Existential Psychology

Write Your Life Intentions Down

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Life intentions are the foundation upon which the individual life path is built but the problem for most of us is that we never translate the ephemeral into the concrete. Our intentions remain gut feelings, pleasant fantasies, images that skirt at the edge of our conscious awareness, before daily life with its myriad stimuli diverts our attention away. We might spend our whole lives with the dim awareness that we’d like to be different, or try something different, but we never get around to doing it.

A simple yet powerful way to make your life intentions a reality is by writing them down and then hanging them in a place where you will see them multiple times a day. Those life intentions are nothing without the associated behaviors to move them from your mind into the world at large but getting motivated to enact those behaviors all starts with focusing more of your psychic energy on them.

That act of writing your intentions down is the first in a long line of acts of turning the ephemeral into the concrete. Nothing really changes in objective reality when you translate your intentions from your head to a piece of paper and yet everything changes. You’re naming those intentions, clarifying those intentions, validating those intentions, and you’re giving yourself permission to think about them as not just something that might come true in some distant future but something that can start coming true right away.

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