27 October 2005
Successful Intentions Newsletter
Hi ,
When have things turned out just as you intended? And when has life offered you up stones when you intended diamonds?! Is it possible to direct your own good fortune? There is growing evidence that you can, through the Power of Intention©!
Good Intentions
Intention is derived from the Latin intendere, meaning "to stretch, direct or apply the mind in a particular direction." Intention is a force of motivation. It is the energy that precedes action.
For example, the intention to move a group of muscles to perform an action sets up a measurable anticipatory field up to 1.5 seconds before muscle activation.
Whatever your goal, by consciously holding the idea of the action "in-tension" you create a powerful anticipatory field. It's not so much "think before you act" as "intend before you think!" This is why Sports Psychologists use both physical practice and mental rehearsal to train high performance athletes. One without the other is not as effective.
Intentional Action
So, why don't things always work out "the way you intended"? Because you weren't clear enough or honest enough about your real intentions! Intention is represented by a measurable anticipatory field, which has both a force and a direction. In other words, a vector.
You may declare your intention consciously to yourself (for example by repeating an affirmation over and over), but there may be a scattering of sub-conscious intentions which set up competing anticipatory fields. In any case you may be unwilling to accept your honest, most noble, or "real" intention. The resolution of all these intentions gives rise to the resultant vector, which leads to a different outcome than you had at first anticipated.
You need to practice being clear to yourself about your most honest intentions in any given situation. The better you are at visualizing and eliciting your own "real" intention, the stronger the anticipatory field, and the more likely others will resonate with your intention. Studies have demonstrated that a focused, conscious intention can influence the replication, conformation, and electrical properties of DNA in human cells at a distance!
Our Intentions are like seeds, and once sown they will mark the direction in which we choose to steer our lives. Through the power of our intention on the object of our attention we harness an incredible creative and organizing power.
"When your Intentions are clear, the Mechanism will appear, and your Success
is near".
The principles for acting on your conscious intentions are about releasing the inner MONKEY:
- Maintain your intentions like a garden and nurture them daily. A few noble intentions during an entire day of mental irritation will have practically no noticeable result. Planting and tending intentions takes time and patience.
- Open yourself to silence. Be still. You need to slow down, sit down, and quiet down. Find a space to simply be with your thoughts for 15 minutes to half an hour each day. Just let your thoughts bubble up. You will begin to notice the competing intentions of your mind.
- Notice "heart breathing". Get a sense that you are breathing through your heart in order to generate a more coherent heart rhythm.
- Keep your intentions to yourself. Talk about them only if you really intend to pull it off. Speak when there is a reason to speak, when there is purpose or action to be fulfilled.
- Envisage yourself exactly the way you hope your intentions will turn out. See the results of your intentions as vividly as you can possibly imagine them.
- Yoke awareness of your intentions to a daily tracking system. Keep a learning journal or some other method of noting when you think or talk about your intentions. You can bet that the exact opposite intention will keep coming up and you have to be observant of your own mind to weed out these negative impressions.
Imagine what could happen if you were able to consciously choose your intentions and maintain a desirable vector of those intentions over time. There is evidence that you can train your mind to do this.
According to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, "All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become". Success truly flows from clear intention!
Coming up in the next edition of the Successful Intentions Newsletter - "The Corporate Shearer!" 10 problems with coaching in organizations today and what to do about them.
Keep your intentions clear,
Peter Webb
Home
| Manage subscription (Unsubscribe, change e-mail, text only)
