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“True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.” – Seneca (a Greek stoic philosopher)
“Since the beginning of this project I’ve always wanted to put a quote at the top of a blog post, and now I have.” – Craig (a Being on Wheels)
Recently I’ve been very focused on planning and developing my own life. One of the first steps of this process for me (as recommended by countless books) was to plan a list of goals and outcomes. At the time this seemed to be a logical step, but I have begun to realise that it is actually is a potential recipe for disaster. In this article I’m going to outline an alternative method: setting intentions.
Problems with setting goals
The reason that slightly chunky quote is at the top of this page is that I think it highlights a couple of problems with the idea of goal setting.
“True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future”
Setting a goal is a perfect recipe for us to feel anxious about the future. We suddenly have this invisible pressure that we’ve placed upon ourselves to achieve the goal, and if we don’t manage it in the time frame we’ve set, then it is likely we will end up beating ourselves up and feeling bad when in actuality there is no reason we should.
“A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.”
The happiness that comes from accepting where we are in life and what we have available to us is one of the tricky things about well-being, because if we don’t have any aspirations or sense of purpose, then we tend not to be very happy either.
Intentions Instead
The trick here is to try and flip our thinking, from having goals we want to achieve into having a set of intentions of how we want to act in our lives. This can seem a bit paradoxical because sometimes the outcome can actually end up being the same as when goals are set, but the key difference is the path there.
Perhaps an example will provide some clarity…
I intend to keep writing this blog. This means that I have a plan of what I’m doing now and a rough idea of what I want to do with it in the future.
What I’m not doing is setting a goal to have a certain amount of subscribers to my weekly newsletter, or a certain number of comments on my journal-keeping article. Instead, I’m intending to carry on producing content that I hope people will get something from, and improving it everywhere I can.
As a result of this intention, many of my actions will be exactly the same as if I was desperately clawing to reach the goal of 1,000,000 newsletter subscribers. But the difference is that in this manner, I’m putting far less pressure on myself to achieve potentially unrealistic milestones.
Life has a funny way of throwing unexpected issues and hurdles in the way, and these things can make reaching our goals more difficult and sometimes impossible. But these same issues can’t possibly change our intentions because our intentions show up before the situation does. To put it another way, when we set a goal the situation impacts the goal, but when we set an intention the intention impacts the situation.
Intentions are the wise human’s goals; they are not set in stone or easily pinned down, and this works to our advantage. We are ever-changing, and so our intentions will be too.
As always, I would love to hear from you on this subject, let me know if you found anything useful here and if you like, set your intention in the comments below.
If you liked this, you might well enjoy my article on developing your habits.
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