In today’s guest post coach Louise Gillespie Smith shares a personal experiment that she now uses with her own clients.

The Power of Living with Intention

by Louise Gillespie Smith

Six months ago I began an experiment to see what would happen if I fully lived with intention for a whole year. The idea is to set a different intention every month and to fully immerse myself, by directing my thoughts and action in alignment with each one.

I am in the middle of the experiment now and it’s been quite amazing how the different intentions I quite flippantly set for each month at the beginning have all flowed into each other perfectly. The timing has been right for all of them.

Why am I doing this?

Setting my intention for a yoga class or situation has always worked for me. I have found it quite a fun and empowering way to choose how I want to be and act around anything I do. So I thought, what if I was to expand this and see what would happen if I lived with a different focus each month.

I have always dreamed of travelling around India for 6 months and this is going to be part of the journey, I leave in January. As a coach I also believe it’s good to step outside your boundaries and challenge yourself. I find I am more a more effective coach when I am developing and stretching myself as well as my clients.

The intentions so far….

I began with “being creative”, I had not done any art for well over twelve years, it was always something I had loved at school but ever since have just become stuck with. My intention lead me to drawing again, visiting different art galleries each week, going on a graffiti hunt, and watching a street dance show.

It was amazing, I found just sitting down with the intention of being creative with no expectations just helped me to start doing art again. I was drawing nearly every day and I discovered that art is a great meditation, once you are immersed in a picture you think of nothing else.

What has been interesting since I have moved on to new intentions, I have not done any more art which just proved to me the power of having an intention.

My next intention for June was to “do things differently”, now this was a challenge. I literally aimed to shake everything up; I ate different food, I walked different routes, I listened to different music, I gave up TV for a week, I went to new places basically anything that was routine was changed.

I had no idea how much mental effort this would take as most of what we humans do is habit. Luckily my creative juices were already flowing from the previous month so they were put to good use.

Since then I have focused on kindness, love, play and now peace. Kindness and love opened my heart, I felt extremely connected with people and an intense feeling of love, play bought out my spontaneous side which had lain dormant for a year or so and I had an unbelievable about of fun. My intention this month is being peaceful, this is perfect timing as I have just moved from London down to the seaside.

What I have learnt

• Living with intention creates how you want to be in your life.
• It doesn’t have to be for a whole month, it could even just be for a particular task you need to complete. When I have to do something that I really don’t want to do I’ll set an intention that will support me to make it easier for example being powerful or playful always creates a shift.
• Setting an intention around what you want to create in your life can help your focus on making it happen.
• Sticking my intention on post it notes and posting them in obvious places helps to keep my intention in mind.
• I use this when coaching my clients now too, they create their own intentions around what they would like to achieve. We create mini challenges for them to do to stretch them with in their goals and build their self-confidence.
• Setting an intention for each session also is a powerful tool to make each session unique and have the right energy for what is needed that day.

Have fun with it, it can open all sorts of experiences that you would never imagine!

You can read about my Journey of Intention here; http://ajourneyofintention.com/ or follow me on Twitter LouiseatCreate.

About the Author/Further Resources

Louise is a confidence coach and image consultant, she runs a business called Create Yourself supporting people to create lives they love.