Setting Intentions as a Bridge
Gathering with women for our first Intentional Well quarterly event yesterday reminded me of the gift of purposeful community and the rewards of living deliberately.
Setting a few intentions can offer us a practical antidote to life’s mental load. In his book In Over Our Heads, author Robert Kegan describes how our modern society has each of us subject to a slew of conflicting roles. We are expected to be:
good partners
loving parents
productive workers
wise leaders
caring sons and daughters
responsible citizens
…all while exuding calm, confidence, emotional intelligence, independence, attractiveness, consistency, and ethics.
No biggie, right?
This barrage of identities creates a conflict for us that Kegan essentially sums up as “a bewildering array of expectations, prescriptions, claims, and demands.” Each role whispers its own “shoulds”, forcing our brains to constantly triage good/bad and succeed/fail. It's a fraught mental juggling act that can leave us scrambling with many balls in the air.
Chaos Without a Compass
We make sense of life through familiar (often unconscious) filters—what's worked before, what feels safe, what others expect of us. But when "be present for my kids" collides with "crush it at work," those filters start to crack.
I’ll share a personal example: We are just now embarking upon a fairly large reconstruction project brought on from a leak that damaged multiple levels of our home last year. When most of us (myself included) envision living through a renovation while working from home, we sense the jolt of jackhammers rattling the floorboards, cortisol spikes, and a drumbeat of overwhelm from being in a demolition dust cloud (while trying to maintain status quo in our marriage, parenting, work life, etc).
Why it Stays Stuck
Popular culture’s solution to this is “suck it up” or hustle more, which seduces us into thinking that if we just try harder we can succeed.
Yet Kegan’s work reveals something different: that true growth doesn’t come from being a tycoon of time and image mastery. Rather, it comes from growing a more flexible way to embrace all of our modern-day roles without one overtaking the others.
Intentions as the Bridge
Now enter intentionality. When I embody the intention to “view updates as a portal," it transforms this. I can still face the same dust, but recast it now as the path to the life we want (enhanced basement = epic kids sleepovers, revamped bar = hosting 4th of July soirees, and refreshed paint = enhanced coherency all around).
The intention has the effect of aligning some of my roles ("responsible homeowner," “dedicated business owner” and "grounded parent," for example) so they are on the same team.
Setting thoughtful intentions can help us to prioritize one (or a few) chosen aims amid life’s competing pulls. This cuts the noise, helps us prioritize our actions or mindset across roles, and ultimately frees up energy.
Less inner conflict, more bandwidth for what matters.
Here’s to intentions, and the ease that they can bring.
With warmth,
Christina
