The Power of Intention

Tune in to discover one of my favorite tools - the power of intentions. Discover why setting an intention is a powerful way to get the brain to work for you. Learn why intentions are different than goals and how they can help you create the results you want.

I'll share plenty of examples of how I use the power of intentions in all areas of my life - not just food. In fact, I'm using it right now preparing this podcast!

What intentions can you set for yourself today? This concept is truly life-changing.

Want to know why you struggle with food and what to do next? Start watching The Food Freedom Mini Series today. 

Transcript

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Welcome to Binge Breakthrough, the podcast designed to help you finally break through the barriers that keep you stuck, feeling out of control around food. I'm Master Certified Coach James Hilker, and I want you to know that no matter how long you've been struggling or what you've tried, food freedom is possible. And I'm here to show you how. After years of therapy, eating disorders treatment, restrictive diet, and reading all the books, I was still stuck in the onigan-onic cycle of restricting and binging until I was able to see it all from a new perspective that changed everything. Each week I will share the strategies, tools, and mindset that allowed me to overcome my decades-long battle with binge eating. Your journey to body trust starts now. Let's dive in. Hello, trusted listener. Welcome to Binge Breakthrough. I consider you a trusted listener because I trust that you are listening to this podcast for a reason. I trust that you are going to hear something that is insightful and impactful on your journey with food. So I want to talk to you today about the power of intention. This is a concept that I use a lot with my clients. I and I also use for myself personally. The power of intention is incredibly powerful. So let's dive in. What is an intention? An intention, it's simply just what you want for yourself. Now, here's why I love it. And here's why it works. It helps put the reticular activating system to work. Now, if you're not familiar with what the reticular activating system is, it's basically a filter in your brain. You have, I don't know, the numbers really vary depending on the resource that you look at, but you have well over 60,000 thoughts a day that come into your mind and into not even your awareness, but over 60,000 thoughts a day. That's a lot of thoughts. There's no way you could even be aware of all of them. What the reticular activating system does is it's a filter. It tells your brain what's important. It basically, uh, it really, it's a filter. It's a filter for your brain that says, here's how we're going to prioritize and know which of these 60,000 thoughts that we're having are actually important. So you see the reticular activating system at work. Most um, the, the, the, the example that we've probably all experienced is with cars. If you are at a period in your life where you are looking to acquire a new vehicle, all of a sudden you might start to see that particular kind of vehicle on the road everywhere. Or let's say um recently my husband actually bought a new car and I didn't even know he wanted a new car. So I didn't have the experience where we were, I was noticing those particular cars on the road. But what I did have was when he bought it, he got a red car. Then I started noticing red cars. So my reticular activating system went to work on red cars and seeing all the red cars on the road or in a particular parking lot. And it feels like there's more red cars on the road, but that's not really true. It's just now I'm more aware of them because my reticular activating system is working on it. So what we do with intentions, and the reason that intentions are so powerful is it puts the reticular activating system to work on what to create. Your brain will always go to work to solve any problem that it is working on. Your brain does not care if it is a helpful problem, a useful problem, a problem that you would rather not have. The brain doesn't care. It really is a problem-solving machine. Now, if we don't use the power of intention and our prefrontal cortex, the brain is going to look for what's wrong. It's going to look for problems to solve, it's going to look for the danger. So we need to use the power of intention and use utilize our reticular activating system to tell it what to focus on. All right. So that's what we're doing and why it's so powerful. So you might be curious, you might be wondering, how is an intention different from a goal? So a goal is often outcome-based. So you have probably heard of SMART goals. SMART is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, actionable. Uh oh man, I forgot the R. Relevant. I think it's relevant and no, um, realistic. That's what the R is realistic and time bound. So we have these very kind of like it's specific, it's measurable, like I'm going to um uh let's say here could be a smart goal. I'm not gonna binge for 30 days. I'm gonna go 30 days with no binge. So that could be a goal. So it's very outcome-based. Now, how is that different from an intention? An intention, it's something that you want for yourself, but there's not the pressure for it to be right. There's not the pressure that you will fail if you don't achieve it. There's no worthiness or value implied in an intention. So I might have an intention to stay connected with my food and with the signals from my body when I sit down to eat. That would be an intention versus a goal might be I'm going to um, I don't know, I'm gonna eat on a smaller plate or I'm gonna leave bites behind, or something like that. That's different than an intention of kind of what you want for yourself. Now, here's what I love about the power of intention. You can use this concept in so many places in life. And I'm gonna give you a bunch of examples. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you have heard me talk about using the power of intention in several different areas. So I'm gonna give you a lot of different examples and different areas that we can use this concept, this power of intention. So we can use it with specific meals. So let's say the other day I was talking to a client who um went to a family dinner and they were celebrating the birthday of a family member. And so there was gonna be, you know, a particular amount of food there, types of food that this client wasn't um fully comfortable being around. And there was definitely going to be birthday cake. So using the power of intention, you can decide ahead of time. How, what intention do I have for myself? How do I want to feel? This is the way that I like to use it. Use the intention specifically around meals. How do I want to feel? What is the intention I'm setting for myself for this meal? Maybe before I love to think about things before, during, and after. So with this holiday meal with the family, maybe I have an intention. I'm gonna be really connected with the family. I want to be really engaged in the in the dialogue, in the conversation. Maybe I want an intention specifically around the birthday cake. Like, yes, I want to have, I want to have a piece of birthday cake. And I'm really my intention is to be really curious and open. Do I like this birthday cake? My intention is to figure out if I like birthday cake. And if I do to understand what I like about it, how, what flavors I like, which bites I liked the best. Maybe that's an intention you could do around a specific meal. You can also use the power of intention if you're going out to eat. So another example would be how do I want to feel before, during, and after this meal? I love this question because even before, if you've got a lot of stress and anxiety of like, oh my gosh, I'm going to eat, like, I don't know, what is it going to be like? I don't really want to go. And yeah, like that already, you're setting yourself up to have a lot of additional tension in your body. While you're there, if you're not, if you don't set an intention, you're probably going to be really freaked out about like looking at the menu. What do I eat? How much do I eat? Do I eat everything on my plate? What is everybody else eating? But if you set an intention ahead of time, your brain knows it can already go to work on what it wants to create. How do I want to feel after when I leave the restaurant? So that I'm not just thinking, sometimes we spend so much time thinking, maybe ahead of time, I'm going to look at the menu. I'm going to decide what I'm going to eat. That's like kind of more goal-oriented. Can you hear the difference? In a goal, is like, okay, I'm going to go to the restaurant. I'm going to order this thing. I've already decided in advance that I'm going to eat, and I'm only going to eat half. And then I'm going to have them bring me a container. And then, or when I'm done, I'm going to put my napkin over my plate. I'm going to push it away. Like, there's a lot of like just focusing on what I'm doing. The intention is more focused on how do I want to feel? What do I want to focus on? What do I, there's more connection with yourself. All right, here's another example. Holidays, the holiday season. We are going into, if you are listening to this live when it is recorded in 2024, next week is Thanksgiving in the United States. We have Thanksgiving next week. We have Christmas coming up next month. There are a lot of opportunities to practice setting an intention for your holidays. One way you can use this very specifically going into Thanksgiving. What is my intention for it? Could be today, it could be the entire day. It could be, you could break up your day. Let's say you are a person who goes to, because you have an extended blended family, you might have uh three different holiday meals in one or two days. You could, for each specific meal, each specific outing, wherever you're going, have an intention. The intention might be the same, it might be different. You get to decide what your intention is. And what you're doing is you're putting your reticular activating system to work on what you want to experience. Other ways you can create it during the holidays. You can um you can also think about your intentions for gifts, buying gifts, wrapping gifts. How do I want to show up around the holidays? You could do it specifically for a holiday party. You could do it if you're going out with your friends, whatever you're going to be with your family, and you know there might be some conflict or some tension with a family member who maybe says sometimes that says things that trigger you sometimes. You can set an intention on how you want to respond, how you want to show up. Now, setting just setting an intention doesn't mean you're not going to get triggered. It doesn't mean things aren't going to happen, but it puts, you're basically setting the stage, you're planting the seed for yourself. So powerful. If you want to check out the replay of the bench free holiday event, I'll put a link in where you can check out the replay of that, where I gave some, we really kind of did a deep dive into how to have a bench free holiday season this year. So I'll put a link of that in the replay. You can get that through um through December of 2024. All right, another place you have seen me use this a lot is going on vacation. I love going on vacation, setting an intention. What do I want to focus on? How do I want to feel? What is important for me in this vacation? I do this on my own. A lot of times, if I'm going on a road trip with my husband, I'll ask him, what is your intention for our trip? Might even ask day by day, because depending on what we're doing on any given day, it is going to be a very different answer. Great place to use it. Approaching your workday, what is your intention for your work day? All right. My intention is to stay focused. My intention is, I might even have in this case, like I might even have an intention to get a certain amount of things done. But if I don't, I'm not going to beat myself up about it. How do you want to approach it? Spending time with family or friends. I love to. I've spent um, I've had a few very recently, I've had a few extended times with friends. And before I leave, I set an intention. How do I want to show up? How do I want to be? I often will think about really being connected. When I set this intention ahead of time, here's what I notice. I'm not just picking up my phone and being distracted. I don't get as annoyed or irritated because I'm setting the intention ahead of time. Here's another one of my favorites. How do you want to feel at the end of the day? It's an intention. My intention is to put my head on the pillow tonight, feeling accomplished, feeling relaxed, feeling proud, whatever it is. How do you want to respond to yourself after a bench? This is an intention. You can set an intention for yourself around this. If you want some help with this, how do I respond to myself after a bench? I always just beat myself up and think I'm broken and terrible and awful. I'm going to put a link in the show notes for a resource I have for you, which is what to do after a binge, can walk you through that process. Now, right now, as I am recording this podcast, I am getting ready for some travel coming up, some extended travel coming up, which you're going to hear about in a future episode. My intention is to get as much done as possible before my trip. I am really trying to set my future self up for success. So my intention is to be fully relaxed and unplugged while I am on my trip. This requires me to do some things in advance. But if I set an intention to of how I want to feel while I'm there and how I want to feel while I am getting these other things done so that I can be ready to go, I'm going to create a completely different experience for myself of getting to the day that we drive to the airport versus just stressing myself out up until that day and then being done. The power of intention. So intentions are softer than goals. There's more fluidity, more flexibility with intentions. Clients love this tool. I have a client, Helen, she's in the cultivate group, who recently went on vacation. She said, setting an intention before I left was so powerful for me. She said, I am usually so stressed out. And usually in some if everything has to be perfect. And if something isn't perfect, I kind of fall apart and I have a really hard time. And then, you know, maybe I end up binging or whatever else. And she said, Yes, I set an intention, and I things weren't perfect. And I was so able to be flexible about it, to adapt, to adjust. It was such a different experience. And then I have another private client, Erin. She talks about, she sets an intention for herself of what she's going to do in the transition from work to home. So she knows she's identified that transition period is challenging, as it is for a lot of working people. So she sets an intention of what she's going to do, how she's going to treat herself, how she's really going to approach that time. So now, if you are listening live and the Thanksgiving is coming up next week, if you happen to be in the United States, here's how you can use this concept. What intention would you like to set for your holiday? Now, when you're setting an intention, what intention would you like to set no matter what? So think about for yourself for this holiday, the next, if if if you're not listening to this during a holiday time, just think about the next major eating experience you're gonna have. What intention would you like to set for that? No matter what. The power of intention. It's such a powerful concept. You can literally use it in every area of your life. Now, if you would like some support and you want to dive into this a little bit deeper, I will put that link to the binge free holiday workshop replay. Check it out. You can really go deeper. And there's some worksheets that kind of can walk you through with this as well. But if you don't want to go deeper, all you need to remember is the power of intention. What intention do I want to set for myself? Use this, not just with food in every area of your life and watch the shift that it will make for you. All right, that's what I have for you this week. I will see you next week to talk about gratitude. I thought it would just be a perfect topic to talk about for the week of Thanksgiving in the United States. I can tell you right now, I am grateful for you, grateful for you listening to this podcast, and grateful to have this resource, this platform as a way to share these ideas and these concepts with people all across the globe. So amazing. And I just appreciate you tuning in. I'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to Binge Breakthrough. You can find the show notes and any resources mentioned at bingebreakthrough.com. If you like this episode, subscribe to have future episodes delivered to you each Wednesday. And remember, your five star rating and review will help others discover these life changing concepts. See you next week.