Intention

This post is a little different than my others.  Last year I picked a word for the year instead of New Year resolutions.  This is how my 2010 word wound itself through my year.

Last year when I started to think about what my word for 2010 would be, the word “intention” kept popping up.  Initially, I thought this meant I needed to set an intention to find my word.  The more I thought about my word, the more I heard “intention”, but that just couldn’t be my word, it was too big.

So, I looked up “intention” to find a word that was similar, but felt smaller. Nothing I found felt right.  I kept coming back to “intention” and in January realized that “intention” was my word for 2010.  I heard somewhere that if you’re not growing, you’re dying.  I think there’s a lot of truth to that and I wanted to keep growing.

It was a year of big changes for me.  Over the course of the year I tackled many fears and learned to trust my intuition.

I hired a life coach to help me find a new career.  Anyone from the outside looking in would have said I had a good career and great job.  They would have been right too, I did have a great job, and I really enjoyed it, but it wasn’t right for me anymore.  So, I set an intention to find something that was right for me.

I made the biggest change while working with my coach: I decided to become a life coach.

This decision was an extremely scary step for me.  Who was I to think that I could successfully be a life coach?  After all, I’m a left brained analytical person! My inner critic was especially loud one day while I was driving.  It told me that if I took this step I was going to be a huge failure.  Identifying that voice as a fear, and NOT reality, helped me handle the situation. I do have the skills to be a life coach; I just wasn’t using most of those skills at my job.

From the outside, the biggest change was leaving my job at the beginning of December to focus on my life coach training and to start my own business. This was going to happen in February, after my training completed, but my intuition told me that it needed to happen sooner (and that voice wouldn’t go away no matter how many times I asked it to).  So, I trusted my intuition and made it happen three months earlier.

Intention was a really powerful word for me this year.  Without being conscious of it I evaluated where I was to where I wanted to be and, most importantly, took steps to get there.

I continue to set intentions and take steps to make my life what I want it to be.  It might not be perfect, but I’m enjoying the process.