how setting intentions will change your life.

striped dress. shoes. hat. necklace. basket.

On Tuesday morning Ava threw the mother of all fits.  I shared this over on instagram yesterday, but she is in that super obsessive phase of childhood where the seam of your sock sitting wrong in your shoe makes you lose your mind.  She fights me daily on what to wear to school, and basically she doesn’t want to wear any of her clothes because they’re “uncomfortable.”  The only thing she wants to wear is an old pair of sweats with holes in them, which I will not allow.

Her percocious nature, paired with this new obsessive development, has manifested in frequent World War 3 level meltdowns over the last few months and have me mourning my once super easy-going, never threw fits, easy to reason with, fourth child.  Ava has always been a piece of cake to parent, and there’s no irony in that.  When it came time to potty train her, all I had to do was say, “okay, we’re all done with diapers, you’re going to go potty in the toilet now.”  And she literally never had an accident. (This was not the case with my other three children.) I feel that I owe her lots of grace during this stage just for that potty-training miracle alone.

Anyway, yesterday afternoon I was in my bedroom putting some laundry away, and she came up and started chatting with me, then she said, “mom, I’m so excited!  I made a goal to not be bad today, and I haven’t been bad at all!  I did it!”

I thought about that for like 3 hours last night.  How she set an intention for herself, and because of it, she had success: no behavior problems, no obsessive meltdowns, no time-out, just a good happy day.  

I think there’s a lot to learn from this one situation, about the power of setting intentions for ourselves.  The truth is, setting goals, or as I like to call them intentions, is really just about living intentionally.

 It’s a life-changing principle, so simple even a 6 year old can understand the core of it.   

The benefit in setting our intentions, or making goals, is that it gives our life a plan, purpose, and direction.  Making your way through a day/life without intention, is like starting a road trip with no destination in mind.  Just driving aimlessly and hoping that it all works out.  But the truth is, if you don’t know where you’re going, you might not like where you end up.

The only way to truly live our fullest life, is to set intentions for it.  True freedom comes from committing to a plan and a purpose.

This may sound counterintuitive, but think for a moment about what happens when no intention is set for things like our time, money, family, meals, or even our closet.  Time without a schedule is often wasted, money without a budget gets spent mindlessly, family life without a mission statement is hectic, creating meals without a plan results in thrown together dinners or too many trips to McDonalds, and a closet without intention becomes a mess and the task of getting dressed a frustrating experience.

Approaching our life with intention helps us steer in the direction we want to go and gives us the freedom that comes with controlling our time and resources.

The picture of where you are trying to get happens first in your minds eye before you make it happen in real life.

This is how I’ve approached every major thing in my life, from parenting, to travel, to how I get dressed in the morning.  It’s how we ended up living in my dream, living in an old farmhouse in New England.  It’s how I’ve raised kids who don’t need to be told to do their homework.  Every time I have achieved success in anything big or small, it was because I first created the picture of the outcome I was looking for, and then set my mind to it.

If the thought of setting intentions for your whole life feels intimidating, start small.  Create a weekly meal plan, or plan your outfits for the week (you can get my free outfit planner below).  Write out 2-3 small goals you want to accomplish and then work towards them.

It’s amazing what you can do when you first decide where it is you want to go, and then work hard towards getting there.

Do you set intentions in your life?