Purpose Archives - Page 6 of 7

Attention Is Essential

July 19, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 7 Comments

Intention is a great catalyst. It gives us something to aim at, a focus, a goal. But after creating an intention to do something, we also need to pay attention to what happens—to what we do, what we think, and what we feel. Paying attention helps us override the brain’s autopilot so we don’t simply fall back into familiar patterns and habits.

Attention is the same as awareness or mindfulness. Since much of what we do is done automatically, we tend not to be very mindful of our own thoughts, feelings, words, and behavior, let alone the effect we might be having on other people. We aren’t fully present most of the time.

There are various kinds of mindfulness practices, including mindfulness meditation. Meditation has many great benefits and is an excellent habit to develop and maintain for general health and well-being. But it isn’t the only way to be mindful, aware, or attentive. In terms of following through with an intention, a practice or a tool that helps us focus on the behavior we’re trying to generate may be more useful. Here are three suggestions:

Self-Awareness Pie Chart

Draw a circle a couple of inches in diameter and divide it into three slices that represent how much of your attention in that moment is on your feelings (F), your thoughts (T), and your body (B). Put the letter designations inside the appropriate pie slices. Then write your answers to these questions:

How do I feel emotionally?
What am I thinking about?
How do I feel physically?

You can write as much or as little as you like. If you use this exercise to help with an intention, the best time to do it is when you have done—or not done—what you intended to do.

Theme Word or Phrase

Come up with a word or phrase that reminds you of what you’re trying to achieve. Write it on Post-its or index cards and put them where you’re most likely to see them. You don’t have to limit yourself to a word or phrase. You can come up with a theme song, an image, a string around your finger, or anything else that focuses your attention.

Questions

Create two or three questions you can ask yourself each day, such as:

What is my intention?
Why do I want to do [whatever it is]?
Am I committed to doing [whatever it is] today?

You can ask and answer the questions on paper, in your head, or you can invite a friend to ask them.

It doesn’t really matter what you decide to do, as long as you do something to keep your attention focused on your intention. It takes many repetitions for your brain’s autopilot to get the message.

Intention Is Powerful

July 17, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 8 Comments

Autopilot Off (EP) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We humans have a propensity for following the path of least resistance. We tend to do the easier thing, the thing that takes the least time or requires the least effort. Often the result is that we do what we’ve always done because that’s what’s familiar. We know how to do it so we don’t have to put much thought or effort into it. In fact, we can—and do—do what we’ve always done on autopilot. Because it’s so easy, operating on autopilot is very appealing, even compelling.

But autopilot only works when we’re in familiar territory. Novel situations require conscious thought, and conscious thought requires more energy than autopilot requires. We’re sort of programmed to conserve energy by continuing along the path of least resistance. That’s why habits are so difficult to change or break. The way our brains conserve energy is by developing subroutines whenever they can and turning them over to the unconscious. This enables us to get by without having to think about a great many things we do. Yes, my brain made me do it is a valid excuse.

Our brain’s autopilot keeps us alive every day, but it can be difficult to interrupt. Autopilot behavior could be called habitual, unconscious, automatic, unmindful, or routine. What it can’t be called is deliberate.

If we want to do something deliberately, as opposed to habitually, the first thing we need is an intention. If we don’t have an intention in place, we’re likely to succumb to the siren song of the path of least resistance. That’s just the way we’re wired.

An intention is more than wishful thinking or a good idea. An intention is something specific we are committed to doing and willing to put the necessary time and effort into. Creating and acting on an intention requires our conscious thought. If we want to break away from the path of least resistance and carve out a new path, we need to ask ourselves if we’re committed to doing it and if we’re willing to do whatever it takes, including feeling uncomfortable.

We also need to get very, very specific. It’s fine to begin with a vague or general objective. That’s the way most ideas start out. But if we want to give ourselves a fighting chance at succeeding, we need to spell out the what, when, where, and how of what we intend to do.

Acting deliberately and thoughtfully is the opposite of running on autopilot. It takes practice. It requires energy and effort. But first of all, it requires an intention.

Keep Calm?

May 16, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Thanks to www.womenworking.com. I couldn’t agree more!

What Gets in the Way

March 28, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

What keeps us from achieving the things we want or even set out to achieve? Science writer David DiSalvo (What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite) seems to like why questions—which I’m on record as opposing. He wrote an article for Forbes titled “The 10 Reasons Why We Fail,” which he describes as reflections on falling short—more precisely, why we fail despite ourselves.

Two of his reasons—the first and last, as it happens—really resonate for me based on my own experience and the experiences of friends and acquaintances.

You Don’t Believe You Can Do It

Luke: I can’t believe it.
Yoda: That is why you fail.

The crucial part of Yoda’s dialogue with Luke is “believe.” The human brain is a powerful problem-solving and prediction making machine, and it operates via a multitude of feedback loops. What matters most in the feedback loop dynamic is input—what goes into the loop that begins the analysis-evaluation-action process, which ultimately results in an outcome. Here’s the kicker: if your input shuttle for achieving a goal lacks the critical, emotionally relevant component of belief, then the feedback loop is drained of octane from the start. Another way to say that is—why would you expect a convincingly successful outcome when you haven’t convinced yourself that it’s possible?

Believing you can do something is a precursor to intentionally changing or initiating a habit. If you start out believing you can’t do it, you will more than likely fulfill that prophecy.

You’re Confused about What to Do

Of all of these 10 ideas, this one is to me the most difficult because it plagues me almost constantly. Gearing up the cerebral feedback loop for achievement is one thing, but without a sense of focus and direction, all of that energy isn’t going to yield very much in the end. My experience has been that sometimes you have to let the energy flow for a while without too firm a sense of direction and see if focus emerges organically. Once it does, you can then nurture it into a more structured method for getting where you want to go.

Confusion abounds, especially when people think they ought to know what to do and where to go, but don’t. There are several ways to prime the pump to gain some clarity about what to do next. Often, however, we and our brains are so frantically busy going in whatever direction we’re going that we can’t slow down enough to realize we don’t actually know what the heck we’re doing.

Uppercase INTENTIONS

March 7, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Love intention plate — Love intention (Photo credit: Pilisa)

Intention is one of those words that has to cover a lot of ground. By that I mean we tend not to make very good distinctions when we use it. Intention can refer to anything from our most informal plans all the way up to major goals and even life purpose. More often, though, intention gets the casual treatment.

I intended to do it, but didn’t because…

I didn’t intend for X to happen.

I intend to take care of that this afternoon.

There’s nothing wrong with using intention that way, but it does rob the word of power. Do our intentions amount to nothing more than completing tasks on our to-do lists? While I don’t want to downplay the value of completing things and doing what we say we’re going to do, there’s more to intention than that.

I don’t think it works to approach making a difference in the world the same way we approach dealing with meeting a deadline. But I suspect we often do. Maybe the result of treating all of our intentions equally is that we end up with an equally weak commitment to following through on them.

Since an intention to gas up the car on the way home from work, an intention to improve one’s bad habits, and an intention to create a meaningful life are not all of the same order, having a way to distinguish among them might be useful. We could refer to our day-to-day intentions as lowercase intentions and our larger, purpose-driven intentions—the ones that require our conscious choice—as uppercase intentions.

As it turns out, defining, declaring, and attending to uppercase intentions makes it so much easier to follow through on lowercase intentions.