I shared last week about our own intentions for the holidays and got several questions from people about how to shift to an intentional way of thinking. This week I’m sharing how we made this shift for the holidays and the rest of the year.
What an Intention is Not
An intention is not a resolution. This isn’t a thing you put down as a goal and then cross it off when it’s been achieved. I look at being intentional as a shift in how I approach life. It’s integrated it into our lives as a family. We embrace it in a variety of ways and our intentions have helped change our focus, not like a goal that is achieved and measured.
Losing weight is a goal with lots of steps, but you can see if you lost 10 pounds or not. You can even measure it over time or try to make it happen in a lot of ways. An intention is not that simple. It permeates different areas of your life if you fully embrace it. In the case of weight loss, the intention is being healthier in your food choices or in integrating healthy eating or exercise into your routine. You can see the change, but it’s not really a box to check off to show the work is done or the goal is achieved.
Our intentions for our family during the holidays this year are to focus on experiences and to give back to our community. For the focus on experiences, we will go new places, try different restaurants, go to the movies, maybe try roller skating or other new activities. For volunteering, we will start by delivering a few meals through Meals on Wheels and doing some work with Mobile Loaves and Fishes. Christmas is a good time to make this transition happen because lots of groups have opportunities during the holiday season, which might not exist at other times. In our case, there are times when people can’t do their usual volunteering because they’re out of town, so we’re filling in.
Understand your why
The first step when you’re trying to be more intentional is to understand why. As I already mentioned, it’s not an item on a to do list. It’s important to do some soul searching and understand the interest or the drive to make it happen. Is it a complete shift in your mindset or approach to life? If so, is there something driving that? Essentially you want to ask why a few times to get to the root of the change instead of asking it once and you’re done.
For us, we want to focus more on experiences because we’ve noticed we’re fine without stuff for stretches, we find the stuff overwhelming, and we’re trying to shift mindset for our boys from having stuff to doing stuff. The deeper why is that we want our boys to have a sense of adventure, curiosity, and discovery as a lifelong approach and that’s hard to do when they’re focused on stuff. We made this shift during the rest of the year by traveling to different places and doing local hikes. We get distracted during the holidays by stuff that is interesting for a few days or weeks and then the interest in experience comes back. Why not skip the stuff or limit it and keep focusing on experience all year-long.
What is your intention for the holidays and beyond?
Now that you understand why you want to make changes, what is it that you want to change? Try to be specific. For example, an intention to be happier sounds good, but what does that even mean? Bringing more gratitude into your life to focus on being more content with the life you have is a more reasonable intention related to happiness. If it helps, visualize what you want and try to describe the scene or picture in your mind. That might help you think through and put words to what you want.
What does that look like?
The third step is to do some brainstorming on what that looks like. For example, there are lots of ways to give back to the community, so what do you want to be involved with. For us, it’s helping with Meals on Wheels and Mobile Loaves and Fishes because it gives us up close interaction with the people we’re helping. They can see the impact they’re making in that moment instead of trying to explain it to them as an abstract concept.
Maybe you care about animals and want to have your family volunteer at an animal shelter because it helps create a life-long love of animals. Maybe you want to focus on kids helping kids to grow empathy from a different perspective in your children.
Think about what it looks like and then start talking to organizations that do those types of activities. For this step, Google is your friend or ask your friends where they might volunteer.
Get your kids on board
The final step is to get your kids excited about the new intentions. Think about word choice when you’re trying to explain things. For example, instead of saying “We’re delivering meals,” describe it as “helping make a difference in someone’s day.” We are delivering their meals and we’re going to make a card at home before we leave the house so that we have a treat to deliver with the meal to help make that person’s day a bit better. We will talk about making a difference one person at a time. It helps to drive home the idea of empathy as well.
I’ve simplified the process we took of being more intentional. What started the whole thing was thinking about our kids as adults. We can’t mold them like clay, but we can help bring attributes to the surface that already exist. We can focus energy on different attributes they already have. I compare it to build up a muscle as you work out. If you work out once, you don’t see the result, but you do if you work out over time. We want to enable our boys to start practicing how to use these attributes so they blossom over time.
Want some ideas for intentions? Check out the blog on my family’s intentions for the holidays.
Do you have an intention for this holiday? Are you trying out new intentions during the holiday so that you have a head start for the new year? What is working or not for you?
