Transforming Attention into Intention

In the first blog post, we asserted that your most important asset was your attention. Not your money, your time, or even your energy. Nothing is more important than your attention. In that post, we discussed why it matters, how attention has evolved over time, and how the modern world and our modern culture create obstacles to harnessing it well, and what that means for our emotions and our experience.

Today I want to go deeper and explain how to develop a flexible attention in the world.

At its core, our mind pays attention for two reasons. This is always happening and will continue until the day you die.

One purpose of our attention is to protect us from threats. The other is to identify and secure resources.

These two engines are at the heart of a calculus unfolding underneath our conscious awareness, always sorting out what we should pay attention to, why we should pay attention to it, and how we should pay attention.

What is unique to humans is that we are able to place our attention into the future. We can imagine outcomes and communicate them with others.

What is also unique, and what I want to focus on here, is that we are able to pay attention to what we are paying attention to.

When we join these two uniquely human capacities, we shift from being reactive to becoming intentional.

Whereas other creatures live instinctually and reactively, we are able to see a bigger picture of our lives and the outcomes of our future actions. If I want to lose 50 pounds this year, I need to remember that goal when I’m ordering dinner and order with intention.

Today is January 7th, and we can see this all around us. Gymnasiums are flooded with people who want to create a brand-new version of themselves. They are living into their intentions.

Come August, most of those new gym-goers will likely be staying home and will have long forgotten, or given up on, the plans they made at the beginning of the year.

They lost connection with their intention, or decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. Or maybe the priorities of their life simply squeezed the intention out.

I think this is how it typically happens. We don’t decide one morning to throw away our hopes and dreams. No. What happens is that our other priorities and commitments demand our attention, and as a result, we lose the intentional thread.

This happens because the world doesn’t care about our intentions. It doesn’t care about our goals. It doesn’t care about our to-do list. Our children, friends, and family have needs. Not to mention our employers, who pay us for our attention.

And let’s not forget acts of nature. Hurricanes, ice storms, and their cousin, cold and flu season, all lobbying for our attention.

The world is in constant movement, and it constantly interrupts our good intentions. Even our hormones and blood sugar levels impact our ability to live intentionally.

So what can be done about it? That’s what I want to talk about for the rest of this post.

Intention is not about control. That’s a trap.

Once we understand that living intentionally is not about increasing control, we can begin to live more harmoniously with the world as we meet it, and maybe create a more value-directed and intentional life.

So if it’s not about control, then what is it about?

It’s about flexibility.

It’s about relationship.

There’s also a third element I’ll introduce in a moment.

What do I mean by that?

There are several layers to this.

First, flexibility has to do with the ease with which we can place our attention. Learning to notice where our senses are directing us. Learning to notice what our body is telling us as it moves us through the world.

Learning to notice what is in that affect. What is in that feeling in my body?

So the first real ingredient is flexibility. This is something we can develop through practice. Mindfulness practice helps with this, but it’s not required.

The second ingredient is curiosity. We learn to relate to our attention curiously. We wonder: Why am I thinking so much about yesterday’s meeting? Why does my body feel tight in my gut? Why am I so frustrated by the sound of my kid chewing right now?

In short, we ask: What’s going on here? What is this?

So the first step is flexibility. The second step is curiosity. We toggle our attention flexibly, and we relate to it curiously. These are the first two moves toward becoming more intentional.

The third and final ingredient takes more time and thought. It’s about understanding what is most important to us. What future outcome do we value, and how would we like to value it?

It’s about having a relationship with the areas of our lives, the things in our lives, and the people in our lives. It means taking time to pay attention to things like our work, our eating, and our relationships, and asking: What is the value here? What kind of value would I like to create in this relationship?

If we want to create flow in our lives, we don’t fight against the movement of the world around us. We don’t try to control it.

Instead, we learn to budget our attention. We learn to move it flexibly, relate to it curiously, and give energy toward becoming the person we want to be and creating a life we would love to live.

We harness our attention, and by doing so, transform it into intention.

Let's try it now

Let’s hold our attention and move it intentionally.

Let’s attend to the past several minutes you’ve spent reading this. Do you remember a moment when your mind wandered?

If you can’t recall, no problem. But if you can, let’s wonder where your mind went.

Now let’s toggle our attention into the immediate future.

When you stop reading this, what do you imagine you are going to do next? Where will your attention go with you?

Going deeper

For the sake of time, and to make the point more clearly, I’d like to invite you to move your attention to an important domain of your life. Maybe a relationship, your work, or even yourself.

Now ask yourself what value you would like to embody more fully in that domain. If the domain is a relationship, maybe the value is patient or generous.

If it’s work, maybe focused, thorough, or creative.

And if it’s yourself, maybe kind, mindful, or unhurried.

Honestly, these are my guiding values in those domains at this particular moment, but you’re free to try them for yourself.

Did you decide on a domain and a value you want to embody more intentionally?

Good. Now imagine what you’ll be doing in the immediate future and how you might embody that value.

Going even deeper

Here’s where adverbs become very helpful.

This part is gold, so if you’re getting bored, please do a cold plunge.

Now that you have a domain, a value, and something you plan to do soon in that domain, I want you to turn your value into an adverb.

I have a dog named Scarlett. Since I’m about to walk her, I’ll choose the value unhurried. This is something I’ve been working on for a while. So I’ll walk Scarlett unhurriedly.

If your value doesn’t translate easily into an adverb, play with it until you find one that does.

Once you’ve imagined what you’re going to do next and how you plan to do it, imagine for just a second or two what that experience will be like.

When I imagine myself walking Scarlett unhurriedly, I imagine making more room for her to sniff around the bushes.

Because I usually have other things to do, Scarlett often gets pulled away from her exploration. But I intend to become more patient and more present in my senses. I intend to use the walk not only to reset myself, but to allow her to enjoy mapping our neighborhood through her senses, which, being a dog, is primarily her sense of smell. I will need to remind myself of my intention along the walk, and it should be easy since I've got an easy adverb to remember.

I hope you’ll try this yourself. Imagine the next moment, and how you might live into a value by intentionally allowing an adverb to shape your action. Then when the moment comes, conjure your adverb and act into it.

In a future post, we’ll be more specific about the calculus that drives your attention, both threats and opportunities. We’ll look at how to understand what your attention is concerned with, how it relates to your fundamental needs, and how it shapes your experience.

But that’s for a future post.

If you live in the Houston area and are struggling to live intentionally into your values, or if stress is beginning to undermine your mental health or your relationships, I’d like to invite you to give me a call. I might be able to help, and if I can’t, I can point you toward resources that could.