Intention

What are Intentions, and What Do They Do?

We now know that we have many thoughts, and that we can choose which ones to pay attention to, and which to allow to pass through us. The next step is to set intentions. Before delving in, let’s define what we mean. An intention is a mental determination of goals or aims. In the churning storm of thoughts in our brains, it is a specific kind of clarity: what do I want (to say or do)?

This bears closer examination. I’ll use myself as an example. When I started working with my mentor, one of my intentions was to tap into my creativity more deeply. I found that I was judging my creative works – drawings and musical compositions, mostly – rather than letting them simply flow out. Sure, I could evaluate them after they’ve come out, discard some, refine others, maybe even appreciate a few as they appeared. I knew already that my judgment was stifling that creativity.

Upon deeper reflection, was more creativity really the goal? Or was the drought-like feeling I was having symptomatic of something much, much deeper? In my case, I was (and still am – this is an active area of work for me) simply too harsh a self-critic to allow creativity to flow freely. Imagine judging a pencil sketch before you’ve even made three strokes of pencil on paper – that is what I continue to do.

The point is, my intention could be to increase my creative output. But the deeper intention is to open myself to creativity, which necessarily involves iteration and imperfection. Voltaire said, “Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien,” which translates directly to: “"the best is the enemy of the good." This has been paraphrased as “perfect is the enemy is good,” and I very much suffer from this affliction. I wrote the invocation at the beginning of this book in around 2016, but I’d had the idea to do it for at least 10 years before that. But as a poetic essay on the topic of organized religion, which is admittedly a difficult task to tackle, I stifled myself in even starting it. It should be, and I commit here and now that it is, my intention to accept flaws and imperfections, and not to shy away from the imperfections that come with drafts and trials and errors.

Ultimately, intentions direct attention toward a purpose. And this purpose is something you care deeply about, which now impacts what you notice in and around you. Without intention, we default back to automatic responses, habits, and external influences. Let’s say that you’re browsing on Instagram. You are immediately offered a feed, which includes posts selected by an algorithm that is aimed at keeping your attention on the screen. That algorithm adapts to what you show an interest in by showing you more of the same. Many of us have found ourselves sucked into a vortex of scrolling through social media posts in just this way. If, instead, you approach the platform with a clear intention – say, to check on how your best friend’s trip to the Grand Canyon is going, it allows you to cut through the algorithm’s suggestions and find the information you want. Armed with your intention, you have retained control over your attention, rather than surrendering it.

An intention is like an inner compass, orienting your attention and purpose. For example, let’s say that you set an intention to become more patient with others. That value influences how you interpret moments, even if you aren’t perfectly executing that intention right away. But beyond that initial direction-setting, this intention continues to guide you, even as you hit roadblocks or stray off course. Returning to the previous example, let’s say that you are having a stressful week, and you snap at a colleague for taking too long on a project. Because your underlying intention was to practice more patience, you can reflect on what happened, apologize, and get back on track.

In 2004, Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun wrote Post-Traumatic Growth. A key summary from 2018 by Tedeschi is: “Growth is not a direct result of trauma itself but of the individual’s struggle to make sense of and integrate the trauma into a new narrative.”³³ In other words, one’s interpretation of the trauma they’ve endured determines whether and how much they grow from it. And this interpretation can be driven either automatically (usually by way of the trauma itself), or intentionally. Tedeschi said in 2004: “Central to PTG is the idea that people must engage in deliberate cognitive processing and meaning-making to reconstruct their worldviews in a way that allows growth to occur.”³⁴ The key word here is deliberate.

We cognitively process and make meaning of our past whether this is conscious or not. Returning to my upbringing, I also internalized that I must be a burden to my parents, who were working so hard to put food on the table and clothes on our backs. This belief metastasized over time, and I generally walk around in the world with the primary belief that I am a burden to those around me, and I must make up for that deficit I have caused. It has made me extremely reluctant to accept, let alone ask for, help from others, even from dearly loved ones.

This, too, has been the topic of much work and growth with my mentor and therapists before her. And it turns out that a key to unlocking the problem for me was intention. Intention acts as a volitional framing device. If you intentionally decide how to interpret the events in your life, you’re taking agency over your narrative, your inner story. You’re not just reacting out of habit or programming. You’re purposefully assigning a meaning to what happened. So, intention is not just a future-facing behavior. It works just as importantly retrospectively. It helps you reconfigure the past into a meaningful trajectory – perhaps more coherently and oriented towards growth.

As quiet and subtle as the act of setting an intention is, it is full of power, of potential energy. But that power is neutral, amplifying whatever goal or motive it serves. Because of this, we have arrived at a crucial question: How do we choose what intention to set?

Strategies for Setting Intentions

In her 1990 paper, “The Case for Motivated Reasoning,” Ziva Kunda lays out a foundational framework for how goals and motivations shape reasoning processes – i.e., not just what people think, but also how they think.

Kunda’s research on motivated reasoning shows how our desires shape what we believe. We tend to accept evidence that flatters us and reject what challenges us—a pattern that combines self-serving bias and confirmation bias. For example, when we ace a test, we credit ourselves; when we fail, we blame the test. This tendency also showed up in Chapter Five, where we saw how attention follows prior assumptions, reinforcing what we already believe.

• We tend to evaluate the opinions of others more harshly if we identify them as belonging to an “other” group (ideologically or politically, for example).
• We tend to downplay risks to avoid anxiety around our own actions. For example,smokers were more likely to disbelieve studies linking smoking to cancer, or to scrutinize the methodologies of such studies, more harshly than non-smokers.³⁵

So, we have an abundance of default strategies to set intentions for us, if we do not do it consciously. Most of these center around believing either what we already believe, or what is convenient for us to believe. I understand that this is somewhat annoying: it is not enough to set an intention. We need to be intentional about setting intentions! But alas, here we are. If we do not do it, it will be done on our behalf. And, while it may be annoying, this recursiveness does hint at something we’ll come back to much later – can we change the nature of the thoughts and impulses that occur to us, with enough practice?

Returning to the present topic, here is a definitively non-exhaustive list of strategies for setting intentions:

1. Ensure narrative coherence (via Tedeschi, McAdams) – Growth follows when you actively frame a hardship you’ve experienced that leans towards meaning, impact, learning. So, “What intention can I set to help make sense of my path so far?”³⁶
2. Gravitate towards intentions that serve others or contribute to something enduring (via McAdams).³⁷ Remember what we’ve agreed upon, regarding separation and short-termism. Consider, “Who or what beyond my immediate self might this intention serve?”
3. Orient towards inner integrity (via McAdams, the Hindus, and the Stoics). The more we can self-examine, without judgment, the better aligned our intentions can be with attunement to consciousness. The stoics focused on internal virtue – which they defined as alignment with inborn purpose, much along the lines of the Hindu notion of “dharma.” What you were born to do? The main problem here is tuning in to this internal virtue. We put a great many biases and defenses up to block the way towards seeing ourselves. The key here is stripping away these self-destructive defenses and seeing ourselves truly and compassionately.
4. When in doubt, use indifferentism (via me). Will a given intention actually change your choices? Will your circumstances allow for this intention to grow into action? If not, it’s not really an intention, it’s just noise, and should be ignored. Indifferentism is a highly pragmatic, constant call to action: What are you going to do about it?

This spectrum of attunement to consciousness is a series of bridges between seemingly distinct things. Selective attention bridges ever-present mental turbulence with intention. And intention is a bridge between the internal world and the external world of embodiment. Imagine chasm hundreds of miles long, but not terribly far across. On the other side, there are areas that are useful to you, let’s say abundant with natural resources. Other areas are barren and harsh. You can see that choosing where to put your bridge and where to aim it is a decision with clear consequences. What you aim at will quietly, but certainly, shape what you become. We will explore the other side of this bridge next.