ORGANIZATION
As creative entrepreneurs we aren’t at a loss for ideas and talent, but organizing intentionally can bring much-needed systems and processes to the business of doing what you love.
ARTICULATE
Sometimes it’s hard to communicate all those ideas in a consistent and cohesive way—the intention to articulate helps you say things concisely.
REST
When you’re hustling all day, every day, the intention to rest can balance out the threat of burnout.
ENTHUSIASM
When you’re feeling weighed down by the daily grind, intending to be enthusiastic about your work can rekindle that original spark of why you chose to do the damn thing in the first place.
The point is to put your intention at the forefront of your daily life so that you can work every day to recognize the good that you already have, and continue to cultivate more of it in your life. This way you can practice your values and reach your goals with meaning, and be present in the process along the way.
Make intention setting very simple by choosing a single word to represent what you want to focus on. This word becomes your intention.
DAILY: Set an intention for the day to help you hone in on the task at hand. For example, your intention might be competence on a day when you’re pitching to a potential client.
MONTHLY: You can also pick a one-word intention for the month, giving you something to practice in all aspects of your life and work during that time. Having a one-word intention allows you to experience your world through a different lens with every new theme, and makes you more mindful of taking steps toward what you want.
YEARLY: Beyond your day or your month, you can also use a one-word intention for an entire year. We like to do this practice every year for our business. If you’re not a fan of making New Year’s resolutions, a one-word intention is a great alternative (and conversation piece!). We’ve had The Year of Growth, The Year of Joy, and The Year of Balance, with each intention driving our decisions and actions for the entire year.
Rituals are routines that have been kicked up a notch, making them more meaningful to you than your daily practices of brushing your teeth or taking the dog for a walk. Whereas habits and routines are repeated so often that you can do them without thinking, rituals are devices that return your attention fully to what you’re doing. These are exercises that bring you back from your long list of to-dos and big dreamy goals to ground you in right now.
Many creatives ritualize their morning writing, pouring their same cup of coffee, sitting in the same chair, and using the same pen to write in their journal. It’s a meaningful experience that makes this part of their day sacred. It gets them in the right mindset to tackle their day on a deeper, even more visceral, level, just as athletes ritualize their pre-game routines. Many business owners ritualize monthly goal setting or that thing they do at the end of each business day to shut it off and walk away. You can ritualize any part of your process as a way to give it more energy and focus, and therefore make it more impactful for the outcome you desire. It’s a process that you know gets you into your winning mindset. You give it the attention it deserves, as it plays a big part in your success. You practice rituals because you believe they hold a bit of—dare we say—magic.
Choose your rituals wisely and practice them faithfully, because they energize your body and your mind and will positively affect your ongoing performance.
We just discussed creating intentions to guide your actions and explained how you can use a one-word intention to help you work and live mindfully based on how you want to feel. We know that this is effective for helping us reach our goals—we’ve done it for years and the practice connects us to and engages us with our own lives, so it’s an ongoing part of our greater success-focused routine. This practice is a constant reminder that we hold our present and our future in our hands, that we’re the bosses of our own lives, and we can live and work however we want. We share our intentions with those closest to us as a way to hold ourselves accountable to focusing on and cultivating what we want from our actions. When we speak our intentions out loud, it brings them into the real world.
In fact, it’s so important to us that it’s not just another regular, by-the-calendar, monthly routine. It’s an intention-setting ritual we do based on the cycles of the moon. For years we set intentions based on the calendar months, but as creatives with our faces constantly in our computer screen, we found ourselves craving more practices that take place in the “real world,” so we ditched our calendars, moved away from the screen, and went outside to look up at the moon. And because the moon works in a twenty-seven- to twenty-eight-day cycle, we have enough time to fully practice our intentions and get to squeeze thirteen intentions out of a calendar year, instead of just twelve. Here’s is what this ritual looks like:
On each new moon, light a candle, get out your journal, and answer these questions:
• What things am I grateful for? (The answer to this is often a simple list.)
• What was my intention for the previous month? How did it show up in my life? How did it challenge me?
• Explore your intention for the upcoming month. If a new intention for the upcoming cycle hasn’t been chosen yet, spend a few moments freewriting about whatever comes to mind, whether it’s a struggle, a current situation or opportunity, or something you’re interested in. In particular, write about your desired outcome. Be mindful of the feelings that come up when writing out the outcome, or any feeling-words you write down (especially if they get written down over and over). Choose an intention that fits this writing.
• What is my intention for the next month? How is this feeling already present in my life? How do I plan to practice more of this new intention? How do I imagine it will present itself?
• What goals do I wish to accomplish in this next cycle?
When you’re done, blow out your candle and walk away. Ritual done. Path set. Ready to go.