Intention Setting 101: Creating Goals With Meaning

Intention setting is a powerful tool that allows us to create goals with meaning. Everyone is talking about it and sharing their inspirational spaces in which they write their intentions but what even is it? What is an intention and how do we use it?

Intention setting is more than just writing your average to-do list full of boxes to check. Writing intentions should be approached as a guide for how we want to be living our lives, how we want to be responding to situations, how we want to act as our best selves.

An intention is, at it’s simplest, a goal with meaning. It’s an actionable goal that we create for ourselves that aligns with our values and is backed with purpose. Having a clear purpose behind our goal makes a world of difference in the likelihood of us staying motivated, consistent, and actually reaching that goal.

For those of you just getting into the world of intention setting, I thought I would write up a little post guiding you how to begin an intention setting practice. We’re going to cover how to choose an intention, things to think about when setting an intention, how often to set intentions and how to fine tune your environment to make it that much more powerful.

Let’s get started.

Create An Intention Setting Space

Yes, you can write intentions any time and anywhere – there’s no need for anything fancy or extravagant. But for myself, and maybe for you as well, having a space set up with some of my favourite things turns intention setting from a mere list of written ideas into a sacred time to connect and reflect.

Create a space that feels special and inviting to you, a spot that you want to sit and really spend some time reflecting in. I enjoy putting my favorite blankets and pillows down, grabbing my meditating buddha that I got in Thailand, having a nice journal and favorite pens, highlighters, lighting a candle or two and even placing my conch shell from Barbados in the mix. That shell connects me to a place where I have felt some of my happiest moments. The buddha reminds me to slow my body down and go inwards for this practice. The blankets, pillows and candles create a cozy atmosphere. And the journal and pens? Well, I just think it’s fun to highlight things and use bright colours.

Your space can be whatever you want it to be. Maybe you prefer going to your favorite place in nature to write your intentions – like your favorite park, a bench in the forest, the beach.

Meditate Before Intention Setting

Spending a few moments in a meditation is so beneficial when you’re preparing to set your intentions. This can be a silent meditation or a guided one, for as little as 10 minutes or as long as you’d like. I personally enjoy guided meditations that focus on visualization and clarity. You can find lots of great ones for free in the Insight Timer app!

Use this meditation time to connect to your desires, to the feelings that you want to be experiencing more of. Get specific and into as much great detail as you can throughout your visualization. What does your visualization look like and smell like. What noises do you hear? How do you feel within that visualization? Notice what emotions and images come up for you.

How Do I Set Intentions?

Now, it’s time to dig in deep. You might struggle with the idea of setting intentions and might end up creating some really superficial ones at first, like “lose weight”, “eat vegetables”, “sleep more”. These are all fine and well but… they fall a little flat don’t you think? Where is the power behind them? The meaning? The significance?

To set an intention means to connect to an ultimate feeling and desire that is coming from your inner awareness. To do this, get clear on what you value most in your life. Do you value compassion? Freedom? Abundance? Social connections? Confidence?

In what way do you want to be living your life? What emotions do you want to experience most frequently? What is something that you’re holding on to that just does not do you any good anymore? Where can you release and where can you add? When you imagine your ideal life, how do you feel? What does that life bring you? Let your thoughts run wild.

Now that you have a grasp on your values and your ideal life, what can you implement to get there? How can you begin to live in a way that fosters the feelings that visualizing your ideal life brought up for you, right now? An intention is a driving force behind why you’re doing the thing you want to do. It can be specific and it can even be broad, like a philosophy to live by.

Things to think about to get your creative juices flowing:

How you would like to make decisions that align with your values?
Areas of your life that you would like to improve (physical, emotional, social, any area!)
Things that you would like to do more of
Things that you would like to do less of and replace with something more positive
The emotions, images and thoughts that floated through your earlier meditation

TIP #1: Don’t overthink this. Let your mind wander and write down whatever comes to you, whatever intentions feel good and true to you.

TIP #2: We want our intentions to come from a place of positivity. Even if your intention involves releasing something (de-stressing, removing toxic friendships, etc.), we want our intention to reflect the positives that will replace that. For example, if we want to remove toxic friendships – our intention may be I surround myself with loving, supportive people that lift me up.

The main thing that I want you to consider when intention setting is the purpose behind your intentions. Whatever you have written down, I want you to have a deep and innate understanding of WHY that intention is so powerful for you. What purpose will it serve you? I want you to feel warmth within whenever you read your intention.

Once you have your intentions, keep them somewhere where you can see them often. Maybe you’ll write an intention on a sticky note and put it on your mirror. Maybe you’ll create a background for your phone so that you see one of your intentions every time you look at your phone. For about four years, I stayed connected to two of my deepest intentions turned mantras: do everything from a place of love and your power is in the present moment. These words meant a lot to me (they still do), and I had reminders pop up on my phone every day at 9AM an 12PM for each of these.

When Should I Set Intentions?

You can set intentions as often as you’d like. You could have monthly intentions that you write at the start of each month. You could have a weekly intention, something that you really want to focus in on for that week. You could have yearly intentions, that you set around New Year’s. I love monthly intention setting as I feel that it holds the most power for me. I also love my New Year’s Eve tradition of intention setting for the year ahead and use this time to allow for more broad intentions such as the two that I mentioned earlier. 

If you like having a structure alongside the natural world, using the phases of the moon as a guide for intention setting can be really fun. Not only can the moon serve as a guide but it can also help you focus on what types of intentions to focus on, such as releasing and letting go or visualizing and creating.

♡

If you do yearly intention setting, make sure that you re-connect to your intentions at least every three months. Do they still ring true for you? Have you been living in alignment with those intentions?

After all, the point of setting intentions is to create guidelines based on your most important values that hold deep purpose for the direction of your life. They are a reminder to connect with yourself often, to make decisions lovingly, and of the way in which your true self would like to be living.