Five Steps For Setting Intentions That Stick

In this beginning lesson, I'll ask you to reflect on what common challenges you run up against when trying to set intentions for yourself that stick, and I'll share my own experience with my "old operating system" and my "newer operating system" when it comes to moving me toward what matters. This will lay the groundwork for understanding more about why moving toward our goals can be difficult, and why it's important to create an optimal inner environment for ourselves. We'll end with a meditation to help you connect with what your heart is calling you toward.

This lesson will provide a framework for understanding how our nervous system's wiring plays a critical role in helping us to move toward or away from our goals. We will explore our survival/protection circuits and our thriving/connection circuits and what they have to do with our ability to move toward what matters. You will learn a key ingredient for creating an optimal inner environment for yourself, where the "seeds" you plant can flourish. I'll invite you to reflect on your strengths, and to call up inner resources that have helped you in the past. This lesson sets the stage for the five steps to follow.

In this lesson, you'll learn and practice an important strategy for turning down your stress response, and turning on your "yes" response, so that you can move with greater ease towards what matters in your life. I'll invite you to use mind-body cues to differentiate your body's "yes" versus "no", and I'll suggest ways you can frame intentions for yourself to turn on your thriving circuits. By the end of this lesson, you'll create an intention that will stick, that you can take forward into the days and weeks ahead. We'll end with a short meditation to practice this.

In this lesson, I will teach you step two of the five steps, which involves creating a "beacon" for yourself to help guide you toward what matters. Similar to a beacon of light that guides ships to safe harbor, our personal beacon can help us to connect with our deepest values, and these in turn become the fuel to help us move toward our goals and end up where we want to be. We'll work with short meditations and mini-exercises to help you create your beacon so that you can start using it by the end of this lesson.

This lesson will address a crucial third step of moving toward what matters: creating action steps. You will learn how to create actions for yourself that feel "safe" for your nervous system, so that you can access the energy you need to move you forward. I'll share a story of how using this step helped me to achieve something I never thought I could do. By the end of this lesson, you will identify specific action steps for yourself that are concrete and doable, and that allow you to feel empowered as you move forward.

In this lesson, we will explore how leaving things to chance (even with the best of intentions) can make it harder to follow through. As an antidote to this, you will learn how to create a specific action plan for yourself that will greatly increase the likelihood of you following through with your action steps (that you identified in lesson 5). Through multiple examples, you will understand how to create an effective action plan that you can start using and implementing by the end of this lesson. We'll end with a short visualization and reflection, to help bring this step in an embodied way into your life.

While many of us may think of obstacles as something "bad" to be avoided, creating a mindset that incorporates working with obstacles as part of our human journey can be much more helpful in moving us toward what matters and helping us following through with heartfelt intentions. I'll share with you a way to flip your thinking so that you don't get stuck when you come up against obstacles. We'll do a meditation to help you identify your challenges, so that you can begin to work with them in helpful and productive ways.

One common obstacle that gets in the way of people reaching their goals is the voice of the inner critic. This voice, which can often be harsh, distorted, and inaccurate, can derail even those of us with the best of intentions. Having strategies for working with the inner critic can be immensely helpful, and that's what this lesson is all about. You will walk away with a plan for how to work with your inner critic, so that it doesn't stop you from moving toward what matters. We end with a short meditation to work with this strategy using visualization.

In this lesson, you will learn how to work with another common obstacle that can derail many people from their goals: the experience of fear, self-doubt, or other emotional discomforts. When we run up against any of these as we approach our goals, our inclination is to push them away or feel that we need to wait until the feelings go away before we can take steps forward. I offer you an alternative approach that is often much more helpful: learning how to be kind to whatever is showing up, relating to it in a new way, and taking it along for the ride with you as you move toward what matters. We'll work with a meditation and some guided imagery to help you do this, so that you will walk away knowing just what to do when faced with some of these unpleasant visitors (fear, self-doubt, etc).

In this final lesson, we will talk about the importance of developing a specific action plan to work with setbacks, and you will develop one for yourself that you can start using by the end of this lesson. Rather than letting things fall to chance when you run up against inevitable obstacles, you will have a way to work with them that will leave you feeling empowered. In the second part of this lesson, we work with the fifth and final step, which involves using mental rehearsal and visualization to help your brain and nervous system learn in advance what it looks and feels like to use all of these tools and live the life that you most want, making the choices that align with your deepest values. In doing so, you can move toward what matters in your life with greater confidence, clarity, energy, and empowerment.