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After watching the Netflix series on Queen Elizabeth, my admiration for her grew tremendously. Like many Americans, I’d barely registered her existence beyond a vague awareness that somewhere across the ocean, there was a queen.

I’d wondered how old she was, maybe thought the phrase “it’s good to be a queen” was actually true.

Now I know it’s not.

A Life Chosen For You

The life of being a queen wasn’t one Elizabeth chose. She was born to it.

Imagine a life completely planned for you. No choice. You will be queen. You will become an Institution more than a person.

What if you wanted to be a dancer, or an artist, or backpack through Europe sleeping on friends’ couches?

What if you wanted to live in a tiny house, be a musician, and disappear from the world? None of that would be possible.

Instead, Queen Elizabeth lived and governed, bound by rules set in place for centuries, mostly by men.

Yet within the confines of a life chosen for her, we can see she lived by intent—the intent to be both a good queen and a good woman.

And that’s what I want to talk about today: Intent.

Why Goals Without Intent Eventually Fail

We’re all familiar with the New Year’s resolution cycle. Set goals. Feel motivated for a few weeks. Watch them crumble by February.

I learned long ago that setting goals before understanding why I’m setting them—before knowing the intent behind them—will eventually be a bust.

And I think that may be true for most people.

It’s not that I don’t have goals. I do. You should see my daily to-do list.

Actually, you probably shouldn’t—it would be scary. And I do accomplish most of it, too, most of the time. I have goals for this year, for today, for the next hour.

But first, I have an intent.

Once I have that intent, the goals and the steps to accomplish them become clear.

Intent as Your True North

Think of it like a map. Intent is the place you are traveling to.

What needs to be done and how you travel to get there can change.

Goals and the steps to accomplish them can shift based on circumstances.

In fact, they should if they’re not supporting the intent, if they’re not taking you to your destination.

Resolutions come and go. Intent remains.

How to Find Your Intent

So how do you discover your own intent?

First, understand this: It’s not an intellectual exercise. It’s a heart-based exercise.

And we aren’t as practiced at this as we’d like to be.

Choosing from the heart is the opposite of letting our mind, intellect, or masculine energy plan and take charge. Instead, our feminine, intuitive, divine guidance—call it what you want—decides, and then our intellect can carry it out.

It takes practice to stop the habit of trying to make things happen and instead pause and listen to what is calling you from within.

Ask yourself:

• What am I here to express?
• What wants to come through me this year?
• What would make my soul sing?

The true answers to these questions are both deeply personal and bigger than our human ego.

Personal because it’s what we’ll feel empowered to do, what will provide soul-deep satisfaction, even real happiness.

But if the intent isn’t bigger than our human ego, we won’t experience any of that—although we can easily fool ourselves into thinking we are.

From Intent to Action

Once you’re clear about your intent, set goals that will keep you on the path of expressing that intent.

After that, it’s easy to set the steps to carry it out—the to-dos, the intellectual part. The masculine part of ourselves goes out and accomplishes the desires of the heart.

A Simple Example

When I go to yoga class, I ask myself: What is my intent here?

I ask myself how I’ll feel if I let that intent guide me. That’s a quality word.

In class, the to-dos are easy—follow along. So my intent might be “Be present” (don’t be home in my head working, be present here and now). How would I feel? Perhaps the word that pops in is peaceful.

For the rest of the class, I remind myself of that intent and that quality. It makes all the difference.

Living Well Within Your Parameters

Life has handed each of us something we may not like. Some things are bigger than others. But each of us has been gifted with the opportunity to live well within those parameters using the power of intent.

I wrote a book about intent. It’s cleverly called The Intent Course, with the subtitle Say Yes To What Moves You.

In the book, you can work your way through your intents for every aspect of your life.

It helps you find them, set them, and discover the qualities of that intent—which I think is the most powerful aspect of having an intention.

Queen Elizabeth’s Declaration

Queen Elizabeth probably didn’t have many chances to say yes to what moved her.

Instead, she set for herself an intent to fulfill what life had handed to her, and within that, she found her yes.

On her 21st birthday, April 21, 1947, she told the world her intent for her life:

What a powerful example of setting an intent and living it for a lifetime.

Your Invitation

I hope you will make it your intent this year to live a life that suits exactly who you are.

It will involve work. It may involve sacrifice. But if you set your intent, listen for your quality words, and then set goals and to-dos—well, no matter what the outcome, it will be a successful year in terms that work for you.

We may not be brave enough to announce our intent to the world as Queen Elizabeth did, but I know we can be brave enough to find them for ourselves and then live them.

Intent - Goals - To Do's ... you can do it!

Some people say this is their favorite shift book and suggest I should have written this book first.

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Does it count if I add something I'm doing? I hope so, because I'm stealing this space this week! My latest fiction book is ready for you. In my fiction, I try to embed in "real life" what I talk about in my spiritual self-help Shift Series. I hope it makes learning fun, while solving a mystery or two, discovering more about relationships, and escaping into a book for a few hours. Check out The Rising here.

Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you — and all other conscious beings as such — are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole. - Erwin Schrödinger

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