The Power of Setting Your Own Intention to Live With Purpose

What is the power of intention?

Today we're going to be talking about what intention is and what it means to live from a place of intention—and why it's an important thing to be pursuing in living a wholehearted life.

So today, you guys we’re talking about intention and I want to start by just sharing a little bit of research that's recently come across about what it means to live with intention.

So what does it mean to do something intentionally? The word intention could be synonymous with something like doing something on purpose, meaning to do something. Intentional living is the choice of living instead of just letting life be dictated to us.

So what does it mean to live a life of intention? Here's the research.

The research says that if we as human beings, wherever we're at in life, whatever age you are right now, if you were to conceptualize an ideal self—several years in the future, 10, 15, 20-years in the future, and you could crystallize that image of who you want to be by the time you're old and retired or by the time you die, what mark do you want to leave on the world? The more vividly that you can crystallize that image in your mind, the more likely you are to actually live a life that will end up being like the image that you've created in your mind.

So, most of us live our lives by waking up in the morning and barely even knowing what we're going to do with our day. First thing we're thinking about is just how to get out of bed in the morning. And then we kind of go throughout our day being on autopilot and letting life just be dictated to us. We go to our normal jobs. We go to our normal relationships. We act in this place of just autopilot, never actually living the lives that are right in front of us.

We get stuck in a pattern of doing that day in and day out. And eventually we end up looking at our lives and looking back at the last 15 or 20-years and wondering what we've done with ourselves, and wondering why we didn't achieve all of our dreams and our goals.

Today I want to help you guys understand the power of being able to set an intention. And I challenge you to do this little exercise here. Take a few minutes. Get in a quiet place where you can think about your life. Ponder what your values are. Ponder what your strengths are. Think about a couple of questions and maybe do some journaling.

These questions would be things like:

When I die, what do I want people to say about me at my funeral?

What impact do I want to leave on the world?

What is a life of meaning to me?

And then, do a little bit of a visualization and try to picture meeting yourself 15 or 20 or 30 years from now and having a conversation with your future self. And that conversation with your future self, try to get a real image of actually what you look like. Bring that image up into your mind and ask your future self what it means to have a good life.

And then journal all the things that come. Let it rise to the surface. Journal all the things that come. Once you have those things, set an intention by writing down what life you want to live. Principles that you want to live by—I want to live a life of adventure; I want to live a life of Integrity; I want to live a life of providing for my wife and my family; I want to live a life of being able to reflect what I believe is the Light of Christ into the lives of other people who are suffering; I want to be able to live a life that allows me, by the time I'm old and gray, to look back and say I lived a life of vibrance and color.

And you can go and create your own mission statement. Once you have that mission statement in place, regularly revisit it. And you'll notice that over time, if you look at your life in snapshots, your brain will be working towards those things subconsciously.

The brain is an amazing organism that once it has something planted into it, it's looking for a way to provide organization. Because, that organization allows it to use its resources in other ways. So, if you're plugging in these intentions, the brain is looking for a way to organize it. The way that it does it is it helps us move towards that end result.

And this can work for both positive and negative. So if I'm waking up every day and I set an intention, what's my intention? My intention is to get in touch with my heart—the best part of myself—in any way possible.

That means I'm going to intentionally go and spend some time in nature. I'm going to go intentionally pursue some relationship with God. I'm going to intentionally cultivate my relationship with my wife and my children. I'm going to do some hobbies and interests. I'm going to do something on purpose, to get my heart connected to the best part of myself. When that happens, now I'm living a life of intention. It allows me to be much more productive in my day. It allows me to feel much more contented with my life, and it's moving me towards that greater goal.

I just tell you a little story about my grandfather. I always talk about my grandfather, Grandpa Harris. He's an amazing man, one of my personal mentors. And he struggled through his whole life with some depression. He was deaf, so he couldn't hear very well. He struggled to be able to communicate with people as a result and that often led to some depression, and also led to him feeling like an outcast sometimes in his relationships.

And I remember reading his journals of when he was a younger man and noticing that he was struggling with depression. I did not know that man when I was a kid, because my grandfather, by the time I knew him, had set his intentions. And the way he set his intentions was with something he called his “Optimus Creed.”

It was a one-page statement of all the things he promised himself to do for the day. He promised to treat himself as the best, the same as he treated everybody else as the best, because nothing but the best for the best.

He promised to treat other people with nothing but kindness and a smile every day because that's what he would want in his life. He promised himself to treat his life with an avid work ethic, because he wanted to be a hard worker.

That's the man that I knew—a man who was a hard worker, a man who lived with a sense of humor, a man who treated us with kindness. He's the kind of guy who'd walk around the grocery store with handmade three by five little cards that said—he'd hand them to people, had a big smiley face on it and said, “Here's a smile for you today.” Just a way to build people up.

His license plates cover said, “Smile always, except when laughing.” And the actual license plate itself was a specialized license plate that said, “We love you.”

That was the kind of man that I knew. And that's the kind of man that he was, because he had set his intention 20-30 years earlier and he'd allowed that intention to work himself into the place of being that man who he was.

So, think about your intentions. What is a life worth living to you? Put that on paper. Revisit it regularly. Speak those things to yourself in the mirror and watch the magic that happens over the course of the rest of your life.

Thank you so much for being here with me. If you found this to be valuable for you, please hit the like and subscribe button. If you're facing particular struggles that you need help with or roadblocks that you're running into, please submit a question. I'd be happy to answer it for you.