What is Intentional Living

Intentional living means to lead a life where choices and actions are taken deliberately and consciously based on your values and moral compass. To lead an intentional life, we don’t simply go with the flow and see what cards we get dealt with. Instead, we choose our decisions and actions wisely and deliberately.

For many of us, life throws at us problems which are seemingly out of our control. But we can control our responses and decisions however. This is often the key difference between how some people manage to succeed, while most others resign to fate and lead mediocre unsatisfying lives. It is all about understanding our inner values and intents, and to take decisions that are in harmony with our values.

The benefit of living intentionally

Too often, we dream of being successful in our relationships, in our work, and in our personal lives, but do not take the steps needed to make these dreams happen. We procrastinate, complain passively, and sometimes even take decisions that lead us further from those goals and intents.

Practicing the concept of living intentionally, we should instead first evaluate why do we’d want to improve that certain aspect of our lives, and then take deliberate steps to achieve those goals, however difficult they may seem. Step by step, when we make these difficult choices and actions, we eventually surround ourselves in an environment that encourages and enables us to achieve our goals.

Understand the Why in our intents

Before we leap into evaluating our choices, we should also first understand why we are aiming to achieve certain goals and intents. There’s little point in going through the whole process of evaluating our choices and taking deliberate actions if we don’t even understand the reasons behind our intentions.

Imagine that you had a map and were planning the route that will lead you to your destination, only to later realize during the journey that it wasn’t the destination that you’d truly wanted, or worse, not even knowing why you had wanted to travel to that destination in the first place!

To understand the Why in our intentions and goals, it is essential that we be honest with ourselves. When we are not honest with ourselves and give false reasons for wanting to achieve something, it is usually because the underlying real reasoning is either weak or mis-aligned with our inner values. Such situations will eventually lead to self-questioning later on, where we may ultimately realize that these intentions were not what we truly want after all.

Taking ownership of your choices

Making an intentional choice however does not mean that the choice will lead to the best outcome. Remember that everyone’s values and moral compass may be different, and that there is nothing wrong if you decide on a choice that is not aligned with the set of values and morals of others. What is important here is that your decisions are given proper evaluation by you and are intentionally chosen.

Making choices that are based on our values and morals also ensures that we are always in harmony with our inner self. The whole aim of intentional living is to improve the way that we live, and being out of sync with your inner values will cause us to suffer from a crisis of self-integrity within us, as our actions become at odds with our inner values.

As long as we are making choices intentionally and based on our values and morals, we are unlikely to find ourselves regretting these decisions in the future. This is because that would have been the best choice deliberately taken at that time given whatever information that was available. We may re-evaluate our choices if new information are presented later on, but there would be no regret of the earlier choice that was made.