INSIGHT: Intentions Solve Overwhelm

Key Takeaways:

• Intentions help cut through overwhelm: When the chaos of daily life clouds your vision, setting clear intentions brings perspective, helping you distinguish what truly matters.

• Intentions activate your intuitive mind: Instead of relying solely on logic, engaging your right brain through intentions gives your inner wisdom a seat at the decision-making table.

• Intentions clarify priorities: Visualizing your future state as if it’s already true helps your intuitive self guide your rational brain to focus on what must happen first—naturally sorting your to-do list.

• Intentions offer calm and concentration: With one clear intention in place, your mind relaxes. You’re able to focus fully, allowing the noise of everything else to temporarily fade.

• Intentions create progress one step at a time: By choosing just one meaningful intention a day, you reclaim your sense of agency and satisfaction, gradually navigating out of overwhelm.

Overwhelmed? Try setting intentions. Set ONE THING as your intention to achieve by the end of the day and be satisfied when you achieve it. Do this every day.

Overwhelm results from a lack of distinction. When you’re flying over the forest the gullies, fallen trees and open spaces are clear. It’s easy to chart a path. But when you’re in the thick of it, weeds tickling your cheek, you can’t see the obstacles until they’re blocking your way. Every step is overwhelming because you don’t have the perspective to see the distinctions that would help you chart an easier course. Setting intentions can help.

We can’t always fly up to see the territory ahead as clearly as we’d like. Our information is imperfect and the future is a moveable target, but most of us leave a key tool in our toolkit untapped. We ask our left brains to figure out as much as they can to guide us, but we let our right brains go unused. We don’t ask our “knowing” self for advice often enough.

This is too bad. Our intuitive right brain has powerful skills to help us prioritize how we spend our time and energy, even when the future is unclear. We can use intentions to activate our intuitive skills to help us.

Intentions tap our right brain knowing skills fluidly and easily, helping us create distinctions that immediately begin to prioritize the mess of tasks and opportunities in front of us.

Intentions result from an intuitive state and when your successful future state is clear in your mind, as though you’d already achieved it, everything overwhelming you begins to come into prioritized focus very quickly. Before you know it your intuitive self will begin to show your rational brain that in order for your intention to be true, some other things must become true first. Your rational mind begins to calm down and focus on the priorities that make the rest of it possible.  Intentions allow you to relax, concentrate and let everything else recede for a while, until they become critical to your intention.

Intention allows you to focus on what’s in front of you without worrying about the rest of it. All that other stuff will still be there when you’ve achieved your intention, though some of it may have simply fallen off your list.