Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want, and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it.
Hi everybody, and welcome to the Bloom Your Mind podcast. This is episode number 85.
Today we are talking about intention versus action and I'm excited to jump into that. But first I've been building this romp room. It began as a rumpus room. If any of you have ever seen where the wild things are, the book, if you've read it, if you've seen the movie, the book is a classic and in it Max, the child Max, goes to this island. He's in trouble and he goes to the island where the wild things are. And in that book, it says let the wild rumpus begin. And they all the monsters and Max in the story they party down really loudly and ferociously.
And I want had this idea that we could turn a garage into a rumpus room for my children, meaning they could throw balls in there and wrestle and literally bounce off the walls. So, I share this idea with my kids and with my husband. Everybody was into it, and we've been working towards it. So, I had the idea, said it out loud, got some agreement, got some excitement. We've been brainstorming ideas around it. So like are we going to put climbing holds on the wall? Yes, we are. We decided to do that.
We're going to put wrestling mats on part of the floor the kids can actually like on parts of the walls, so kids can actually wrestle each other and be safe and bounce off the walls. Literally there are little hooks in the ceiling that they can tie ropes to and swing off of them and maybe tie. I'm going to put some little hooks in other parts of the room so they can tie ropes across and build forts. But it's also like a guest room where we're making it into a spot where we can host people, because it's kind of fun in there. And then I thought, okay, what about the walls? Oh, also, we're building my husband a vocal recording booth in there so he can sing really loud and record himself. I'll probably record podcasts there. I'll let you know when I'm in the rumpus room.
But gradually the rumpus word, you know, took a lot of explanation, so we've been calling it the romp room and we finished up the drywall and the paint and all of a sudden, I was like Whoa, what am I going to paint on the walls? So, I asked, I had this idea of painting the silhouettes of my family members rumpusing or romping you choose which word you like better. And so, I've been brainstorming all these ideas for what it could look like. And one of my kids I asked them hey, what do you want to be doing? My daughter said she wanted to be flying.
So, I took some pictures of her, and I projected them on the wall and then I sort of traced and then drew into them this outline of my daughter flying across the wall and our dog being carried by a bunch of balloons chasing after her. And then my son. He's flying across the ceiling like in a series. He loves it when we throw him, launch him in swimming pools and in oceans, and so he's being launched. He's like launching up into the air, flying across the air and then landing.
And so, I took these pictures, and I started drawing. They knew what I was drawing, but it has been the coolest experience to say, hey, the drawing's ready for you to see and for each of my kids to come in and encounter the drawing of themselves. It's just a drawing. I still have to paint it. I could really mess it up in the painting part of this process. We'll see how that goes, but the drawings are really cool. But the drawings are really cool, and it has been so fun to watch them walk in and say that's me and smile and like, encounter themselves in the drawing, and I used to paint giant portraits of people.
So, I've had this experience a lot, but this is the first one where I've done it with my kids in great detail the drawings, and it was really cool. So, this is just a little anecdote to kind of describe how this incredible experience I had, watching my children interact with themselves, is something that never would have happened if I hadn't said this silly idea for a rumpus room Like what even is that right? I said it out loud, said it to my husband, said it to my kids, got some excitement going and then we built it and now there are pictures of them on the wall and they are also experiencing this gift of my love, because when I paint pictures of people it is truly a love language.
My deepest love language is taking hours and hours to do a painting of someone. It is a big investment of time and when I do that it's a big, big, big, I love you. It's like yo, I really love you, and so to do that for them feels really good.
So, let's talk about intentions versus actions when you have an idea, and you want to make it into a real thing intentions and actions. The difference between those two things is everything. So, I'm going to talk a tiny bit about that today. And then I want to talk about intention versus action in relationships and in perception, because I'm seeing all kinds in my coaching conversations, in all kinds of relationships around me and in politics, I am seeing people get really mixed up between intention and action.
So, I really want to talk about this today. Yesterday there was an event where there was an assassination attempt on the former president Trump, and, no matter what anybody's political stance is, there are all kinds of stories being woven and I just see America jumping right back into the storytelling and I've seen this in relationships recently in a way that's very harmful to relationships, very, very harmful and very harmful to people's ideas that they're trying to make real. So, I'm going to talk a little bit about that.
First, I just want to brush on the idea of intention versus action when we're trying to make our idea real. Right, if we want to change a habit that we have, we have so many intentions. Y'all check in with yourself what are the habits that you intend to change? How long is that list right? When we have an intention for how we want to act or what we want to accomplish, how we want to be with others, languages, we want to learn people, we want to meet experiences we want to have all of those things are intentions, glimmers of possibility, intentions in our mind until we take an action to make them real.
And they will stay intentions always, no matter how much we want them or believe in them, until we translate them into action. Now, that's pretty obvious, right? But I just want to dig into it a little bit, because we got to get real with ourselves about when that transformation happens, the conversion of something from an intention into action. So let me give you a couple of examples of something from an intention into action. So let me give you a couple of examples.
I have always wanted to swim with whales. That is at the top of my bucket list, but you know, what I've never done is set a date. I have looked into places I want to go. I've even talked to people about wanting to go with me, talked to my husband about when I might possibly do it, but I have not set a date, bought a ticket, have not taken those actions which will cement this intention into something I'm actually going to do.
A second thing that's true about me is that I have never finished my own website. I have the intention to do it. I have paid my designer half of the fee already to do it, and I did that like a year ago, and I have a whole bunch of content that's almost ready, but I have never. I have the intention of having that website, but I have never made that idea real. I have not taken the action to make it real.
Now, why? Why are these two things swimming with whales and making my website staying intention, not action? Why are they staying in the realm of intention? And as you're listening to this, maybe you can think about the things that are staying in the realm of intention for yourself, okay, okay, for me and for you.
The reason that things stay in the world of intention and stay ideas that are not made real is because of one reason, and one reason only we have not prioritized them over all of the other things that we have the option of putting our time and energy into. They have not become our priorities right. The option of putting our time and energy into. They have not become our priorities right. So, whatever we say yes to doing with our time and our energy at that moment, we are saying no to everything but that thing right. We are prioritizing this thing over all of the other possibilities of where we could be, what we could be doing, what we could be experiencing.
Now I have not prioritized the whales because it's expensive, it's a big old trip, and I have prioritized instead trips with my kids, because I don't want to take them on that trip, I want to really be on that trip myself and experience it and trips with my parents, because I see this period of time when we are all able to take these trips together as really, really special, both the trips with my parents and the trips with my kids, because we all want to, because we're all able to, because we all are adventuring together and it won't always be like this.
We are all getting older, all of us the kids, my parents, myself and this is a period of time where this is really special to me Doesn't mean I'm not going to next year prioritize the whales, but up until this moment, I'm very aware that this thing is staying in intention and not in the world of action for my website. Yeah, you know, I should really get that thing done, but I have prioritized all of my current clients and my podcast content and all of my present work over the website and the other things that are in my life. I just decided not to do it because I'd rather be with my kids.
Do I really need it? It'd be nice. I'm sure it would be great for me to have that website and I will eventually do it.
So, what are you leaving in the world of intention and not moving into the world of action, and why? What are you prioritizing over it and are you happy with that choice? There's no right answer. Right, if we're drinking alcohol, for example, when I am prioritizing drinking alcohol at night, I am prioritizing that over the next morning. If I have a glass of wine or two glasses of wine or whatever, I'm going to prioritize that over feeling super fresh and clean the next morning.
So I ask myself do I want that? Do I not want that the vast, vast majority of nights. I do not want that right. I want to be fresh and clean the next morning, but I get to make the choice. Same thing with the foods we put in our body. Same things with anything that we're focusing on in a moment, spending time doing. We are saying no to everything else and there never is a right answer. But are we doing it intentionally?
Are we clear about what we are putting in the world of intention and what we are actually prioritizing to take into the world of action? That's all I got on that front. It's not rocket science, but we tend to glaze over and not recognize the things that we are intending to do but not taking action on. So just a little differentiation there. And this piece is what is the reason for not prioritizing the thing you intend to do and why do you like your reasons All right?
Now to the meat of what I really care about talking about today. We really confuse intention with action in our perceptions of other people, and I am seeing this in the political realm, I am seeing this in communities, I am seeing this in relationships. I'm seeing it all over the place. So, I want to take some couple minutes today and really invite you to look at this with me. I am not saying that, when we claim that we have good intentions without seeking to understand any harm experienced by action, that that's a good thing, right?
What I mean is intention does not trump action. When we do harm, when someone does harm, when something happens as a responsibility of an action, just because good intentions were there, it doesn't mean harm wasn't done and it doesn't mean it's our responsibility.
Okay, that is really important to understand, and our experiences are always true. We felt it, we experienced it, but our interpretation of events is not always true, and I am seeing a lot of people conflate these two things. It is true, whatever our experience was, whatever feelings we had, whatever we experienced in a moment happened, but just because we experienced it in a moment, it doesn't mean that the way that we interpreted events was true. A feeling arising in the body could be true Absolutely, but when we later look at what we interpreted things out, we may have been mistaken, and that's a step that many of us don't take.
Okay, when we are looking at politics, we're looking at relationships, we're looking at communities that we are a part of. Oftentimes we look at the actions that people take and we, instead of just looking at actions, assign intention to those people. Our brains do this automatically because our brains are great at perceiving threats and our brains want us to be the good guy.
So, our automatic pattern is when we see something that we don't like, when someone behaves in a way that we don't like, when another political party or a member of a community does something that rubs us the wrong way, we start to automatically assign intentions to that person. We get into trouble when we don't question that leap of logic.
When we start interacting with our story of what someone's intention was, our story of why someone did something or said something or is acting in a certain way, and we start interacting with that as fact. When we start talking about that to other people and getting agreement around that story about someone else, we are doing harm. Just know that we are causing harm. When we start creating stories about what someone intended and if that's what we want, hey, that's up to all of us, but I don't think any of us are out there trying to cause harm.
I think my belief is that the majority of I really believe that all people think we're on the side of good, that we are doing our best and we are where we think that we're on the side of good. And so, what can we do if we know that our tendency as human beings is to start guessing at what someone else intended, and if something rubbed us the wrong way, our tendency will be to assign them negative intention? Here's what we do.
We look at the story that we're telling ourselves about what happened. Maybe that's something that happened in our own community, in our own lives, in our own relationships and on the political sphere, something we read in the news. What are the facts of that story? And when I say facts, what do I mean? Fact has no adjectives, has no descriptor words, has no nothing that could even be argued with. A fact is the sky is blue. A fact is the date. A fact is your name.
This person said these specific words right, it would be provable in a court of law. 100% of people would agree on those facts. And usually, when we really choose just the facts of a story that we are telling or an experience we have, there aren't that many of them.
Our next step, once we have just the facts, is to look at everything else that we're thinking about what happened. Y'all all of that is made up, it's invented, it's a choice. So we can start looking at all of the rest of what we're thinking, what we think about what someone else intended, what we think about what they were thinking, what we think about what they did before and after the thing that we know that they said or did, and we're kind of making that up in our own head. We can look at where we are making leaps of logic.
Where are we practicing black or white thinking? Where are we trying to make ourselves the good guy and somebody else the bad guy, make ourselves right and someone else wrong? Because, my friends, I want to remind us that if we're the good guy, what does that leave for everybody else? If we are making ourselves right, what does that leave for everyone else? It means everyone else is wrong. Everyone else is the bad guy. Let's not do that right. If we're the righteous ones, what does that mean for everybody else?
And how counterproductive and divisive is it if none of us check ourselves on that? Because we're all going to go around thinking we're in the right instead of trying to understand each other. So, no matter what we do with that reflection afterwards, no matter whether we have a conversation or we change our perspective or we don't change our perspective.
Here's an invitation from me to you to be a part of what heals your relationships, your communities, your country, your political world, your close relationships, your world, the world we all share, by taking responsibility for your perceptions, by separating out fact and be honest there, the things that you know happened right In a story, from everything else. If you really want to get grown and be a part of the healing, look at all of the rest of it, all the story you're telling yourself, and really try to see a different way the story you're telling yourself, and really try to see a different way.
What if the opposite were true? Where are you projecting your stuff on other people through the story that you're telling yourself about what their intentions are? Because that is what we do, my friends. We project the thing that we least like about ourselves onto other people and we tell ourselves that's what they're doing. And we do it in politics, we do it in our personal relationships, we do it in our communities, we do it all over the place.
But we can pause that cycle by stopping looking at what we're telling ourselves about other people about how we're right and they're wrong, we're good and they're bad, pausing and saying what's that about? Why is that my story? How can I be a little bit more generous? How can I assume the best intentions instead of the worst? Where am I trying to make myself right and them wrong?
And in that story of how they're wrong, how is that maybe a part of myself I don't want to see.
If we all did that work, if we all took that invitation, there would be so much more healing in the world. We can do that. We can do better. We can choose differently. Every single one of us has that choice today and every other day we can separate out intention from action.
We can assume the best intentions we can seek to understand and in doing that, we can be a part of healing the world. And that's what I've got for you today, and I will see you next week.
Thanks for hanging out with me, friends. If you like today's episode and you want more of them, please take two minutes right now to subscribe and give me a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Then send this episode to a friend. See you next time.
