Intentions aren't woo-woo; they're a leadership practice to develop.

Would you drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles without mapping a route? Probably not.?

Would you go into a high-stakes meeting without consciously choosing your attitude? Possibly.?

Setting an intention can be a powerful and practical practice in work and personal life.

What is an Intention??

“Intentions support a way of being (how we choose to behave) as we strive towards our goals” authors and executive coaches Sarah Suatoni and David Yuan write in their new book Work With Heart: Developing the Inner Capacity for Thriving at Work and in Life (85).?

Your intention is the attitude, mindset, or way of being that you choose at that moment.

Just to clarify, an intention is not your goal or your destination. Instead, an intention is more of a tool you can use to help gain clarity around how you will approach meeting your goal or traveling to your destination.?

Why This Is Important

You are more likely to achieve your goals or arrive at your destination if you consciously choose your mental attitude or how you are willing to behave.?

Suatoni and Yuan write in Work With Heart, “an intention can act like a bridge, linking where you are to where you want to be” (86).?

Additionally, when you're intentional, you're less likely to do more damage to yourself and others.

Your intention affects your actions, and your actions affect your results.

If your intention changes, your actions change. And if your actions change, your results may change.

Intention ?? Action ?? Results

Choosing an intention doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get to your destination, but it does increase the likelihood.

Lastly, you might just find that choosing an intention feels better. I sure do.

How to Apply This

Picture yourself heading into an important 1:1 meeting where a colleague is going to give you feedback. You pause for a moment to practice self-awareness, notice your internal emotional state, and quickly realize you are stressed out. That’s OK that you feel stressed, and it’s good that you noticed.

If you don’t choose an intention, you're likely to act out some of your stress with your colleague, which might result in undesirable consequences. So, after you realize you are stressed out, decide to take a moment to cycle through a few potential intentions that could support you in receiving feedback from this colleague.?

A few intentions you consider include…

I choose to be dismissive.?

I choose to be confrontational.?

I choose to be kind to myself.?

I choose to be curious.?

I choose to be open-minded.?

As you consider your list of possible intentions, you realize that if you choose to be stubborn or confrontational, it’s going to be harder for you to receive this feedback. That might strain the relationship between you and your colleague.?

You then notice that if you choose to be curious, kind to yourself, or open-minded, you’ll have a better chance of receiving this feedback.

Upon further reflection, you choose to be curious.

You take a moment to notice what it’s like to be curious. You then go into the meeting, begin to feel stress coming on, remind yourself that you are choosing to be curious in this meeting.?

Each time you remind yourself that you are choosing to be curious, your body settles down, you feel less stress, and you ask your colleague a clarifying question.?

At the end that the meeting, you realize that you received the feedback well and it overall went much smoother than it would have if you went into it being stressed out like usual. You and your colleague are still on great terms, and you end up thanking them for the feedback.?

Would things have gone as well if you went into that feedback situation, feeling stressed out, without taking a minute to choose your approach?

There's only one way to really know... try it out for yourself.

A Question for You Ponder

At this moment, what attitude will support me best?

- Alex Wallash

Thank you for reading! If you have questions, comments, or liked what you read, subscribe, tag me in a comment, or send me a message.?

In this article, I reference a few quotes from Work With Heart. This book is a new and phenomenal resource for people who are being coached, coaches, and anyone interested in their personal development.

Photo: Quang Nguyen Vinh