Intentional Starts Here
5-Minute Read
pages vii-xii
Welcome, fellow adventurer.
The deeply satisfying life you desire does not happen by default.
It is created.
It is renewed daily, continually.
It
is
Intentional.
Human beings are choice-making creatures. We are never not choosing. Perhaps you have heard the axiom that even not choosing is a choice. We make thousands of choices a day. Most of these choices are unconscious, having formed into automatic habits through training and repetition. For many situations, unconscious choosing is actually efficient; it helps with productivity, performance, and mastery of skills. But by the time we reach adulthood, we’re so good at unconscious choosing that life often turns into a rinse-and-repeat existence, where today looks pretty much as yesterday did, which looked like the day before that, which looked like the day before that…
week after week.............
month after month.............
year after year.............
There are unconscious, outdated choices running your life right now. Unconscious choosing can and will deliver only one thing…more of the life you already have. It has no capacity to help you generate anything new. So when the life you desire is other than the life you are living, it is time to get conscious with your choosing. For it is in conscious choosing that your capacity to generate something new is engaged. Conscious choosing is the path to create deep satisfaction in your life and it requires that you be intentional.
Don’t confuse being intentional with having good intentions. Good intentions are pretty impotent in and of themselves; they are thoughts and ideas that often don’t accomplish desired outcomes. To be intentional is to move beyond ideas into deliberate, committed actions that produce the results you desire.
Intentional presents you with fifty-two choices regarding your relationships with yourself, with others, and with the resources (time, money, health, etc.) that sustain you. These fifty-two choices are not random, nor are they designed to give you merely a different life; they are purposed to give you access to a new and deeply satisfying life by actualizing what matters to you. This new life is created through new choices that only you can make for yourself.
Now, it is very common to wait for circumstances to (magically) change in order to make new choices. This kind of waiting often amounts to perpetual delay and frustration—it’s exhausting. However, as a human being, you have the capacity and power to move through the world in a much more dynamic, exhilarating, and thrilling way.
Rather than delaying new choices until you get new circumstances, you can get new circumstances by making new choices. In other words, new choices will make the changes you are waiting for. You can stop waiting and start choosing…intentionally. I hope that sounds like good news!
It may be tempting on a journey of conscious choosing to judge your current reality as bad or wrong in order to justify making a choice for something new. Keep in mind that the choices you make throughout your life are largely informed by the season you are in at the time you make them.
By season, I don’t mean stages of human development or yearly weather patterns. The season I’m referring to is whatever happens to be important to you—whatever you value—during a particular period of time. Here’s an example: You could live many years in a season of “I must be liked and accepted by others” and make choices according to what you think will win others’ approval. Then one day you could suddenly shift into a season of “I really am okay whether others accept me or not,” where you start making decisions free from the concern of others’ approval.
This is how seasons often work in human life:
the old gives way to the emergence of the new.
Sometimes the shift is sudden and abrupt, and sometimes the shift is gradual and progressive. Since you are dealing with seasons, there is no need to judge your current life as bad or wrong in order to choose something new. That kind of judgment is completely unnecessary and likely to interfere with new growth.
To be alive is to grow, emerge,
release, and transform.
The pull you are experiencing for newness in your life is not evidence that the current season is bad; it is life’s signal that the current season is ending and the next season is beginning. Consider that the dissatisfaction you have with your current circumstances is life’s way of readying you to grow beyond who you are right now.
Life has something new for you.
Life in you wants to grow, emerge,
release, and transform.
So take a breath.
Relax.
Trust that life is signaling your next new season.
May you prosper in every way!
Becky & TPL Team
52 Maxims of Conscious Choosing To Create the Deeply Satisfying Life You Desire.