Below, Chris Bailey shares five key insights from his new book, Intentional: How to Finish What You Start.
Chris is an author and lecturer who explores the science behind living a more productive and intentional life. He has written hundreds of articles on the subject and garnered coverage in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, GQ, and Harvard Business Review, among many other outlets.
What’s the big idea?
Most of us struggle with follow-through, not because we lack discipline, but because we don’t understand what’s driving us and accommodate that which holds us back. When you clarify your core values, lower the friction to getting started, and align small intentions with bigger goals, action becomes more natural and meaningful.
1. Know your 12 values.
To be honest, whenever I’ve heard the term “values” in the past, I kind of tuned it out, especially with personal values. What would always come to mind for me were those cheesy corporate exercises where some management consultant comes in and lays down a list in front of you with a hundred values on it, and they say, “Pick the 10 that mean the most to you. ” Most of those are not rooted in science. They’re not rooted in the psychology of values. But in researching this book, I found that there is real science to be found on the topic of values.
There exists science on values that has not only been proven in research but also validated cross-culturally in more than 80 countries across thousands of studies with hundreds of thousands of participants. The latest research shows that there are 12 fundamental human values that we all share in varying amounts.
To give you a lay of the land, there are essentially two fundamental motivations we all have—two axes upon which our motivations fit within. In any moment, we’re either focused on enriching ourselves or enriching others. That’s the first axis. And the second one is we’re either motivated to conserve things as they are or we want to change or improve the way that things are. All 12 values fit within these fundamental motivations.
Values are, in this way, motivations in and of themselves. As I list them, reflect on which connect most with you. Some might even repel you, and that can be informative as well.
Here are the top 12 values:
- Self-direction – cultivating your own thoughts, ideas, and actions.
- Stimulation – seeking novelty.
- Hedonism – pursuing (usually sensory) pleasure.
- Achievement – striving for success through demonstrating competence.
- Power – prestige and control over resources or people.
- Face – preserving your image and avoiding humiliation.
- Security – valuing personal and societal safety and stability.
- Tradition – respect and commitment to customs.
- Conformity – fitting in with rules, obligations, and expectations of others.
- Humility – recognizing your insignificance in the grand scheme.
- Universalism – understanding and protecting the welfare of all people and nature.
- Benevolence – being a devoted and reliable member of the groups you occupy.
We are all a different combination of these values. Reflecting on this can let you connect with your motivational core.
2. Shrink your resistance level to getting something done.
The science of intention is quite beautiful and powerful, but it shows as well that there are reasons that we procrastinate on the things that we intend to do. Just as there are 12 values, there are essentially six main things that lead us to procrastinate tasks.
We often procrastinate a task if it is at least one of the following:
- Boring
- Frustrating
- Unpleasant
- Far off in the future
- Unstructured
- Meaningless
The reason for procrastination is usually some combination of these. These reasons are not connected with our 12 values.
When something is unstructured and also a bit frustrating and unpleasant, there are a lot of different tactics that we can deploy. One of my favorites is shrinking our resistance level. This comes up often with meditation, but it can work for writing, working out, or finally cleaning up that ugly closet in your basement. What you do is essentially feel out your resistance level to doing that thing. You might think, “Hey, do I want to meditate for 40 minutes today?” No, no, no, no, no. No way. No way do I want to meditate for 40 minutes. Okay. What about 30? No. Okay. What about 25? No. 20 to 15? I can probably do 15.
In this way, you accommodate the resistance level you have toward doing something. There will still be a little bit of resistance, but you gain control. You reconnect with that value of self-direction, which is a very common value overall. You just get a grip over the intentions that you set and begin to shape.
3. Build self-reflective capacity.
Buddhist monks observe intentionality but from the direction of the causes and effects that happen within our own minds. After a Buddhist Dharma talk, I asked one of the monks, “Where does intention come from?” He listed off a lot of sources that were mapped on top of the research.
It comes from our biology, right? We set an intention to go to the bathroom on a road trip. It comes from social environments, right? We adopt the intentions of others through phenomenon like social contagion. It comes from conditioning by family and culture, and intentions come from our desire to avoid pain and find happiness. Intention also comes from the lessons we have learned, which shape how we think about and view the world. But the final source that he mentioned was not in the research and it was our self-reflective capacity.
Self-reflective capacity is our ability to look within ourselves and reflect on what we would want to do differently and where we truly wish to go. It’s where our deepest intentions come from because we can ask questions of our inner world. I have a challenge for you: stop reading for a moment, and set an intention for what you will do next after finishing this Book Bite.
“It’s where our deepest intentions come from because we can ask questions of our inner world.”
What do you want to do? What do you want to listen to? What do you want to engage with? Who do you want to talk to? An intention will arise when you ask a question of your inner world. What do I want to do next? What do I truly want to get out of doing this current thing? It can come from a question like that, but it can come from journaling too. These intentions can come from going on long walks and just letting the mind wander. It can come from meditation, which leads us to become more intentional and connect with this self-reflective capacity.
It turns out there is actually a lot of research behind this self-reflective capacity, but this frame for looking inward is sometimes where our deepest intentions come from. When you find these intentions, when they arise in your mind, you can go back to the 12 values and think, “Oh, this actually does align with what I want to do most or what I value most in my life.” It’s wild how that naturally happens.
4. Get to know the intention stack.
There is a shape to the intentions in our life. Every intention we set is different. Some differ in where they come from, as discussed in the previous insight. Some differ in how long they are—we have an intention to get a promotion in our career, but also an intention to take a morning run. They differ in how strong they are—the strength of an intention is how much we desire doing it. They vary in how deep they are, which is how connected they are with our values, but they can also be nested within one another.
We all have these things that we’re intending to do, these grand goals that we want to achieve, but we don’t always make them happen. Why don’t we make those happen? Because goals are an intention. An intention is just a plan that we’re going to do something. There are smaller and larger intentions relative to the goals in our life. Smaller intentions might include our plans for following through on a goal. Even smaller still are the intentions we have at this moment, like finishing reading this Book Bite.
You can work your way up in terms of how long the intentions in our life take place. We have the present intentions—the things that we’re doing today. We have broader plans, then you work your way up to goals, which are the broader stories of change that we’re making in our life. And broader than that are our priorities in life, like our health, fitness, and relationships. Above our priorities are (our ultimate intentions) our values. They’re what we’re ultimately after in life.
“An intention is just a plan that we’re going to do something.”
Let’s say you have a goal right now, like the next intention you’re going to do after this Book Bite: dial into a conference call. But many intentions take place over a longer period of time than this. Maybe dialing into a conference call fits with your plan of developing relationships with three new partners in your business, which might fit into your business goal of finding an expansion partner, which might fit into your priority to expand into a new market, which might fit into your ultimate value of accomplishment through work and benevolence through helping others grow, too.
5. Anticipate obstacles.
Desire and aversion fluctuate over the timeline of goal attainment, across the various goals that we have. But research shows that from the outset of your next goal, one of the best things that you can do in your head is something called mental contrasting. Essentially, you ask yourself, what obstacles are going to get in the way of me achieving this goal?
If you want to work out more, do you have travel coming up? If you want to write a book, are you going to find it difficult to find the time? So maybe you need to wake up earlier. What obstacles will get in the way of you being intentional about the goals that you set?
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This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.