Living Intentionally

No, No, No, No

I will never forget

No, No

I will never regret

I will live my life

Closer to the edge. - 30 Seconds to Mars

December for me has always been a time of reflection. I guess the holidays serve as a convenient mile-marker on the highway of my life; a time to take stock of everything and see how it compares with last year. Up until this year it was simply something I did in my head, unintentionally and it typically centered on trivial things like whether or not I had a girlfriend.

But since I have been introduced to some new management technology this year, I have a mechanism to be intentional with my review and the planning for 2011.

Why do I do this? Because I want to live as intentionally as possible. I don't to waste valuable effort and time thrashing about hoping one day that a miracle will happen and I'll 'make' it. This concern is something Seth Godin lays out perfectly in his blog post here. He says:

"Even if you're not self-employed, your boss is you. You manage your career, your day, your responses. You manage how you sell your services and your education and the way you talk to yourself.

Odds are, you're doing it poorly.

If you had a manager that talked to you the way you talked to you, you'd quit. If you had a boss that wasted as much as your time as you do, they'd fire her. If an organization developed its employees as poorly as you are developing yourself, it would soon go under."

I think that this is a pretty accurate depiction of people trying to make their way through the human experience: survive. It's actually a pretty reasonable way to go through life. With what's going in the world today, it gets pretty easy to slip into the mode of letting one's reasons run their life. With divorce, kids, work demands, car maintenance, sickness, death, etc it's totally reasonable to be in survival mode. In fact self-protection is an honorable act on behalf of self-respect.

So be unreasonable. Follow through on your commitments in the face of all of that. Because that's what being a professional human being. That what living intentionally is: being unreasonable. Doing the hardwork in the off season, when no one is watching, making tough choices and sticking to them longer than anyone else would. Seth goes on to develop this a little further:

"We are surprised when someone self-directed arrives on the scene. Someone who figures out a way to work from home and then turns that into a two-year journey, laptop in hand, as they explore the world while doing their job. We are shocked that someone uses evenings and weekends to get a second education or start a useful new side business. And we're envious when we encounter someone who has managed to bootstrap themselves into happiness, as if that's rare or even uncalled for."

Again, the question for all this is 'why'? Why try to live intentionally? Because if you aren't living intentionally, it's hard to say that you are doing anything other than coping. Coping means that you don't have a choice, that you are given a set consequences that you must manage the best you can. To me that's not living, I know because I did it for most of my memorable life.

Living for me is choosing to do what I want and following through on the commitments in the face of the things that I have no control over. The first cop out I hear around commitment is that something catastrophic happened. Look, if you knew that you would get a million dollars to follow through on one thing you said you would do, nothing - absolutely nothing - would stop you. Those 'reasons' and perfectly explainable barriers that stand in your way wouldn't look so hard to overcome, would they?

As I roll out what's next for me in 2011, my challenge to you is to think about what commitments you have that you keep derailing. And when you identify what you do to derail that, start thinking about what you unknowingly committed to (hint: it has to do with self-protection).

For more information about how this process works, I highly recommend checking out a book by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey on how to start looking at your natural immune system to change called How The Way We Talk Can Change The Way We Work. Good luck. Have fun.