It’s easy to fall into routines that don’t enhance where we want to be. Think about when you decide to exercise, make a new year’s resolution, create a goal to achieve and then you stop when it gets complicated, forget it, get distracted work, life, just being you, it moves down a list of priorities. When you set it up, you knew it was necessary, part of where you wanted to be. We know statistically that 75+%[1] of goals and actions do not get achieved?

 

We also know eating healthily is good for us, supremely good as it extends our quality of life and how long we can live- yet we still overload our bodies with sugar, bad fats, and more that can reduce our lives. 82% of us know this information, yet less than 50% do eat the five or more[2]

 

We know that exercise is good for us. Movement, any form of regular activity each hour, has a hugely positive effect on us. We know sitting for hours and being sedentary is unhealthy, yet we continue to do it. We have wearable devices that inform us, mobile phone apps that tell us our stats, yet we can remain inactive for hours and hours.

 

We know being part of a community[3], having healthy connecting relationships, sharing and caring, being kind, even the neuroscience connection of positive words and language to ourselves and others boost us. Yet, we continue to be negative, say nasty things, treat others with inequality, call names, “bitch and moan” the list is long. If you add social media, the myriad of negativity can outweigh the positives that social media connectivity can bring.

 

So, the big question is, what stops us from doing with all this knowledge?

 

In a study of intention[4] to behaviour, the act of doing highlights that we use external references – other viewpoints, films, media, perspectives, opinions, comments and allow them to override our values, thoughts and also actions/behaviours. Unless we have a real intention connected to values and behaviours, we are setting our focus incorrectly. Throw in neuroscience advances and that our brain creates predictable patterns of responses we have had, and the cycle continues as the more.

 

Let me give you a personal example. This year 2021, I committed a self-imposed intention of doing a minimum of 10km per day. This is a health goal for me. Personally, it's important and part of my self-value. It is very personal and has no external influence. My husband has excellent intentions too, with his own unique training program and yet knowing that I have made this personal intention, has asked a few times, let’s spend time together, carry over your miles you need to do, do them tomorrow, the weather is bad, do them at the weekend. His intentions are positive to spend quality time together, not to stop me from doing. YET, note that his positive intention clashes with my intention, and it is effortless for me to say yes, I will do that. This is much easier than getting ready, wrapping me up and going out in storms and snow. I haven’t stayed in, and I have done my miles per day everyday continuously . I remain committed to my intentions.

 

Managing external influences

Being aware and identifying what your external influences are is vital, and it requires an element of an underrated behaviour of stubbornness! Now you could also apply the focus on self-belief and awareness. Yet to have self-belief, you have to be stubborn to stick to it.  Belligerent and determined are also attributes needed to retain intention. No of these can exist if you don’t believe or know your why in the first place.

 

Staying true to your intentions

Firstly, see the good in the external interruptions and noise. This is important. We can slip into the negative first, “how dare they, who are they telling me I can/can’t etc. “my learning is that most external noise comes from a positive intent of the other.

 

Reflect on what you want to do. If we ask ourselves a few key questions

1.     Why is this important to me?

2.     What can I do to stay committed and intentional? What else can I do to

3.     How can I communicate better my intentions to others?  How does it benefits the ones that matter the most to me?

4.     What if I stayed intentional and doing? What are my outcomes? Do they outweigh not doing?

 

My intention of activity daily is to live a healthier longer life, meaning I get to spend more quality time with my husband- our intentions are the same!

I have also looked at how I train to ensure that we spend plenty of quality time together by splitting my hiking time into smaller ones, accruing the miles through the day. This has had many benefits. I am sedentary for much less as I can do up to three hikes a day, I am outdoors, a connector to energise, and my best thoughts and creativity appear when I am outside and hiking.

 

Clean up your social media intentions

Social media is a choice and one that we can negate quickly. I actively screen my social media follows, why am I following them, add value to my learning, or allow me to experience different perspectives.

Five ways to have social media intentions to boost you

1.     Reflect, are you scrolling or reading? If you aren’t reading, then delete the account you are following. If you scroll, then what value is it adding? What are you gaining? Social media can suck time away, and that then impedes any positive intention.

2.     Allocate “scroll reading “time. This is really valuable. Allocating times makes it more noticeable and also specific. Amazingly you will do less scrolling!

3.     Understand the incremental 1% better per day; allocatee this to spending your time better. Do Lectures and Huitt Denim do a yearbook, and this 2021 is called one percent better, and the incremental gains you achieve by 1.01% improvement has a massive effect and are you going to miss a minute less per day in social media?

4.     Have a NO PHONE or DISTRACTION time – this boosts productivity and effectiveness. No matter how much your intentions are, you will be distracted. Remove the distraction. Have 3 hours er day allocated to doing. This will transform how you achieve.

5.     Have your why as a notification, diary invite, or somewhere you see it regularly. This is important. Create a vision board, be truly connected to your why and when that scrolling finger need occurs- look for the why and see it to reset yourself quickly.

 

Reset Relationship and community intentions

We know that having healthy relationships energise us, they boost or longevity too. In neuroscience body budgeting (our neural capacity and connection get boosted from positive healthy relationships).

 Being part of a community is as beneficial, as we can aid each other in collective thoughts and thinking, support through conversation and energise through mutual activity.

Five ways to have relationship and community intentions

1.     Listen. Person to person relationships can fail because we don’t communicate the same[5]. As individuals, we all need, want and nurture different things, and if we don’t speak this, then we clash, falter, disconnect and even destroy a potential relationship. The best skill to build is the ability to listen. This is not hearing. That’s a singular focus on hearing what YOU want to hear. Listening means we have to connect to what the other person is saying without bias or personal perspective. This is a true skill and takes time to foster and means we have to question, query, repeat, validate, and accept that the other person needs to have listened too. This is also your skill of listening to yourself (your daily Dollar Dream Club practice is work from within, listen to you, you have the answers)

2.     Positive intent first- this is a belief mantra that we have to believe first that we are in a relationship that starts with positive intent. This means that we have to trust first, acting in positive intent first, too. We want good. We want kindness, calm, happiness, and all come from a positive intent. Start with yourself, and this benefits others also.

3.     Value time. Time is a non-repeatable commodity. Once used, it can’t be returned, added or omitted from. It exists as a singular entity. Value it, make it precious, share it with the right people, ones that add value to you, challenge your perspectives, allow you to grow, fail and succeed, add or boost your views, trust and respect are based within time. We can commit to time and give it away and lose the actual connection we wanted to offer. Be careful of saying yes first. List who is important and then allocate time for them, then add a list of values and link this to your community time to share.

4.     Balance. I have a personal opinion that work/life balance is a fallacy of modern age created to make you work a certain amount of time and then be “given” time as a reward to spend on your life. Rubbish. Life balance is about you deciding what adds to your life, not reduces. Work is a necessity for many, as it gives us a financial element to be able to do. Yet, it doesn’t commit us to comparison, keeping up with the Joneses, being something others want and not ourselves. If you listen to you (and the loved ones around you), have positive intent first and know your values, build trust and respect and value your time, you will be creating balance. Life is not about a perfectly straight, calm line. It requires the bees and flows, the pulls and the pushes, the ups and the downs for us to create balance and understand what we seek.

5.     Stop assuming—a hugely powerful gift to yourself and others. We assume we apply our bias and perspective. A great way to have intentional relationships and community is to stop assuming what someone thinks, feels, wants or needs. Ask first. Clarify. Listen. Learn. We assume that someone we love, care for, respect, or trust has the same ideas, thoughts, feelings we do. They usually don’t! So the less we assume, the more we communicate, the more we learn, the more we enhance our relationships.

This year I started texting my dearest friend every day at 8 am. This started after a conversation of lack of contact from each other, and that when we did connect, it boosted us both. So why didn’t we do it? It was easier not to! It was easy to say life got in our way. We were busy, didn’t have time for all fallacies and excuses. When we made the time, we enjoyed it, so we make time every day. Every morning at 8 is I text my friend and ask a question. I have learned more in the first two months of this year of my best friends’ thoughts, feelings, perspectives, drivers and motivators from this daily action. I get boosted every morning considering the question I will ask from how to do you grieve, to what flavour pancake is your favourite, to do you believe in karma to what is your favourite colour and why! This is just a few as each question then stimulates a thought process and more questions. Our relationship also means we now talk more, as when the texts need more explanation or more conversation, we just pick up the phone. A winner all round.

 Nurture Exercise & Nutrition Intentions

This isn’t a lecture about eating better. Take up an exercise challenge. It’s much more subtle, personalised and achievable than that. Variety is key to exercise and nutrition on several levels. Our bodies change continuously -the body myth that we renew every 7 (or ten years) depending on what you read is just that myth. There are between 50 and 75 trillion cells in the body. Each type of cell has its own life span; for example

·      Brain cells: Your lifetime (and can be transplanted so could live longer!)

·      Eye lens cells: Lifetime

·      Egg cells: 50 years

·      Heart muscle cells: 40 years

·      Intestinal cells (excluding lining): 15.9 years

·      Skeletal muscle cells: 15.1 years

·      Fat cells: 8 years

·      Hematopoietic stem cells: 5 years

·      Liver cells: 10-16 months

·      Pancreas cells: 1 year

·      White blood cells; 1 year

·      Red blood cells – approx. 4 months

·      Skin Cells: 2-3 weeks

·      Colon Cells: 4 days

·      Sperm cells – 3 days

 

Working on this theory of continuous renewal, we can boost our body quickly every day.

 

Five ways to have nutrition and exercise intentions

 

1.     A simple routine of movement every hour, even if this is just getting up and walking around your sofa. This hourly activity is a stimulus for your body and makes a considerable difference (go back to 1% better each day of movement extra per day, 1:01% more it so small yet incrementally hugely beneficial for your body). Set a timer to get you moving each hour.

2.     Get fresh air, open a window, stand at your front/back door/garden/ park, take in the outdoors air, breath in and out slowly. See and observe the details around you. Now connect to how you feel. This connection to self and being is key to you. Plus, its more movement.

3.     When you feel hungry, hydrate first. Drink a glass of water. Allow 20 minutes before you decide to eat or not. Our bodies have been predilected through society to eat at certain times, this isn’t a necessity, and mostly we need water. We are essentially mostly water as a human!

4.     Have a glass of fresh lemon water first thing. The first drink of your day allows your body to reset after its rest period. It’s a great way to reset the alkaline focus in your body and rehydrate after a long sleep. 

5.     Sleep is rest, and restorative action is a slow and steady movement you need both, Whether you are training for an event or just getting your body moving. Rest is sleep and rest exercise days still required movement. Setting a regular sleep pattern is key to allowing you to be at your best. We use Oura rings to track our physicality and sleep.

 

For me, variety is essential to my daily activity – my first desire is to be outside that overrides anything else. I know I am more productive, effective, calm, thoughtful and considered through taking outside activity- this boost on so many physical, emotional and spiritual levels is key as I am aware of them. I Hike, run, walk, bike, uphill, flats, walk backwards, different distances, new routes

 

 

Connecting this to Dollar Dream Club Intentions

 

This is a blog post for Dollar Dream club so connecting it all back to practice and intentional practice is essential. Our intentions are positive and useful, we set off on this and get swept up and love it and as each week passes, we can disconnect or forget or think tomorrow is ok. Double up the time then creates a more significant disconnect as it’s taking too much time! The intentional daily practice – that 1% better per day is essential

 

Charles F. Haanel wrote the Master key in a specific way as he knew human nature wanes, ebbs and flows, and don’t take action consumed in one huge chunk. We NEED small nuggets. We need to get new material each week to practice. We need to apply incremental changes daily. In the program, we need to connect to the small, gradual changes, the improvements, the abundant thinking, the practice. We need to see and feel the process to enjoy an outcome.

 

Our five intentional actions of support

 

1.     12 Lives in the Community group. Dave and I have decided to do 12 continuous live one per day for each of the weeks we are up to reconnect to the content, the practice and boost our intention and hopefully help your if it’s got a little lost or off track. (start Monday 22 Feb 2021) 

2.     Every Friday at 2 pm GMT the Matt, Haydn, Karen and Dave will be live on Facebook sharing their experiences and a live Q&A

3.     Your weekly Dollar Dream Club blog from me, exploring all things from manifestation to neuroscience to top tips to stories.

4.     Bonus free 90 Minute workshop at the end of 26 weeks taking you to the next level of Dollar Dream Club – will send out info in the exclusive members-only area www.dollardreamclub.com

5.     Additional techniques MindChangers® using NLP, you can add the MindChangers® to your intention practice and boost yourself and outcomes.

 

 

 

References and notes

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232499540_Young_adults'_intention_to_eat_healthy_food_Extending_the_theory_of_planned_behaviour

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Life-expectancy-active-life-expectancy-disability-free-life-expectancy-and-life_fig1_344395128

https://www.msdmanuals.com/home/older-people%E2%80%99s-health-issues/the-aging-body/changes-in-the-body-with-aging

https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/004012.htm,https://www.britannica.com/science/human-aging, https://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/mph-modules/ph/aging/aging_print.html

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190606150315.htm

[1] http://www.socmot.uni-konstanz.de/sites/default/files/93_Gollwitzer_Goal_Achievement_neu.pdf

[2]https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/699241/NDNS_results_years_7_and_8.pdf[2] https://extranet.who.int/nutrition/gina/

[3] https://www.ageing-better.org.uk/sites/default/files/2020-11/The-State-of-Ageing-2020.pdf

[4] http://www.socmot.uni-konstanz.de/sites/default/files/93_Gollwitzer_Goal_Achievement_neu.pdf

 

[5] 65% of relationships cited in divorce cases from lack of communication, 43% inability to resolve communication issues. (Psychology today ref 201705 , YourTango 2019 report)