Goals Versus Intentions…

 On goals, intentions, and staying present.

I've been sitting with this feeling lately, like a desire to orient more toward being than doing, and whenever I try to make that practical, not just a pretty concept, I like to say out loud, I find myself returning to the distinction between goals and intentions.

If goals are desired, outcomes pointing us somewhere, giving us something to move toward and achieve. I feel like intentions have more room to them, like more space for creativity, presence, even joy, and intention keeps bringing me back to the concept of here, asking me to refine, articulate, and respond in real time.

And a goal on the other hand, can sometimes pull me out of my body. It becomes something I'm chasing, something I have to complete and prove on this external plane. And I want to be clear here that I don't think goals are bad or unimportant. I think they're valuable. I just think that we tend to really overemphasize them.

We start to relate to ourselves, like projects to finish, like there's a final version of us that we're supposed to arrive at. And in that framing, I think it's easy to forget that we're actually really in relationship with the world, constantly taking in new information, adjusting, evolving, becoming.

In other words, we're not static we're responsive.

For me, this has been especially relevant to consider the goals versus intentions, the staticness versus the responsiveness. As someone who has really big visions and can tend to think in really long term arcs and trajectories. In other words, I feel like I don't need help envisioning the future because I'm already there half the time.

What's harder for me is being in the present, feeling the joy of where I am, remembering where I've been to get here, and letting the path that I'm on continue to shape the vision rather than gripping tightly to the version that makes sense today.

So this is my practice. It's not about abandoning the big vision. It's not about not having goals. It's really about softening my grip on the vision and the goal, the outcome. It's more about trusting that if I let the journey inform the vision, so if I stay in relationship with the journey, there's something more honest or aligned that can emerge.

I'm going to try to make this concrete. So, for example, I have a goal of becoming a fully licensed therapist. For context, as I'm recording this, I have about 260 hours out of 3000 hours that are required for my state licensing board to deem me a fully licensed clinician. In other words, I have just slightly under 10% left of something I've been working on for years to be able to be a fully licensed therapist.

So there's a finish line. And I can feel how easy it would be for me to treat the finish line in every session that I'm required to do to get to the finish line as like an itemized list to check off. And then it just becomes numbers and like progress towards completion, which feels like the opposite of what I want to do as a therapist who sits with people and empathizes and draws out creative integrative work. But when I relate to it as a goal, there's just so much that gets lost. So then I ask myself like, what is my intention here? And I realized I'm not here to just finish my license. I'm here to learn. That's why I signed up for this process.

And that's where it shifts to my intention is to learn how to practice in a way that feels like me. It's to find clients who resonate with the work that I care about. It's to build something that's sustainable, relational, real. So I get more specific and it evolves to, I want to work with individuals and couples in the state of Washington where I'm getting licensed, who are curious about themselves, who want to explore beyond inherited narratives and conditioning and live more authentically.

I want the work to feel meaningful. And I have personal goals like wanting to start a family, that come into play with my timing and my just personal trajectory. But when I set that intention, it doesn't flatten the experience into a checklist.

It organizes my whole being and it starts to take shape without this rigidity. And it feels like casting a spell. Not in a passive way of like, I'm just going to sit back and see what happens. But in the sense that it really directs my attention and it's anchoring me into my 'why', like, why I'm doing what I do, rather than needing to know how I do it and have that tight grip, I have more permission to leave space for how it unfolds.

It also helps me right- size everything else, and this is back to the big vision idea. Because I have big ideas about changing the therapy field, rethinking business structures, rethinking collaboration, challenging capitalism. These are ideas that matter to me, but if I tried to act on all of them at once, and right now I get lost in the sauce and I can't even find my footing.

So I'm starting to hold that differently. I'm loving that concept of the parking lot of ideas, like they're not dismissed, but they're just not in charge of my attention right now. They can wait and they can become what they want to become.

This links me to the power of intention, that it's not a static statement, it's an orientation. It's a way of aligning your whole self to something, and in return, it's less forceful, it's less grippy, and it's more about the relationship.

Another way to think about it is instead of saying, "I'm going to run a marathon", the intention might be, I want to live a healthy, connected life. And from there your choices emerge like movement, rest, food, sleep. You already know what a healthy lifestyle components are. Now, you just choose how you relate to it because you've set that intention. And so maybe you still end up running the marathon, but it's not the only way that intention gets expressed. That might just be a bonus of living into that intention.

Focusing more on the intention creates a more fulfilling life. Rather than this constant pursuit of outcomes, we have the ability to stay in relationship with what you're doing as you're doing it. So it's really about letting presence shape your experience.

From here, I'm curious what this brings up for you. Are there goals you're holding that might want to soften into intentions? Where might you loosen your grip on a vision and see what emerges when you stay with the journey itself?

I imagine that this will continue to unfold and evolve with time and feedback. So, one, I am so curious if you have specific feedback on maybe how you've seen goals in a different light than how I've outlined them here. And two, any ideas, suggestions, or reinterpretations of how you've maybe combined the art of intentions and goals in different ways than what I've shared here or maybe in ways that are resonant. I welcome it and thank you for tuning in.