Should you just live life, or should you have an Intentional Life Plan?
The word intentional is defined as “planned or meant.” Intended is something done on purpose and deliberate.
When Melinda and I shared our Intentional Life Plan on Facebook, friends went crazy. Tracy wrote, “This is amazing! I am so inspired to do this with my husband. This is the smartest thing ever! How do we start?”
Another friend, however, commented, “My life is NOT a project, it’s a journey. But if it’s working for you—excellent! Very interesting, in fact. If life’s a project it’s way overdue and over budget.”
Plan or no plan? We build plans for everything else; why not have one for your life?
What’s lovely about an “Intentional Life Plan” is it’s something you can change as your intentions change. You can set life goals for yourself now and get after them in the year ahead. But if you don’t get to them all or you decide to do something else, you can move or change them or remove them altogether.
It’s also fun to go back and look at your past plans to see how your intentions may have changed or evolved.
As my friend Sheila Hamilton writes, “We spend so much of our lives planning work, children, even our vacation. Somehow, lost in the equation is our own hopes and dreams, the goals we sometimes fantasize about but never verbalize for fear we could be seen as selfish or, worse, ridiculous.”
A boss once said to me, “You won’t want to be lying on your deathbed wishing you’d worked more or that you’d gone to Italy, or told your dad you loved him.”
You want, at the end, to say you lived your life well, and spent your time on earth living with intention.
