“What are your intentions?” the suspicious father would ask of his daughter’s suitor long, long ago in a different time and place. Today I ask you the same question. Being clear about your intentions is the most powerful way to create what you want in all areas of your life. I work with many people on goal setting, but I consider goal setting the “outside” companion of the more important “inside” work–setting clear intentions on a daily basis. So what is the difference?

Getting clear intentions means you spend time “inside” visualizing and getting very clear about what you want. Goals are the concrete results of your intentions. An intention is not concrete, but energetic. It’s the way we send messages to the universe about what we want to create. Intention along with Attention is like a powerful magnet that attracts to us what we want. Simply put: You get what you focus on. And we all get things coming into our life everyday–sometimes it doesn’t seem like what we want, but it may be where we’ve focused unconsciously. Especially when we let our inner critic and disappointment or discouragement get in our way. We may say we want five new clients for example, when we are really spending all our time focusing and talking about the bad economy. The intention going out is that we don’t think we can get five new clients in this economy. 

If you have a goal that is not aligned with your larger belief, you may find that your intentions are actually undermining your goals. When your intentions are aligned with your larger desires and passions, you will find that consciously setting daily intentions will set in motion the Law of Attraction and you will find your actions to reach your goals flow much smoother and with less effort.

Here are a couple of examples of creating conscious intention around all you do that’s important to you:

• Each morning when you get up, think about the day ahead and write down or say what you intend that day to be like. How do you intend to feel? What impact you intend to have?

• Try setting a conscious intention before going into a meeting. Set one for the room, for example, “openness” and hold that during the meeting. Notice what difference it makes. It’s even more powerful if the entire group sets a common intention.

Intention is the unseen energy and power behind your goals and what you want to create in your life. Remembering to consciously set positive intentions, coupled with the action needed to achieve them, and you will notice ease and flow, and an increase in productivity as well as enjoyment in working towards what you want–especially if these are some of the intentions you set!