We’ve been talking about my new book, Light it Up—7 Skills for Setting Intentions That Work. We’ve developed a new understanding about what makes a successful intention and learned seven new skills along the way. In this week’s excerpt, we’ll stitch everything together with four critical takeaways.
We’ve developed a new understanding about what makes a successful intention and learned seven new skills along the way. In this week’s excerpt, we’ll stitch everything together with four critical takeaways.
You can purchase Light it Up at Amazon or read it for free as part of their Kindle Unlimited program.
Don’t leave your heart’s desire sitting on a shelf. Skill up like a Soul Boss so you can declare, “My year was lit!”
The case studies show that there is much more to setting intentions than wishing, hoping, or engineering circumstances to get what you want. The best intentions aren’t limited to a checklist of creature comforts. They’re about entering the space of possibility. They require you to stretch and iterate, often using a mindset or behavior you wouldn’t normally use. In a sense, they bring you home to the best version of yourself.
There are four critical takeaways you can use to say, “My year was lit!”:
Let’s review each takeaway in detail.
Henry Ford was on to something when he said, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” You can dream, affirm, create vision boards, or get the best coaching in the world, but your intentions will short-circuit if they’re built on a foundation of anxieties or lack of self-worth. You won’t be able to attain a million-dollar commission if your self-talk is, I can’t handle this. But you can turn negative self-talk around by using your intention superpower: Making the connection between your current belief systems and where you’d like to go.
When you draw on your intention superpower, goals transform from a superficial list of short-term stuff to the long game. You’ll change from designing a perfect plan that sits in a drawer to taking consistent action. And you will be able to rely on your growing wisdom, insights, and life experience to keep going when Murphy’s Law (“Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”) and everyday stress kicks into high gear.
Intentions fall flat if you only focus on the What. When you use the What-Why-How framework, you’ve stepped into living a Soul Boss life. You’re doing more than dreaming. You’re acting like a CEO with a plan—someone who has the 360° view of every step of the process and how everything fits together.
The What is the spark plug, the idea that kicks everything off. The Why compels you to go beyond the optics and dig for the real reason you’re pursuing a goal. And the How pushes you to articulate a few steps to take your vision from the ethers to the real world.
Although the case studies varied, they had one thing in common: Scripting a picture-perfect goal doesn’t mean much without confronting what’s happening behind the scenes.
What happened in each story as people felt frustrated, hurt, or tired? They immediately slipped into subconscious patterns, like being defensive, stubborn, or doubting themselves. That was the instant their results began to unravel.
The way to avoid that short-circuit is to also make the intention that makes you a bit uncomfortable. The shortlist for your emotional boot camp consists of goals like persistent honesty, deep listening, exercising patience, learning how to compromise, and accepting feedback.
Here’s the silver lining: Working through an uncomfortable intention is a point of mastery. That’s the moment fears and insecurities stop being the boss of you.
Building critical soft skills like adaptability, creativity, discernment, empathy, and healthy self-confidence is just like building muscle at the gym. It takes time and dedication, and the results are life changing.
It’s easy to light up your intentions when you celebrate small starts. So, don’t wait until you cross the finish line. Honor every little bit of progress along the way. Here are three ways to do that:
Changing the world starts with changing your world, and that’s where small starts count. So, before you set an intention to solve world peace, try being a peaceful person at the staff meeting. Instead of imagining what you will do with a million dollars, imagine a financial picture where you have all your bills paid in full and on time, with a little left over for savings and fun. And try to gain a nugget of wisdom every day—that is priceless and irrevocable.
Check out Light it Up—7 Skills for Setting Intentions That Work today at Amazon.