If you’re interested in personal development, chances are you’re being flooded with “new year, new you” messages right now and most of them are urging you to set bigger, better goals. I want to offer a different perspective. One that feels gentler, more sustainable, and far more life-giving. Instead of setting goals, I set intentions, and it has completely changed how I plan my life, relate to myself, and experience fulfilment on a day-to-day basis.
The Difference Between Goals and Intentions
(The following three paragraphs are a slightly modified version of text from my book: The Great Life Planner)
Goals are usually specific and time-bound. While this can create focus, it can also create rigidity of thinking, over-doing, and feelings of anxiety, failure and disappointment. People who are very goal oriented may achieve a lot, but often at the expense of their own health and well-being and their relationships with others, because all that matters to them is the finish line. Setting a time to achieve something by can create motivation, and it can also create feelings of anxiety about reaching your goal in time, and stress shuts down the creative thinking parts of the brain. If you don’t achieve your goal by the due date, then it can stimulate feelings of failure, embarrassment and disappointment, and decreased motivation to set any further goals.
Goals Focus on the “What”, Intentions Focus on the “Why”
It is not the “what” that is most important, it is the “why”. It is not some achievement or thing you want, but how you think having that will make you feel. What you actually want is to feel states of being such as satisfaction, peace, love, and happiness. In essence what we are always reaching for is ways to feel good. Goals focus you on a specific what, which is only one pathway for you to attain the state and feeling you want. Setting intentions focuses you on the why, and creates openness for you to experience that in all sorts of ways that you may not have thought of.
Goal setting:
- keeps you focused on a future end achievement
- makes you very aware of the gap between where you are and what you desire
- often comes from a place that something is “wrong” and you need to fix it
- often leads to feelings of anxiety in terms of achieving what you want
- focuses on effort, striving and making things happen
- ego based
With intentions, the journey is part of living the intention. It is a process of development. You are not chasing something “out there”, you are embodying more and more of what you want on a day-to-day basis. Intention setting is grounded in purpose and focus. It is about living purposefully rather than striving for achievements.
Intention setting:
- focuses on who you are being rather than what you are doing
- development rather than achievement
- brings you to the present and how you can live what you want now
- soul based
Our greatest accomplishments often arise unexpectedly, sometimes with results that surpass our aspirations, when we remain in the process, that is, flexible and allowing for the new to form or appear. Being in process in this way is the mine of our richest treasures and the source of our greatness.
Anat Baniel – Move into Life
How to Live with Intention
I am a planner and I need routine for my nervous system to feel settled. I don’t like being surprised, I don’t even like people turning up to my house unexpectedly, but I stopped setting goals several years ago and I feel much lighter and more satisfied in my life. I swapped from setting goals to setting intentions. The process of me doing that was where my book The Great Life Planner grew from. Originally I used the process that is outlined on the Daily Focus Sheet from the book (you can download a free copy here).
Since then I have evolved my personal process and each morning I write in my “Magic Book”, which is just a cheap spiral notebook. I write one page of appreciation – this moves me into the high frequency energy of gratitude and helps me clarify what is important to me, what I enjoy and what I want more of. Then I write page as if I am writing in my diary in the future and something I desire has already come about. As I do this I focus on what I am feeling and what I am embodying having received what I desire.
When we clearly imagine something as if we are actually experiencing it, our subconscious mind can perceive it as being the same as a physical life experience. Sometimes I notice that when I have written a very clear account of an experience I want and embodied the feeling of it as well, then later it can seem like a memory to me rather than something I imagined. It can seem like it really happened and this shifts who I am identifying as.
The other thing that often happens is that I gain clarity about how I can start living or moving towards what I wrote about. Through writing it as a story it becomes both more tangible and more clear. My focus is honed and I notice different things. Things start to come together and the desire that I wrote about starts to feel inevitable, like it has already been created. That is why I call it my “Magic Book” because many of the things that I write about as future experiences, do come to pass in real life.
Setting New Year Resolutions
Common New Year Resolutions include things like:
- Exercise at least 3 times a week.
- Drink more water daily.
- Practice yoga or meditation regularly.
- Take the stairs instead of the elevator.
- Hit a daily step goal of 8,000+ and track it.
- Read a new book every month.
- Learn a musical instrument.
- Build a morning routine that sets a positive tone for the day.
- Create a monthly budget and stick to it.
- Pay off debts or loans.
- Plan date nights with a partner.
- Learn stress management techniques
- Reduce, reuse, and recycle more.
- Start a composting or gardening project.
- Reduce carbon footprint by using public transport or biking.
These are all worthy activities – and note that they are all activities. They are all “whats”. Which could be a large part of the reason why most people fail to see their New Year Resolutions through past the end of January if they act on them at all. The other issue with many New Year Resolutions like this is that they are formed from a sense of guilt, responsibility (something you should do) or a desire to make yourself better to be more worthy or attractive in some way.
Some people are more motivated by moving away from or avoiding something, and some people are more motivated by moving towards something, but none of us are motivated unless an action is personally meaningful to us in some way. We are most motivated by what we personally want, and what we think we can have. That second part is key. If you don’t believe you are allowed or capable of having what you want then your subconscious will block you from attaining it.
This is another advantage of setting intentions. Thinking about why you want something helps you gain clarity about who you need to become to have that. For example, let’s say your New Year Resolution is to learn a new instrument. To form that into an intention you need to explore why you want to do that and what emotional need it would fill. When you think about it, the reason you want to do it could be because then you could play an instrument and sing, which helps you realise that what you really want to do is sing because when you sing it feels so good in your body. Then you realise how important singing is to you, that it gives you bliss, and that you can start singing more now in other ways without learning to play an instrument. In the beginning, you saw singing as condition on learning to play an instrument (a “what”) but when you look at it as an intention you begin to see how it is possible for you to have what you want now.
That is the power and freedom of intentions. They are not conditional on anything and the intention setting process itself guides you into seeing how you can embody what you want now.
Here’s how I can work through this process for myself. When I wrote my draft notes for the post I wrote down: “my over-riding intention for 2026 is to have more fun”. On the surface this sounds very positive. However, when we look at it more closely it is an activity, an outcome, a “what”. So, when I say I want to have more fun, why do I want that? What do I want to feel?
I want to feel light, playful, free, ecstatic.
Now the intention becomes: I feel light, playful, free and ecstatic.
The future action-condition based goal of “I want to have more fun” has become the present tense embodied intention of “I feel light, playful, free and ecstatic.
That’s a big shift in focus and energy, and when you state it this way then it prompts your brain to start looking for ways that is true now. It opens your mind to all the possible ways that you could feel that, and creates a tag in your brain (in your Reticular Activating System) to notice when you do. And what you focus on grows. Your goal is no longer something out in the future that you are working towards, it is something you are living and growing on a day to day basis.
Happy Anti-New Year dear reader.
How are you already what you want to become?
Aroha nui, much love
Janine
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