setting intentions gives your mind an opportunity to work for you in the background.
One of my favorite teachers Dr. Matt James always says, “the conscious mind is the goal setter, the unconscious mind is the goal getter”. In the book “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author explains that at any moment, there are about 2 million bits of information floating around in the world our brain could pick up on, but we are only able to pick up on about 126 of those bits consciously. The rest is processed, just at the level of the unconscious mind. The conscious part of your brain is limited in how much it can perceive and focus on. The unconscious is in charge of everything you can’t possibly be aware of in every single moment, for example: taking in and processing sensory information from all that is happening around you, processing and reacting, breathing, keeping your body moving and your heart beating, keeping you safe, learning and committing things to memory, and so much more. If you use the brain power of your conscious mind to set intentions, you can give direction and more energy flow to your unconscious mind so it can work for you in the background of your conscious awareness, just as it supports you in breathing and making sure your heart is beating without you having to think about it.
San Diego local mother of 3 says, “I start by setting the intentions when I wake up for the kind of day I want to have and how I want to feel that day. I find that setting intentions set the mood for the day as I visualize it being great it usually turns out pretty close even when things take a left turn sometimes it still doesn’t seem so bad. Then my more advanced intentions are more specific to what I may have going on in my day. In general, start with setting intentions on what kind of day you will have and how you want to feel. That programs your unconscious mind to look and make your intentions a reality while you’re consciously moving through your day.”
A few years ago I set the intention to improve my relationship with my family. As soon as I committed to that intention, I immediately started to notice different ways that I could take action to begin improving. It was as if my brain was automatically focusing on opportunities. Once I started taking action and making progress, I started to get more specific and even more intentional about aspects of our relationship I wanted to improve, and it has in more ways than I can say. It just started with one simple intention based on my desire for positive change, and I started to see opportunities to move forward and reach my intentions and goals with my family.
One great motivators for setting an intention is that it can be as easy as just thinking about what you want to accomplish in the day before you start taking action.
Interested in learning how to set intentions for yourself or your family? Let us know!
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Jocelyn Burke, MA.Ed.
Program Director & Coach at Club Xcite
