Intentional Living: What it is and how to live intentionally | S3 E34
What does it mean to live intentionally? Last week we defined what intentional means and how to be more intentional in our friendships and relationships. But this week I want to talk more about intentional living.
This goes beyond just being intentional with the people in our lives but it becomes a lifestyle, a way of living our lives with intention.
So often we get so busy and we allow life to happen to us versus us being more purposeful with our time. Time so easily gets away from us and its unfortunately one of the things that we can never get back. Once we spend time, it’s gone forever.
A few years ago that was me. I was running hard and fast but I didn’t feel like I was going far, I was just burning out. I’ve always had big dreams and big ambitions but I wasn’t living my life in a way that allowed for me to sustain what I wanted to build. I would go go go but I wasn’t really planning or living intentionally. I’ve always been an intentional person but I haven’t always lived intentionally. There’s a big difference.
Being an intentional person, to me, means that you take care of the people in your life, you’re thoughtful, caring, kind and you do what you can to put others first in a lot of ways. But living intentionally is more than that. It’s about how you spend your time, what you spend your time on and creating rhythms, routines and systems to help spend your time with intention. It’s also living a bit slower. It doesn’t mean that you are lazy, it means you aren’t hustling and working for rest. You are living from a place of rest. You aren’t in a rush because you know you will get there when you are meant to and you won’t get there at all if you don’t have an intentional lifestyle that helps you get there.
There’s a quote in the book called Atomic Habits by James Clear and it says, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” When I first read this quote, something shifted for me. I realized that I had all these goals and hopes and dreams and I was spinning my wheels in mud because I didn’t have good systems.
My systems today aren’t perfect and sometimes I still fall out of rhythm but I feel a big difference when I’m living intentionally vs when I’m letting life just happen. Let me also say that you don’t have to be super type A and organized to live intentionally. There are simple things you can begin to do that can help you each week to live with more intention and purpose.
The first thing you need to do is evaluate how you spend your time. What needs the most of your time, what gets the most of your time and where do you want the most of your time to be spent. This looks different for everyone depending on the season that you are in currently and it can shift during different life seasons. But in order to live more intentionally we have to know where we are giving our time so that we can either fix some areas to allow us to be more purposeful with our time in the areas that matter most or so that we can spend more time in those areas without feeling so frantic or busy all the time.
Are there any areas of your life that you feel the most frantic or unorganized in that cause you to stress? What systems or organization could you create that would help it be less stressful? Is it having a large calendar to show everything coming up? Is is pre-packaging food so that you don’t have to do it last minute? Evaluate these areas and write a few things down
The next thing I would suggest is taking time at the beginning of each week to sit down and plan out your week at a time that works best for your on Sunday or Monday. Write out what all you know is on your calendar, what you hope to accomplish and what your free time looks like. For me, sitting down and writing this out helps me to breathe easier and stress less because I feel confident going into the week knowing what I can say yes to and what I would need to say no to as things pop up.
I also like to go ahead and designate different tasks to different days so that I know I have laundry day on Thursday or Podcast recording on Monday night or editing on Tuesday night or free nights on Wednesday nights so I can hang out with people or just chill at home. In the past I would feel so frantic not having designated days for things and I would get stressed feeling like I had a million things to do all at once and I would try to get too much done each day instead of spreading things out more with a plan.
One other thing that has helped me is planning my meals and some version of meal prep even if I’m not cooking meals ahead of time, just having the different items organized and as prepped as I can makes the week easier when it comes to eating well. If I’m tired or don’t want to cook I have some options ready or if I do want to cook, I don’t stress as much about how long it will take me to cook because the prep work is mostly done.
So I would encourage you to sit down weekly to plan out the things we just talked about and evaluate monthly to see what rhythms are working and which ones aren’t so you can continue to live more intentionally.
I believe God gave us beautiful lives to live and He is an intentional God so I would love to see us living our lives with more intention too.
I hope these tips and today’s conversation were helpful to you and can jump start you into living a more intentional life. Next week we will wrap up this Intentional series with talking about intentional financial habits. I think it’s going to be super beneficial and help us to be more intentional with our spending and saving.
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