Intention Reset: Getting Back on Track

Intention is not a thought. Intention is actually more like mining. Deep diving for your dreams and your destiny. It’s much more organic than thoughts. It’s kind of like when you have an insight, you don’t think up insights. Insights appear. They show up. Intention is a little bit like that.

Welcome to The Soul-Source Podcast, unconventional business advice for the highly creative secretly sensitive, and wildly ambitious entrepreneur. I’m your host, Christine Kane. Let’s do this.

Hey there, this is episode number three, and we are going to talk about intention today. In particular, we’re going to talk about resetting your intention and getting back on track. Cause we are halfway through the year. It is sort of like 2020 part two.

And there was a photo that got passed around all over Instagram and Facebook in April or May or something like that. And the graphic on the photo said, dear 2020, the shit wasn’t on my vision board.

And yes, it was humorous. And 2020 has been an intense year, but I’ve told my clients this almost daily. And I think it’s important to really, really get this. We are now at a point where each and every one of us is mastering uncertainty.

I mean, we’ve always been navigating and mastering uncertainty. It’s just that now there is a lot less illusion about this whole idea of certainty and there’s a lot less illusion about how much control we actually have.

And no matter what happens in our world, if you own a business, it’s just a good idea to consistently revisit your intention. Especially when things go off course, which they do a lot. So writers often say that novels are not written. They are rewritten. Or plays are not written, they are rewritten. Or books are not written, they are rewritten. Well, I happen to think that that holds true for pretty much anything. And yes, it holds true for intention as well.

Great results come out of intentions that are actually continually and consistently re intended. Commitments are constantly recommitted to. Decisions are constantly redecided. I mean, you don’t just say, oh, I’m going to go to the gym. And then that decision never is struggled with ever again in the morning. We’re constantly recommitting. We’re constantly redeciding.

All this means is that our spirit, our energy needs to get re anchored to those things because we’re not wired up to keep forward motion going. We’re wired up for survival. And often those things that are part of the mastery process are not natural to us. Mastery can be intense.

I remember one time when I was in Dan Sullivan’s room for, for one of our quarterly meetings and it was early, he hadn’t started yet. And I said to him, God, I’m so glad to be here. I just got so off track this quarter. I don’t know what happened. And he looks at me. He goes, I’ll tell you what happened, gravity.

And it’s so true. Just the natural, normal bumps and hits and stuff we go through each and every day can really throw us off course. And so resetting your intention doesn’t just happen because 2020 happened. It’s a constant activity and action step that we do.

So as we hit the midway point of this year in our journey of mastering uncertainty, we’re hearing all this talk about how it’s time to restructure and rebuild and rethink and regroup. I believe that the word pivot may be the most overused word of the year. In fact, I’d go so far as to say, pivot is the quiche of the eighties as a hat tip to Nora Ephron.

But for my clients and for any of us soul sourced entrepreneurs who are solo business owners or small businesses, I’m going to encourage you first off, not to pivot because pivot is turning in the opposite direction of something. So we’re not going to pivot. And don’t be jumping into the regrouping and restructuring and rethinking stuff. Instead, let’s start by a little more simple, okay.

Let’s start by revisiting, and reframing, and realigning, and then resetting, okay. Revisit, reframe, realign, and reset. And we’re going to do this in the context of your intention.

So we’ll start with revisiting. Revisiting your intention means that when you reenter that territory, when you go find your intention, you find where you’ve written it down and you take some time to be with it. You do that activity with awareness and hopefully with compassion because when we all began the year, we were all in a very different world, blindly clueless about what was about to happen.

However, just because events took a turn does not mean that all is lost. In fact, when you revisit your intention, you may discover that much of the energy of your intention still holds. Or that there is still truth to it as well. It just might be that there is a delay or a deepening. Or a different angle to it. You be the one to see what’s there and explore what’s there when you revisit your intention from the beginning of the year.

And then after, after that, we’re going to reframe, and this may be tender territory for some, because some of us get a little attached. We get attached to how we think the world should go. And we get attached to how we think an intention should unfold. And we get a little tantrumy. We get a little waa, like things were going really well before this rotten disease came around and it ruined everything for me. And I’m not trying to laugh at people or point of finger at anyone in particular, but we’ve all experienced so many different, various levels of shock and sadness and anger that has hit us out of the blue.

And maybe some of us have thrown tantrums with the many world events happening right now. And we know we should feel differently, but our business is at stake and it can be very, very tense territory. And I get it.

I’ve worked with many clients and more often than not, when we set an intention, stuff goes wrong. It just is part of the territory. So I’ll have clients set up, you know, launches and they’ll set up workshops and they’ll set up events. And as typically happens, little tiny things go wrong.

And when somebody, I had one client in particular, who I worked with for a few years and she had this pattern of she’d set an intention, she’d get everything ready for her lunch. She’d get everything ready for her event, whatever it might be. She was pretty successful. But as soon as it was all set up, it was like she became this sort of entitled matriarch, hosting a gala in her dining room. And an even though everything was pitch picture perfect, you know, she had the China, the perfect crystal water glasses, the polished silver, anything that would go wrong, like one guest cancels at the last minute for this matriarch. And this client would just sort of go into this pattern and decide that all was lost. And it was like the way I saw it when I was coaching her was like that matriarch would just reach both arms straight out in front of her and clasp your hands together in this one sort of wrecking ball fist. And she’d just sweep her arms across the entire dining room table. And in one very loud shattering sweep she’d just destroy the entire setup. Like, you know, fuck all of you, I’m starting it all over. No one gets to come to my fancy dinner party.

And so this is how some business owners feel right now and I get it and it’s fine, but this is where, when it comes to our intentions, it’s a very, very positive activity to simply step into the, the whole idea of reframing.

And when we reframe what we remember is this, we remember that what is most compelling about intention is not the ultimate outcome. The most compelling thing about intention is who we become on the way to that outcome. Outcomes ultimately are just nice little bullet points that we can all sort of put on our about page or on our bio.

So, you know, I can sit back and I can write all kinds of cool things on my bio about for instance, my music career. And, you know, I shared the stage with Nancy Griffith or Los Lobos or John Mayer. And even when, you know, since I started Uplevel, all the same kinds of bullet points, I, you know, I got to do the keynote at Martha Beck’s annual conference. I’ve made a lot of money and I’ve had all kinds of little number bullet points, but I have to tell you that none of that outward facing bullet pointy stuff can touch who you become. The person you became so that you could even manifest those bullet pointy things.

In fact, whenever I see those kinds of about page bullet points, I kind of cringe a bit at myself because they have nothing to do with the actual stuff that shaped me. The hard stuff, the challenges that sprang directly out of my intentions, like all the rejections, cause the music business is just fraught with rejections. Or like the time I showed up at a club in Atlanta and found out that the promoter had double booked me and I didn’t even get to play that night. And I had to drive four hours back home. Or my first employee who was, who threw her own little tantrum when I fired her. And she stole my laptop and I was so completely inexperienced and clueless I did not know what to do and I can laugh at it now.

But all of that really did, it forced me to live into this intention I claimed that I wanted. And all of it was shaping and teaching and forging, who I was becoming as somebody who could live into that intention.

So when you revisit your intention, there are two ways that you can reframe your current situation. And the first is my number one rule of intention. And that is that intention brings up anything unlike itself, which is a little bit of a paraphrase from the Course in Miracles statement that love brings up anything unlike itself. But it’s very true. Intention brings up anything unlike itself.

And what that means is that sometimes all kinds of shit goes wrong. When you set an intention, which can lead many people to erroneously think that they are terrible at intention or that they weren’t cut out for this, or that God doesn’t like them. Or all the, you know, negative messages that various religions have thrown their way throughout their lives.

But really all it means is that the intention is clearing away the stuff that does not serve the intention. It’s kind of like a mentor of mine said to me, you know, when you plant a seed the first thing that comes up is not the sprout. The first thing that comes up is the dirt because the dirt has to get pushed out of the way for the sprout to come through. And that process is not always fun. So this is a very good reframe.

And that brings me to the second reframe, which is simply a question that you can ask yourself. And that question is this, how are these current circumstances calling me to expand into this intention? How am I being called to expand here? And all the kinds of things that you are being called on to change or to release, or to learn with respect to this intention of yours.

And lastly, one last point I want to make around this idea of reframing is that as an intention unfolds, it almost never looks the way your little tiny ego thinks that it should. This is where the tantrums come. You know, the, the ego things that intention should be set. And then you it all is followed by you winning heaps of praise. And then getting clapped out a little bit. And then you know, maybe getting more heaps of praise. All the while money is raining down on you from above, like all the stock photos. And then you are pumping your arms in the air and screaming and shouting like all the stock photos.

In fact, what you might find when you revisit your intention is something entirely different. And that is that you have changed. Your entire perspective has changed along with what you value and what you know about yourself and appreciate about your business and your life.

And, and most importantly, what matters right now. What matters most to you about your business and how you serve people and how you are present for your clients. And not so much about the, what of your intention may be, but about the how of your intention. And what I’m ultimately doing here is I’m doing a little bit in the background. I’m defining intention.

And what I’m defining here is not an event. It’s not a thing it’s actually defined intention as a process. So too often, when we talk about setting goals or initiating an intention, it’s this one event and we want to get it right. And we want there to be no messing up and everything needs to go exactly the way we think it should. But intention is this really beautiful, luminous, intense, wonderful process.

So after you reframe, what’s probably happening is that you’re starting to examine your intention a little bit more deeply. And this brings us to a place where it’s time to realign with that intention. And I want to be careful about the idea of realigning because realigning doesn’t mean that you are pressured now to become like this soldier and this, you know, gritting your teeth or gripping the steering wheel and jamming on the gas. And then going flying back to that high achieving person that you were before and getting all crazy again. I think a lot of people are really feeling a resistance to that. Like, I don’t want to be that person again. I’ve kind of enjoyed the space to think about this stuff. And I mean, if you are somebody who’s ready to just jump back in and started achieving and that’s your whole jam, then be my guest. That’s completely your choice. But I will say that most of my clients and most of the people who I’m doing Q and A’s with and talking to in some of the events I’m doing online, they’re finding that they desire a more deliberate approach in their work and in their business.

So to that end, when it comes to realigning with intention, I’m going to talk about four different intention traps. I call them intention traps, and they’re very easy to fall into because they, they subtly kind of interfere with your energy and they’re very culturally evolved. And we kind of just do them without even thinking about them. But the, these are like surefire ways to completely ruin your energy and your enthusiasm and most important, your integrity.

So if you are one of the entrepreneurs who is rethinking or reworking your entire intention, then watch out for these common intention traps. They’re deceptively simple, but they are really easy to just fall into because you know, motivational speakers and culture and all the things we’ve heard over and over again, and all the ways that we go on autopilot when it comes to intention. So there are four of them and I’m going to first tell you what they are, and then we’re going to, I’m going to walk through them just briefly.

Okay. The first trap is rushing. And rushing is how we dishonor ourselves. The second intention trap is what I call, figuring it out. And figuring it out is how we distrust ourselves. The third trap is what I call what I think I can get. Which is how we dismiss ourselves. And the last trap is what I should want. And this is how we distract ourselves. So let’s dive into these just a little bit. So you can spot when you’re doing them.

Let’s start with rushing. So rushing. This is a way that you dishonor yourself. As business owners we are expected to know. We are expected to be certain. We are expected to be articulate. And we are expected never to have doubts. Especially if you have a team or you’re surrounded by peers and colleagues. And so in the name of certainty, or at least pretending, but you’re certain or appearing certain and looking good to your teams or your colleagues or your coaches. We treat intention a little bit like it’s a fast food drive through. And we just check off the items on the menu. We toss out anything that comes into our head, and we say all the usual things. You know, scale, I’m going to scale. Or I’ve got legacy and I’m going to impact millions, 5 million people, 5 million that’s right. 5 million. Or I want $2 million or whatever it might be.

But we tend to just say something just to say something. And we dishonor ourselves and we dishonor our souls. So take time with this and better yet, if you don’t know, if you have uncertainty, what if you got really, really radical and you are willing to sit with that uncertainty and you’re willing to see what it reveals. I’m going to tell you that these days we need more people who are comfortable with uncertainty and who are willing to forgo the knee jerk habit of pretending to be certain so that they don’t feel scared. We need you to step into the mastery of uncertainty because it is the new normal.

The second intention trap is what I call figuring it out. And this is how we distrust ourselves. So figuring it out is kind of a red flag for me. Whenever somebody gets on a call and they say, I gotta, I gotta, I got to figure out my ideal client, or I gotta figure out my strategy, or I gotta figure out my message. And what happens when this is the result? What happens is that when someone hits that blank space of uncertainty, which is often the first thing that shows up, by the way, when you start in on your intention, when you revisit your intention, there’s a lot of like, Oh, there’s a lot of unknown. And what happens is they get scared. People get scared of that.

And so fear shows up in the mind, it’s an energy in the mind, it’s a mind activity. And once that gets swirling, the mind starts to kind of just keep going. It’s spinning. And it gets so jammed up with that spinning activity. That then what happens is the energy is high, it’s in the head. And the person tends to think that their intention must be a mental activity. It must be figured out. And all that is, is that because that energy is swirling around it’s thoughts, trying to fight fear.

And what I can tell you from experience of 10 years of coaching, thousands of people is that thoughts are very, very bad at battling fear. But when this happens, when all of that happens, the entire mind becomes kind of a shit show and you lose all perspective. And you’re trying to think up an intention. You’re trying to figure out an intention because you’ve stopped trusting yourself. You stop trusting your whole process.

What I’m going to tell you right now is something you probably already know, but it’s worth repeating. Intention is not something we think up. Intention is not thunk up. Intention is not a thought. Intention is actually more like mining, really mining deep diving for your dreams and your destiny. It’s much more organic than thoughts. It’s kind of like when you have an insight. You don’t think up insights. Insights appear. They show up. Intention is a little bit like that.

So whenever somebody tells me, they’ve got to figure out their next strategy, where they got to figure out their intention. I’m always like, oh, please don’t. Please don’t because even those strategy or goals or intentions seem like left-brain things. They are not.

And I am so with Tom Peters, he’s the author of many books, including In Search of Excellence, but he’s a business strategist. And he loves to say that soft is hard. And what that means is that it takes a lot of navigating uncertainty. And it takes a lot of intangible, unprovable, deep work that’s considered sometimes woo or soft in order to create the hard results. Soft stuff creates hard results. So you gotta trust yourself and your process as you realign with your intention.

And the third trap is what I think I can get. That’s our third intention trap. I call it what I think I can get, because this is how we dismiss ourselves. We no longer take into account our preferences. We no longer take into account our dreams. We don’t even consider our own desires. We shrink immediately into this place of, oh, I want that. But here’s what I really think I can get. It’s like you climb into the wallets of the people around you and say, oh, well, everyone’s struggling with money so I don’t think I can get much more than this.

And so what happens is that instead of actually asking yourself what you truly desire, instead of even giving yourself the chance to dream or giving yourself the chance to expand or take a direction you’ve contorted. And you’ve shrunk into the parameters that you have always shrunk into. It’s all just doubt coming up to show you only what you think you can get. Rather than how you can truly expand and evolve as a soul, which is where the true growth is.

And the last trap is very similar to this and that’s trap number four, intention trap number four. It’s what I should want. What I should want. And this is how, we distract ourselves. And we distract ourselves by looking around and we see other people’s dreams and we see, well, I’m an entrepreneur and so I should want millions. Yeah, I’m an entrepreneur and so I should want to be on stage and I should want to travel. And I should want to be a New York times best selling author. And I should scale by God we’re all supposed to scale. And there’s all these shoulds, that’s one way to do it.

But another thing that we do is what I should want is where we, again, we sorta play small and we look around at our industry and we set our prices pretty low and we set our value very low based on what, you know, everyone else says, oh no, don’t get too big for your britches. So we kind of go no more or less. And then this is all the pattern, all of it’s the pattern of the shoulds. And it’s better to use your focus and clarity, and really face that fear of diving deep into who you are and what you do want.

And all of this, this whole realignment process, this revisiting reframing realigning, it leads right into the activity that I’m going to close out with today. And that is the actual intention reset. And this is something where I always call these self summits. I’m very big into self summits. And so when you reset your intention, I highly recommend that you do some kind of small ritual or ceremony to seal the deal.

And that means write a letter to yourself. Write a letter to your business. Write a letter to the universe. It doesn’t matter. But what I am going to encourage you to do is once you’re done to put your signature on the letter. Sign the letter. Make it a little ceremony. And then I’m very into using our vocal chords and our voices. So I’m going to suggest that you call a friend, a trusted friend, of course, who is not going to be cynical and doubtful and make you play small, but share it out loud.

And one final warning with this, cause I know a lot of people are feeling a little bit more soft around this or deep around this. And so, this is not about exclamation points at this point. So we have a saying, an expression that we say at Uplevel with our clients in our masterminds, and that is I’m in. And I’m in, is an acronym, but we don’t need to worry about that right now. But a lot of times people feel like the pressure of I’m in when they really get what it means. The pressure is that, Oh, I need to say it with an exclamation point all the time, but that’s not the case. Sometimes you say this, sometimes you lean in. Sometimes you recommit with a period, not an exclamation point and your intention reset can be done with a period, not an exclamation point.

So you don’t have to make this about fireworks and confetti and unicorns. So for those of you who want just make it as simple period at the end. Lean in. Be in. Reset without shouting, without exclamation points.

All you need do at this point, when it comes to your intention reset is you simply have to be present and committed to yourself to the current moment. To your business. To your service. And to your intention. It’s really that simple. It’s not easy, but it is simple.

So y’all thanks for being here today. And please, if you would love to do it, subscribe to The Soul-Sourced Business Podcast. I will be here doing episodes every single week. You can give it stars. You can give it hugs. You can even give it unicorns. And then if you’re really jiggy, go to Amazon. Or go to your local bookstore, like Malaprops here in Asheville. We love malaprops and you can preorder my book. It’s called The Soul-Sourced Entrepreneur. It is an unconventional success plan for the highly creative, secretly sensitive, and wildly ambitious. I wrote it because it is the book I would most have wanted when I was struggling to build a business. It is really, and truly around what I call the soul track of having a business. There are two tracks to having a business. One is the strategy track, and the other is the soul track. And the soul is all the soft stuff, all the mindset stuff, all the places that actually have the most profound impact on our strategy and on our success. And that book comes out in November of 2020. You can get a preorder right now. Thank you for being here. And I will see you in our next exciting episode.