The Confident Podcast

EP 152 | How to Be More Intentional in the 5 Areas of Your Life

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Do you feel like you’re constantly moving from one thing to the next without slowing down and taking a moment to pause? In this week’s episode of The Confident Podcast, host Lisa Tarkington discusses the importance of being intentional with our time and how to slow down and prioritize the things that matter the most. Tune in for Lisa’s tips to be more intentional, be more impactful, and do things with more purpose.


Chapters:

  • 0:00 - Intro
  • 04:50 - What Does It Mean to Be Intentional?
  • 06:00 - Being Intentional vs Not Intentional
  • 09:33 - 5 Ways to Be More Intentional in Your Life
  • 21:17 - Key Takeaways & Outro


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Speaker 1:

There's this thing called the Wheel of Life that I teach a lot in all of our programming, and it's looking at our lives and looking at it from like a ranking of 1 to 10 and saying am I satisfied in this area? And if the satisfaction is between like a 1 and 8 or anything like that, or even a 9, or maybe it's even a 10, thinking like, how am I going to make some changes in order for me to be satisfied in this area? And the same thing goes when we're thinking about intention setting and we're thinking about being more mindful. Welcome to the Confident Podcast. I am Lisa Targinton, your host of this podcast. If you found yourself hitting play on this podcast, it means it was meant for you. My goal is to help empower and guide you to become a better version of yourself through conversation, advice and tips that are real, vulnerable and authentic. I am excited to have you join this journey with me. So let's get started. Hey everybody, welcome back for another episode of the Confident Podcast. I am your host, lisa Tarkington, and we have a great episode for you guys. Today we are going to be talking about ways to be more intentional, to really prioritize the important things in our lives and to honestly slow down and take a deep breath. There's so many times in our lives where we just go, go, go, raising my hand right now, saying that I am the exact same way sometimes. But what today we're going to dive into is how to be more intentional, how to be more impactful in your life and to do things with purpose. But before we dive into is how to be more intentional, how to be more impactful in your life and to do things with purpose. But before we dive into today's topic and everything, I always give you guys some life updates. I give you the updates of where I am in with my life, what I'm struggling with or where I'm trying to grow in, and what was it.

Speaker 1:

A couple weeks ago, my husband and I, along with some of our friends, have decided to do the 75-day hard. Now, if you've heard about it, it's a lot of really about this mental toughness, discipline, more workouts following a diet, giving up some of our guilty pleasures and really focusing. I remember wanting to do this for years, to be honest with you, but I just never knew that I. I just didn't want to give up certain things, which is totally okay and we started down this journey and it's been so intriguing to me to think about. I picked my word of the year was discipline, and you've probably heard me talk a little bit about that already on these podcasts. But I really wanted to do it this year because, if my words can be disciplined and there's something that's going to help me be a little bit more mental toughness, I wanted to do it as well, as I had a goal this year to read more, scroll less.

Speaker 1:

Now those have just been a little ups and downs. I did really well for a while. Then I kind of got back into the doom scrolling, as I call it sometimes and so this has been really awesome for me to kind of prioritize and have a little bit of discipline into my life outside of my everyday things that I have to do. And I will tell you, it's been tough. It's been hard. There's days where I don't want to do everything that we're supposed to do, but it's been really also rewarding to see some of the things that I keep saying like, oh, I want to do this every day or oh, I want to do this by the end of this week, and then I allow other things to take over, and so it's been fun to watch the growth for myself, watch the growth in my husband, and overall I'm excited to see where we go with this. It's been fun. It's been hard to actually fit in some of the workouts in all the time, probably because it's more so not the time, it's making the time for things, and I just taught a workshop the other day where I was all talking about that with a lot of our limiting beliefs come around money and time. They're the things that are hindering factors to help us meet our goals, and so how do we reflect and look at those a little bit differently. So if you are looking to give yourself a little bit more of mental toughness, I highly recommend finding something that you want to do to achieve a goal and really sticking with it. For me, having the word discipline I literally wear a bracelet with it on there has been really important to me this year, as I am trying to achieve a lot of goals Now.

Speaker 1:

Last week we talked or a few weeks ago we talked about the episode was all about zone of genius, and it was. I really talked about the four different zones incompetency, competency, excellence and zone of genius. Competency, competency, excellence and zone of genius. One thing that I didn't share on that podcast is that we are giving out a free one pager to help you on your journey with those zones, and so definitely check out the show notes. Also, go to our website, leadconfidentlyorg slash the blog to get all of the show notes as well as information to download this free one pager so that you can take action in your life to be in your zone of genius, because I will tell you when you're in it, it is the best feeling in the world and you definitely see your confidence radiant in all different ways with that.

Speaker 1:

So back to the topic of today, which is all about being intentional. This is something that, for me, is very personal, something that I've had to really work on over the years, and it's really learning the ropes over the years to become more intentional, to be more intentional with my style of work, with how I spend my time, with my overall life, and this is something that I didn't really appreciate, probably in my 20s, probably in my high school years, about being intentional. I was just trying things kind of all over the place with some things sometimes, but what I have really focused on over the years is how do I become more intentional with who I want to be, and so when you think about the word intentional so I just want to think about this for a second being intentional means acting with awareness and purpose with the aim of achieving a desired outcome or goal. So usually when we are being intentional, we're being present in the moment, we're being mindful of something that we want to get out of the outcome, and that's the goal. But many of us don't always think about being intentional. We are go, go, go, one thing to the next thing.

Speaker 1:

If you're in work, you're going from meeting to meeting and you're just trying to make it through the day, at the end of the day, you might be thinking to yourself I've achieved nothing that I wanted to. And what I love to say to people when they say that to me is well, did you even set out, did you even make a list of the things that you wanted to achieve today? Were you intentional about your time? Because if you were, you would have made those things a priority, which sometimes, I know, is easier said than done. But I will say, when you sit back and reflect on that, it makes a big, big change in how you see your priorities. So when we are intentional, here are some really cool things that can happen. We achieve our goals faster. We actually just achieve them instead of saying like I'll just do that later. We have more strong and effective communication. Because we're being intentional with our communication, we know what we want to achieve and we know the desired outcome. We build better relationships, we have personal growth, we enhance our well-being and maximize our success.

Speaker 1:

And, guys, the best one is we reduce our stress. And I know that many of us struggle with having stress in our lives, good or bad. But this month is stress management month. So if you have not looked at your stress levels lately, if you haven't thought about that, I want you to take a moment to kind of reflect on that for a second and think about hmm, how do I reduce my stress this month? And one of those things is with being intentional. So, on the flip side, when we are not being intentional, here are things that come up for us. Think about this with me we lack direction, we have increased stress and anxiety, we have decreased well-being, we're unfulfilled and we're wasting resources. And also the other thing, too, is that we react to living versus being proactive. So when we're being intentional, we're really setting ourselves up for success, which I know that if you're listening to this podcast and looking for tools, that's what you want. You want to set yourself up for success.

Speaker 1:

But setting ourselves up for success sometimes means going slow, and I share that because we have been working on a lot of projects at my company, lead. One of the things that one of my employees said is sometimes we have to go slow to go fast. Sometimes that means that you have to be intentional about your time, your resources and how you're being intentional with everything in order for you to get to the next step, to be able to move faster, and that's been something that I wasn't. I would say, yes, I know that, but X, y, z. But what I had to do is really just kind of rewire my mindset, to have a different like reframing of that, because I couldn't agree more now. Back then I probably wouldn't have agree with that. I was like, well, we have to do all of these things, which is still true, but it's about what's the intention behind it, because sometimes I would say, well, we have to do X, y, z, but then I wouldn't really have the intention behind it. I was just doing it because I was supposed to do it, or I was doing it now, even when that didn't even have to happen or it wouldn't matter for another six months. So you can raise your hand or feel the feels hearing all of that, because sometimes what we do is we make something like have to happen immediately, when really it could happen six months later and the intention should be a little bit different. So it's about how do we prioritize things in our lives and how do we be intentional with that.

Speaker 1:

One of the things I teach all the time when I'm working in professional developments or keynote speaking or even coaching, is in mindful intention settings. It's setting yourself up for success starting your day out. It's setting yourself up for success when it comes to meetings, asking questions and I'll give you guys some examples of questions here in a little bit to ask yourself. But it's about making sure that we are taking our focus back to what really matters, so that when the end of the day happens, or end of week or end of month, you can look at it and say I was intentional about my time to achieve the goal that I desired, and so what I want to talk about today is five ways to be more intentional in the aspects of your life. Now, I have so many tools and resources when it comes to this, and you'll see some of that come out today, but really what I want to talk about is when we picture our lives. There's many categories of our lives that are important, so I'm just going to focus on five of them, and these are kind of like lists and things to do to be more intentional about these areas of our lives, because it's important, right?

Speaker 1:

There's this thing called the wheel of life that I teach a lot in all of our programming and it's looking at our lives and looking at it from like a ranking of one to 10 and saying am I satisfied in this area? And if the satisfaction is between like a one and eight or anything like that, or even a nine or maybe it's even a 10, thinking like, how am I going to make some changes in order for me to be satisfied in this area? And the same thing goes when we're thinking about intention setting and we're thinking about being more mindful. So the first one is friends in our social lives. So I'm in my 30s, so people always say it's harder to make time for friends when you're older, it's like, okay, let's check in a month together, or things like that, and what I have found is that we're all busy, but it's about what am I going to do with my time when I do have it with someone? And so here's just some quick tools or tips that you can utilize when trying to be more intentional with friends.

Speaker 1:

So the first one is checking in If you know that your friend has an upcoming doctor's appointment or something's going on in their lives, or they just need that reminder that you're there, checking in with them to let them know you're there. Maybe that's a phone call, maybe that's just a simple text message, maybe that's a voice text, which me and my friends do all the time, but it's making sure that you have those check-ins because when we can check on each other, it's being intentional. It's thinking about like wow, I haven't talked to this person in a minute. What do I need to do to be intentional about my time, even if it's just for one minuteminute texts that I need to send right now, and for me, I do that a lot. I have a few friends and myself who send each other wellness check-ins when we haven't talked in a while, just to be intentional. I know that I can't always give them hours of my time, but I want to be intentional about the moments that I can be there for them.

Speaker 1:

Another one is appreciation intentional about the moments that I can be there for them. Another one is appreciation. A lot of times we don't always appreciate or say the appreciation to our friends. So being intentional of when we say the appreciation to them, sometimes they just need to hear it and sometimes more than that, we haven't said it in a while. So it's being intentional about making sure that we're spending time to slow down and say like, hey, thank you for X, y, z, because it really goes a long way. And the next one is quality time. And I'm going to say quality times with your phones away. It's very easy to say, hey, let's hang out. And then we sit there, maybe for drinks or dinner or just out at someone's house or something, and we're on our phones, right. And so it's about really spending quality time together. Because if, truly, we don't have all the time in the world with our friends, how are we going to make sure that when we are with them we're being intentional? So maybe your goal is, before you get together like hey, no phones today, I only have an hour. Like, let's really embrace this together and just setting those intentions with each other.

Speaker 1:

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Speaker 1:

As a host of this podcast, I wear many other hats, including an ACC coach, which stands for associate certified coach through the International Coaching Federation. I have gone through extensive learning and have been coaching individuals for years. I have had a front row seat at watching people transform, grow in their careers, take control of their careers and become intentional, gain confidence and more. I believe in the transformative power of self-discovery and personal and professional growth. If you are ready to grow either in your personal or professional life, break through limiting beliefs and step into a life of confidence, I would love to support you. As a certified coach through ICF, I have the knowledge and expertise to coach you and help guide you on your journey. To work directly with me, visit lisatarkingtoncom slash coaching Again that is lisatarkingtoncom slash coaching to sign up for your free consultation. I cannot wait to help you become a better version of yourself.

Speaker 1:

The next area is family, and I'm going to include your fur children with this one, because I have two dogs and when I was thinking about being intentional, there's so many times where I'm like man, I just wish I could hang with my dogs more. But it's about the intentions that I have with them, especially even with my family. You know, my sister and I don't live in the same city, same with my brother, same with my parents, actually along with my in-laws and so it's about thinking about how do we spend time intentionally with our families. So one of the biggest things is active listening. So a lot of times when we're checking in with someone, sometimes we might just want to make it all about us. We have so many things we want to tell them about, like, oh, this is where my life is and this is what's going on. But it's really about making sure that when you're with them, you're being intentional about active listening to what they need in those moments. Can't stress that enough, how much mindful and active listening is really important. It's about being supportive. Again, that's another one.

Speaker 1:

How do you show up, how do you support your friends and your family. How do you support your fur children? Because that's important too. How do you support your fur children, because that's important too. But how do you show up to really support them on all of their initiatives in their lives and being intentional about it? Right, if the desired outcome is for them to know that you support them, how are you showing up in an intentional way where they know that? And same thing with when I said for friends and your social life, it's the same thing with family and your for children, it's quality time. So, again, putting your phone away, thinking about how do I show up to really be focused on them, versus having multitasking things. You know, I can tell when I'm showing up intentionally for my husband and I can show up when I can also tell when I'm not showing up intentionally. There's many times where I'll still be on my phone. He'll be talking and I'll be like, huh, what did you say? And that just shows me right there that I'm not being intentional about our time. I am way too distracted to be able to be like centered, focused and present with him at that moment, and so those are a lot of conversations we get to have about making sure that we're being intentional, because both of us have busy careers.

Speaker 1:

The next one is health and well-being, and so this is something that I always love when I talk about, because it's very, very important that we take care of our bodies and minds, to be better humans, and one of the things when it comes to intentions and being more mindful, it's about self-reflection. So how many times are we sitting down and having a self-reflecting moment? Maybe something didn't go our way in our career or at home personal or professional and are we sitting down to really reflect on it, or are we shoving it under the rug and moving forward? And so when we can have self-reflection, checking in with ourselves? Another one is setting a goal. How many times do we set goals but don't always achieve them? So, being very intentional about the goals that we set, it's important to be aware of what can I achieve? What do I really want when it comes to goal setting.

Speaker 1:

Another one is boundaries. Boundaries are so important when it comes to health and well-being. It's about what's my intention, what are the boundaries that I need to set in order to be successful and to take care of myself? And the last one for this at least checklist for now is self-love and confidence. So how are you working on your confidence, on your self-love, in order to grow in your health and wellness as well? So that's something else to consider. So, again, that's self-reflection, setting goals, boundaries, and self-love and confidence, because the more that we're intentional about this is where I want to grow in my confidence, this is where I want to grow in my worth and my self-love. We are going to see in other areas of our lives how we're being more intentional, because it's kind of going to go and flourish and ripple effect into all those areas.

Speaker 1:

The fourth one is career. So I put this one in here because, for me, career has been really important to me and it's kind of like with health and well-being. It's about setting goals and objectives, but I always say it might be goals for yourself with your career, but it also could just be within your workplace. So, for example, this is really big for me is, before I go into a meeting, making sure that I'm setting the intention, the objective that I want to achieve for that meeting, because there's so many times where we get invited to a meeting and we're like why am I going to this? Do I need to be there, and so it's good for you to think about, like well, what is the goal and the objective? Because if this isn't going to get me the outcome that I need, what do I need to do to maybe, like fix the agenda, have the conversation and kind of set the tone so that we're all being intentional about the time that we have, because time is of the essence for all of us, especially when we're trying to think about how we're gonna fit everything into a week to 24 hours as well.

Speaker 1:

Another area of this is priorities. So when you think about career, it's very easy to think about, like well, everything is a priority right now, and this is not something that I've come up with, but I've seen other podcasters do this and some friends of mine. They set out what are their top three priorities. I do this now, but I did not come up with it the three priorities that they have for the week, because they're being intentional about their time. Those three priorities are the main things they're focusing on. Everything else might still have to happen in order to grow in other areas, but if these three things do not happen, we can't move the business forward, and so that's been really awesome to set those intentions, to think about what do I need to do this week? And then everything else is kind of like a nice to have in those things.

Speaker 1:

Other ones we talked about goals a little bit and the last one I would say is your checklist with relationships. So how are you building relationships in your career, in your workplace? I cannot tell you or stress enough that being intentional about networking is so important. There's many times where people would say, oh, you need to meet with so-and-so and so-and-so and I would do it, but I wasn't intentional and I think that really hurt me, to be honest with you. And so now, when I set up time with people and I want to network, I'm very intentional because I know that it is their time and it's my time. So what is the desired outcome? Just being honest with that? And sometimes it's hey, I just wanted to get to know you, I thought you were a really cool person, but other times it's okay to be transparent about it because you want to be intentional and them to know as well.

Speaker 1:

And the fifth one is your time. So everything that we just talked about friends, family, career, health and well-being all of those are so important, but so is your time, because when we think about our lives, it can be split into many different categories, and so it's so important for us to make sure that we're being intentional about our time, to make sure that we are doing things that bring us joy, that maybe that's volunteering, maybe that's a passion project, maybe that's working out. Whatever that looks like for you. It's so important because if we have goals, if we have things we wanna achieve, we also need to make sure, like, am I happy doing all of these things? The other thing is finding the time right. So maybe it's blocking your calendar, maybe it's making sure that every day at this time I'm going to, you know, go work out. Or maybe I need to volunteer three times a month in order to be intentional, to make sure that I'm adding that joy into my life. So those are just examples. These are things that you know you need to figure out what works best for you.

Speaker 1:

Another one is, again, self-love always focusing on that I know I talked about that already, but I just cannot preach that enough how important it is and then thinking about yourself in all aspects of these, so knowing that you're never going to have it all figured out right, like everything's not going to go perfect. But how do I be more intentional about my time? Maybe it's just making that list of like. Here's the things that I know that I want to be more intentional about. Here are some quick tools that I can do. And again, like when I think about my friends and being more intentional for that. It's different for every person, but it's also about making sure, like, if I really truly value this friendship, what am I going to do to be intentional about it? Same thing with your career. If I really care about it and I only have 40 hours to work, how am I going to be intentional about my time so that the company is getting the best of me?

Speaker 1:

And so some questions to ask yourself when you're going through this and thinking about intentions is when you wake up in the morning and you're getting ready for the day, maybe even brushing your teeth, ask yourself what is my intention for today? And maybe it is to just be happy, or maybe it's that you submit something that's kind of a deadline, or maybe that means that you make sure that you make it to your son's basketball game. Whatever that is, I want you to set those in the morning. That's a very specific tool to utilize, but it's really cool when you set it over time, because you're seeing how you're able to achieve those intentions throughout the day. Another thing to ask yourself is what do I hope to achieve? So this is another question you can ask yourself when, maybe, you're working on a project, maybe when you are trying to be more intentional about something in your life.

Speaker 1:

Another area to think about when it comes to questions mindful intention questions is how can I be supportive today? How do I need to show up for people in my life in order for them to know that I'm here for them? Maybe another question to ask yourself is does this help me reach my goals and that could be your personal goals, this could be your professional goals but me being intentional with my time, does this thing specifically help us reach our goals? And then the last one is does this make me happy? Because we're all going to have things sometimes that we don't always love to do, but when we can be more intentional about our time and where we're spending it, we will have less stress, higher well-being and happiness, and we've already talked about all of those things that being more intentional does for us, and so that's what I want for all of you. So when we think about these things, it's really important for us to think of them as not a checklist, but what works best for us, and so in the show notes is a free one pager for all of you guys to download to help you have actionable tools to help you do this.

Speaker 1:

I'm really big on action because, for me, I want to make sure that I'm checking in with myself. Back to that self-reflection piece. So this one pager is in the show notes. Just download it and it will give you tools and tips and tricks to really help you be more intentional in the five aspects of your life that we just talked about.

Speaker 1:

And one of the biggest things I guess the biggest outcome, intention that I had for this podcast was for you to have the tools to help you know that intention setting and being more intentional is a game changer in your life. For me, my desired outcome for myself is that I am more intentional about my time, that I'm saying no to things that don't fit within those buckets that I need, and that I'm just being smarter. One of the things that we're big on right now is working smarter, not harder, and so, for me, intention setting really does that, so that I can fill up the other aspects of my life with love and freedom and all of the values that I have. I mean, my word this year is discipline, so it kind of goes hand in hand there. So when you're going through this, don't get discouraged. There are days where you might just not have it perfectly figured out, but it's about coming back to it and making time to be intentional, because I promise you that it will really help you overall as a person and with your confidence. So, as I always say at the end of these podcasts, continue to spread love and kindness to everybody that you meet and have a great day.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for tuning into the Confident Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, follow the Confident Podcast on Instagram and TikTok and share it with those who might benefit. Also, if you are looking to work one-on-one with me, message and follow me on Instagram at LisaTarkingtonOfficial. Stay confident, stay inspired and, until next time, keep striving to be the best version of yourself.

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