I hope everyone had a great holiday season! Admittedly, it was a little rough around the edges for me and my family. We had some losses of family and friends. It’s probably the main reason I haven’t posted in a while, but now it’s time to move forward with the new year and focus on setting intentions.
While others are making and even breaking resolutions already, I choose to set Intentions. Resolutions have a connotation for something that needs to be fixed or resolved and in a quick time frame. Resolutions can be too easily rejected or cast aside when it becomes too much to carry them out. Usually, a resolution is all about losing a significant amount of weight in a short time. When the weight doesn’t begin to visibly fall off immediately despite starving oneself, it becomes a burden, a resentment and gets kicked to the curb! The feelings of failure and shame and disgust come to mind. Your intention was most likely not about feeling this way.
Focus Your Attention
Setting intentions, on the other hand, is about focusing your attention on acting and feeling a certain way. The goal of losing weight, when it’s being achieved, might make you feel a certain way along the journey – such as the joy of success, being more healthy, feeling better physically, that’s the intention. Hold on to that feeling and focus on feeling good about your journey. The intention is the mindset and focusing on how you want to feel.
Making a huge amount of money can be your goal, the intention is the focus on how it will make you feel — financially secure, less stressed, the joy in being free to do things you’ve always wanted to do without guilt.
Get Creative
Setting intentions is about focusing on how you want to feel, act, and be. This can be accomplished in many ways. Meditation and mindfulness can allow your mind to focus on your intentions and allow them to come into focus. Be creative and think outside the box. A vision board can help fine-tune the focus and define a path for your journey. It can help to sort things and refine your focus when things get blurry or clouded. Journaling can help you look back and see the progress and it can act as a reminder of how you got from point A to point B.
Intentions don’t have to be goal-based or even big projects. An intention can be set for a short period of time, an event, or as a daily practice to begin your day. Focusing on being more present or showing more compassion or empathy with a difficult patient or family member can be an intention that gets tweaked a little bit each day to experience the feelings you desire. Send your intentions out into the universe and let them grow and reach their full potential.
Take some time and explore this option and see if it’s a better fit for your needs.
Happy New Year! Start a new chapter and make it be the best one yet!
Resources:
How to Set an Intention
5 Steps to Setting Powerful Intentions
7 Steps to Setting Powerful Intentions
Photos:
Mindfulness Image from Pixabay
Vision Board Image from Pixabay
