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3 Steps to an Intentional Life
Are you getting all you want? Are you achieving all of your goals and succeeding in life? Are you living a fully intentional life?
If you are, I salute you. I can’t make the same claim. To live a more intentional life, I constantly strive to gain greater agency, the quality of living intentionally.
In doing that, it helps to take the following three steps: evaluate reality clearly, make effective decisions, and achieve your goals.
Step 1: Evaluate Reality Clearly
What does it mean to evaluate your reality clearly? That means gaining a deep understanding of your external environment — your immediate surroundings, your social circle, your career, and anything else of relevance. That also means your own internal environment — your patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving.
Four factors obstruct our ability to evaluate reality clearly:
- Social prescriptions about appropriate ways of perceiving reality.
- Cached thoughts based on our previous experiences that lead us astray.
- Thinking errors that our brain makes due to faulty wiring.
- Finally, an emotional reluctance to face the truth of reality when that requires changing our minds and updating our beliefs based on new information.
