How many hours of your day do you spend intentionally?
Living with intention in the 21st century can be a really hard task. Whether you are a millennial who just jumped into adulthood or a 19s kid, you probably understand what I mean.
It seems that a lot of the time we go about our lives with all the responsibilities we have, all the must-dos, all the people we want to catch up with, and we forget that we have a saying in all of this. I’m seeing people around me, as well as myself, get sucked up into an unintentional and passive mode of living for sometimes, months on end — and then bam!
The ‘bam!’ I’m referring to, is our natural capacity to understand emptiness. Do you ever get glimpses of low mental health periods? As if life hits you with a drug that numbs you out for a while? During these low periods, we normally feel like nothing’s exciting or that we have nothing to look forward to. During this time we also normally understand how passively we’ve been living for the past month or months.
If we look at this phenomenon from a positive psychology perspective we could relate it to theories of self-actualization. Self-actualization is the highest need in the hierarchy of human needs. Abraham Maslow developed a triangle of needs that represents people’s basic needs in life. At the base of the triangle lie the physiological needs every human has, and at the peak of it lies self-actualization — which means achieving our highest self; our potential.
Positive psychology focuses on the human capacity and natural tendency to want to improve and become better. You might be thinking, better than what? According to approaches taken by social cognitive theories, we have a tendency of trying to become a better version of our truest selves.
Taking this into account, what if those low periods we referred to above are wake-up calls? What if feeling this numbness, or feeling like nothing’s exciting, or that we are living without purpose, is the way our body, soul, and mind tell us that something needs to be changed?
I hear so many people say ‘be who you truly are’ or ‘live with intention’, and even though these words are psychologically boosting, I don’t always know how to apply them in my life…
How do I live intentionally and refrain from getting sucked into the ‘routine’? Living intentionally for a few days can be done with no great effort, but how do you make your life more intentional altogether for the long-term?
I’ve recently read this book called The12-week-year by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington, and even though the book focuses on goal-setting, most concepts discussed are about intentional time use.
And here’s an idea from the book…
If you know what your life vision is and if your vision is so exciting to you that you literally smile just by thinking about it, then you can set goals and habits that are aligned with that vision.
This might seem like the most simple and obvious first step to living intentionally, but it is often overlooked.
If you think about it, though, how can you make sure you are honouring who you want to be if you don’t know who that person is? And I don’t mean that you must have everything figured out — I think almost nobody has everything figured out anyway. I just mean — it’s no surprise that we live our life passively if we don’t have a vision of how we want this life to look like.
A question I found useful from the book is:
In x years what would I want to have, be, and do in my life?
This prompt helps you think about what excites you, what would make you jump out of bed in the morning. In addition, who are you in this life you desire? Are you courageous, honourable, honest, hard-working? What do you have in this life? Is it a family, a great career, or maybe both?
Perhaps if we all think about these questions, and construct a vision that is exciting to us and not necessarily to anyone else, we might start living life the way it should be lived — by truly living it!
And one of the greatest lessons I’m slowly learning is how, in the midst of all this, we can always find a way to be truly here, truly present, and look at everything with peace, love and acceptance — even the hard parts of our journey.
