It’s been a while since I revisited the powerful concept of ‘intent’, which is central to the development of emotional health. Lately I’ve been thinking about the relationship between intent and the principle of ‘allowing’.
Let’s start with intent. To recap, to state an intent is all about asking the question, ‘How do I want to be or be seen?’, as opposed to creating an intention, which is all about what you want to do or achieve?’.
As I wrote in that previous blog post, intention is largely about hope; it’s about ‘try’ and ‘should’ and ‘might’. Intent is much stronger. It’s about a state of mind; it’s about establishing a designated quality of behaviour, which in turn creates appropriate actions consistent with that quality.
Let’s say I decide that I want to present myself with more confidence as a leader. I want to be more confident. I want to be seen to be more confident. However, I don’t want this confidence to be inauthentic or to spill into over-confidence or aggression.
Stating this as an intent – literally telling myself out loud at the start of the day, or before a meeting, that I want to feel more confident – is an important step. Just doing this can instantly cause us to stand up a little straighter or look people in the eyes with purpose.
More than that, carrying the intent of confidence can open our field of view to its possibilities. All of a sudden we start to notice confidence in others, and to identify aspects of their behaviour that help project that confidence. Aspects that we can then adopt ourselves.
The intent becomes a form of immersion. All of a sudden we see confidence everywhere; we start to soak it in by osmosis.‘Surrounding’ ourselves in confidence creates the patterns needed to help it exist in our brain. It’s just like the way immersing yourself in a language is a more effective way of learning than a series of occasional lessons.
Which brings me to the concept of allowing, which comes to us from the work of Dianne Collins, developer of QuantumThink®.
If intent is about being clear on how we want to be, allowing is about being open to how that shows up. It means holding our intent lightly enough that we don’t try to control the route, the timing or the form it takes. We notice what arrives rather than forcing what we think should arrive.
This is where intent and allowing meet. Without allowing, intent can quietly slide back into intention. We start measuring and checking whether we were ‘confident’ enough today. Then ‘try’ and ‘should’ creep back in. Allowing keeps intent pure. It enables us to say, ‘I know how I want to be; now let me see what that opens up’.
The immersion I described above is allowing at work. I don’t go hunting for confident people with a checklist. I set my intent and then I let my attention be drawn to examples I would otherwise have walked straight past.
Malcolm and I experienced this most powerfully in Global Leadership Foundation itself. We established the organisation with a very clear intent: to raise emotional health levels of people across the globe. However, rather than planning its growth in a structured, mechanistic way, we chose to allow it to unfold and reveal itself to us.
More than twenty years on, our intent has held us steady. Allowing has brought us people, work and possibilities we could never have scripted.
This is how I’ve come to see intent and allowing not as two separate ideas, but as partners. Intent gives us clarity about who we want to be. Allowing gives us the openness to discover what that makes possible.
Intent without allowing can become rigid. Allowing without intent can become drift.
A question to sit with this week is what is your intent and where might you need to loosen your grip and allow?
Gayle
Intent and allowing are featured as two steps in our app ‘Mastering Emotional Health: 21 steps to enhance your wellbeing’. If you haven’t tried it yet, now might be a good time! Try the ‘Creating an Intent’ step for free, no signup required.