Your will is all you own.
Intention starts with “I”, as in “I will”. You’ve probably had many good intentions that haven’t produced the desired result, and as such, you may have learned to devalue intentions. There are two things wrong with that conditioning.
- You’ve attached an outcome to an intention. Allowing you to judge its success. Did you get the outcome you wanted or not?
- You didn’t fully appreciate the intention’s motivation. Driven or drawn. Was the intention freely defined by you or forced?
Attaching an outcome to an intention ignores reality. You don’t control the outcome. It also pre-defines a “winning outcome”, potentially hiding a better one all together. The suggestion here isn’t to stop working toward something, it’s to recognize the transformation is in the doing, not some intended result.
Which leads to problem two: the intention’s motivation. Never adopt an intention you cannot fully map to its motivation. Start with asking a simple question: are you being driven toward this intention or being drawn toward it?
Driven intentions tend to include short-term sacrifices requiring willpower which is susceptible to, well, you. The concept of “sacrifice” does not apply when something is drawing you forward. Rather, it defines things as useful or unuseful to you. .
Intentions either reflect your will or drain your willpower.