Category: Intentional Living

Living our lives intentionally includes thinking about and deciding who we want to be and how we want to show up in our lives.

It also includes deliberately deciding what we want to care about – because it’s important to us – and what we are not willing to care about—because it’s not important to us.

What do you want to care about?

Trying to answer this question can be an intimidating and overwhelming exercise.

Because there is so much to care about!

Everywhere we look, there is something to care about.

We see so many things – in ourselves and others – that we want to improve, change, fix, or act on because we care about them.

However, the caring potential that each of us has is limited.

If we try to care about everything that comes to our mind, that attracts our attention, enthusiasm, or passion, we are doomed to fail, get disappointed and discouraged, get exhausted, and burn out.

Because our time, energy, and personal resources are limited – we can’t care about everything.

Once we recognise that it is impossible to care about everything we want to care about, we can decide to focus our caring potential on the things we personally care about most.

We can decide to deliberately constrain our caring by asking ourselves:

What am I not willing to care about (any longer)?

Little exercise:

Setting up some guiding steps before you start writing down your answer to the question above can be helpful.

Consider these suggestions:

#1 – Make a list of all areas of your life.

Example:   Relationships, work, home, fitness and health, finances, personal interests and hobbies, etc.

#2 – Choose the area you want to focus on right now.

Example:   My relationships.

#3 – Pick the one segment of your focus area you care about most.

Example:   My relationship with my mother.

#4 – List all the things you care about regarding that thing.

Example:   What I care about regarding my relationship with my mother:

• • a) She says she is feeling lonely. Should I visit her more often?
  • b) I wish she had a closer relationship with Aunt Mary.
  • c) I am worried about her health. I think she should eat healthier and drink more water.
  • d) I wonder what she is thinking about our recently bought house.
  • e) She is always so impatient with the waiters when I take her out for lunch.
  • f) She wants me to call her daily, which stresses me out.

#5 – Go through your list again. Can you discover specific patterns? Categories of things you care about?

Example:   It seems I am thinking a lot about what she might think of me and what she expects of me. I am worried about her well-being, and in some regards, I am quite judgmental of her.

#6 – Deliberately choose the things you are no longer willing to care about.

Example:   I am no longer willing to care about what she thinks of me (d, f). I am no longer willing to care about what (I thought) she should or shouldn’t do. (b, e)

#7 – Cross these things out on your list.

Example:

• • a) She says she is feeling lonely. Should I visit her more often?
  • b)  wish she had a closer relationship with Aunt Mary.
  • c) I am worried about her health. I think she should eat healthier and drink more water.
  • d) I wonder what she is thinking about our recently bought house.
  • e) She is always so impatient with the waiters when I take her out for dinner.
  • f) She wants me to call her daily, which stresses me out.

#8 – Now, look at what remains on your list. These are the things you want to care about.

Are you taking care of them in the best possible way already? Is there any room for improvement?

Example:

• • a) I care about her well-being. And although I know that I’m not able to take away her feelings of loneliness, I decide now to visit her twice instead of once each week.
  • c) I accept that I can’t make her eat healthier or drink more. However, I’ll ensure she always has healthy snacks and enough water in her kitchen.

#9 – Finally, promise yourself that these – a) and c) – are the only things you will care about regarding your mother.

Nothing else.

Only these two things.

Example:

You will enjoy your relationship with your mother much more – because you now know you care about and take care of what’s most important to you.

Most probably, your mother will enjoy her relationship with you also more. 🙂

Living intentionally means that you deliberately decide how you want to live – and what you want to do to create the life you want.

It means that you don’t let life just happen to you and purely react to its circumstances and challenges.

Instead, you actively define what’s important to you and how you want to experience and live your life.

You are well aware of your priorities and proactively make changes that move you toward the life you want to live.

Your priorities give your life direction and guidance.

Planning your life with intention doesn’t have to be an intimidating or overwhelming exercise.

If you regularly check and update your priorities, you are well prepared to act and react confidently when faced with bigger or smaller decisions in everyday life.

Your priorities also direct and guide you when you must manage a significant life challenge:

• • A planned transition like entering retirement, becoming an empty nester, downsizing,
  • or an unexpected event like divorce, the loss of a job, a critical illness, or the death of a loved one.

How do you choose your priorities – and direct your life in the way you want it to go?

Continue reading Your top priorities make it easier to plan and organise your life intentionally.

Our lives and our experience of life reflect where we spend most of our attention.

The thoughts that we paid the most attention to in the past, the ones we thought most frequently, are the thoughts that have created our current results.

The thoughts we pay most attention to today, those we are thinking most frequently right now, will create our future results.

Our attention is our most powerful resource. And we can intentionally make good use of this resource. We have the power to control where we place our attention.

However, the amount of attention available to us is limited.

At any given moment, we can pay attention to only one thing. Just one.

That’s why it is so important to intentionally decide where we want to put our attention.

In Part 1 of this short introduction series, we defined what living intentionally means, in a broader and in a more narrow way.

In Part 2, we listed some typical life situations to get a clearer idea of what intentional living might look like in real life.

Today, I want to briefly discuss a simple framework that helps us create a more intentional life.

Living intentionally – How do we get there?

No matter what the specific intention behind a client’s decluttering or organising project is, we always use my simple 3-step process – the ‘ADA Framework’ – to realise the desired outcomes successfully.

The ADA Framework

These are the steps that my clients practice and implement to actively take control and create the life they want to live: 

Now, that we have defined what intentional living means, it’s time to consider how the concept plays out in real life.

Living intentionally – What does that look like?

Living an intentional and organised life looks different for each of us, of course.

Each of my clients has very personal and unique goals and ideas about what they want to achieve and why they want that.

Decluttering and organising physical stuff and personal information.

For some of my clients, the focus of the work is creating more space and order in their personal environment. They want to clear their home and belongings or optimise their physical paperwork and digital information management. Their intention is to enjoy more spaciousness, clarity, and lightness.

Planning, organising, and successfully realising bigger changes in life.

Living intentionally – What does that mean?

Basically, living intentionally means that we deliberately decide how we want to live our life. And then we act on that.

We don’t let life just happen to us and purely react to its circumstances and challenges.

Instead, we actively define what’s important to us and how we want to experience and live our life.

We proactively make any necessary changes, even if that doesn’t feel very comfortable.

And we get ourselves well prepared for the challenges and opportunities the future might bring along.

Specifically, living intentionally means that we get good at thinking and acting intentionally. 

It means that we actively

What are your treasures?

We all own things we truly love, things that we cannot imagine parting with, even if sometimes other people can’t understand our attachment to those special things.

These are our treasures.

Their worth is not measured in money, but rather in the meaning and significance they hold for us. Often, they represent very special experiences of our life, and they reflect what is unique about us.

Treasures are the things that you for sure want to preserve from the past and take along with you into your future.

The following exercise will help you discover your personal treasures – and it will help you to constrain yourself to a limited number of treasures:

You want to be careful not to declare too many things as treasures because that would belittle the value of each of them.

EXERCISE

Step 1

Decide how many items you wish to declare treasures before you start to select them.

The smaller the number, the better.

You might want to constrain yourself to 10 treasures. Or 5? Or 15?

Decide now, and commit yourself to stick to that number.

Step 2

Think about which of your clutter-champion categories might hide some of your treasures.

For example, if books belong to your clutter champions, decide whether you wish to assign 3 or 5 (or whatever number you choose) of your favourite books the status of treasures.

If your kitchen appliances are clutter champions – you have too many of them or several duplicates -, decide to declare the 3 – for example – most used/loved ones as treasures.

Step 3

Imagine the house burnt down and you lost everything (Only the most important personal documents could be saved.)

Which belongings would you badly miss?

Which of them could not be replaced?

Step 4

Take all the items with ‘treasure’-potential out, hold them in your hands for a while, try to ‘feel’ how truly important they are to you, and then arrange them in a ‘treasure collection area’ or – if you don’t have the space for such an area – take photographs.

Spend some time with your treasure candidates and evaluate how much you treasure each of them.

You might want to ask yourself questions like these:

• • Is it something that reminds me of a happy memory?
  • Is it related to a special accomplishment?
  • Is it closely related to me, to the very special person I am?
  • Would I be very sad if it suddenly disappeared?
  • Does it refer to my values and to the vision that I defined for the next chapter of my life?

Step 5

Now make your final choice and compile a list of your personal treasures.

This list and the insights gained about your treasures will be very helpful whenever you have to or want to make decluttering decisions.