How Living Life Intentionally is Different than Living A Life of Intention. 5 Steps to Making Next Year Different

By Jackie White

The end of year is inevitably a time when we look back on how and what we did over the past 12 months. Sometimes it’s easy to rattle off a few accomplishments and other times you wonder were you even present during your past year of life? Life does march on whether you are paying attention or not. The question then becomes, how can you live your life in a way that in a year from now, you will feel accomplished and proud of who you were in 2022?

It all begins with intention and I don’t mean that you have an intention to want to achieve X,Y or Z. For example words of good intention go something like this:

I wish
I desire
Someday I want to
Hopefully I can
On occasion I am intentional

Words of intentional living take on a different meaning. Essentially these words are the actions you are going to take persistently and continually throughout the year. 

Action
Purpose
Today, I will
My strategy to achieve X,Y Z is…
I will definitely do…
Discipline
Persistence

When you live intentionally you are present and mindful of what your end goals are. So for example, if you wanted to save money to purchase a new boat, you would have to take action everyday to consciously put money away in savings. If you want this next year to feel like you made a difference, you might want to consider volunteering in some capacity. Doing one act of charitable work is helpful, but for it to be meaningful to you over time, you will want to be purposeful in volunteering each month.

Looking to be intentional over an entire year’s time can feel like a lot, but you can do it in 5 easy steps:

1. Look at the end game. I don’t care how old you are, I want you to fast forward to the end of your life. Now, take a look back and what are the things that come to mind when you are defining what a successful, happy and satisfying life looks like? Things like having a family, good health to be able to enjoy your older years, having written a book, cataloging your family heritage, making a difference in a child’s life? What are the things that you see as important? Utilizing your SoulShine Personal Inventory, you can think through the 13 areas of life balance and imagine what each of those look like years from now.
   
2. What specifically do you want to accomplish this year? Do those things align with your life’s vision? Not everything aligns perfectly, right? You might say, this year I want to build a treehouse for my kids. That’s great and a worthy goal and although it is a blip on the radar screen of life right now, I would argue that something like that might prove to be far more important when you look back and your kids have made years of memories playing in that treehouse. Use your SoulShine Personal Inventory to help prioritize these goals.
   
3. Once you have identified and prioritized the goals, the stuff you want to get done this year you need to think through how do those things manifest over time and specifically what do you need to do today and this year to accomplish those priorities?
   
4. Once you do steps 1-3, you should have a pretty good outline of what you want to be intentional about this year.The next step is calendarizing these things. Put a timeline to each goal and record that in a place that you can review daily or weekly.
   
5. Living intentionally as we discussed earlier means taking action and persistently pursuing the accomplishment of a life’s goal. This step is on-going. You will need to review your goals daily and work through any resistance or roadblocks you may encounter. This can be the hard part, but this is where the payoff is. When you persist, you accomplish.
   

SoulShine wants you to succeed. Living intentionally is most people’s intention, but many times they fall short in motivation, persistence and inspiration to keep going. Sometimes they need more tools or support and because of this, SoulShine is launching a new private Facebook group to assist you in your commitment to living intentionally. To join this free group click here:

We look forward to walking with you on your intentional journey through life!

Shine On!

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