Hey, it's Samantha Hartley of the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. This is season three, Consultants and Consulting. Today, I specifically want to talk to you about using the power of intention in your consulting business. Years ago, I read the book The Power of Intention by Dr Wayne Dyer. And in it, he told a story that really influenced me. He had some relatives that he'd never really gotten along with that always struggled and they had to go for a holiday to be with him one time. He says he wanted to have a different experience of them and to do what was in his power to create a different experience. So, he basically set an intention which was, “I intend to see only that which pleases me”. It was as simple as that. He then reported that he went to what would normally be a kind of an upsetting and annoying time with these relatives and had a perfectly good time when he left.

I thought that was compelling, but a little bit hard to believe so, my husband and I had our own in-laws that we were kind of struggling with, and we decided that we would do the same thing so I said, “Let's set the intention that not just that, I want to see that which pleases me, but I really want to see the best in them, I want to see what's really great about them.” So we had a kind of a lot of traveling to do. By the time we get there, you know it is kind of dis jostled and disgruntled here, shaken up from travel. So by the time I got there, I'd kind of forgotten about my intention. We had this normal time that we did with them, except for we had a really fabulous time. And I remember walking home from that day with my husband and saying, “We just had a really good time with them. How is it that we had such a good time with them? And I thought they must have done something totally different, like, they were different right? They were definitely different.” Then, we thought we set that intention, had that really worked? Had we been able to do something that changed them? Because they seemed really different or was it just that we were different and we saw them differently? I still don't know what the answer to that is.

All I know is that when I have set clear intentions about what I want to have happen, that's what usually happens. So, that's a personal example. In my business, I had a referral partner who was driving me crazy. I'm going to call him Miles. And basically, he was heavily involved in all of the business that he sent to me and there was kind of weirdness around money and weirdness around the implementation of the work and I had a call setup with him and it was the call where I was basically going to break up and I set on paper like these are the things that I need to see happen differently or else I don't think the relationship is going to work.

So before the call, I set the intention to have this open and clear conversation and that my intention was to find what was going to be the best thing for both of us in the end. I got on the call and again, as if by magic, Miles started saying, “Oh, here's things I've been doing. I should've been doing these things, I want to do things totally differently. Can we still continue to work together and can it be like this?” Again, I got off the phone, I turned to my husband and I said, “What just happened? How is it that this thing that I thought was going to be a huge conflict” I was really prepared for a knock down drag out in this call, it just evaporated and what I think happens is that in the setting of intention, in the formulation of a very clear intention about how we want things to be, we do a lot of work you know we get clear, we get clear on what we don't want, we get clear on what we do want and we set that in our minds and then energetically, we align with it and we bring that into a situation. I'm sure you've heard the expression, when we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change and I think that's what happens with intention and it's why I'm such an advocate for it and if you talk to any of my clients, they'll know that I'm constantly talking about intention and it's why I wanted to talk to you about it today.

My intention for today, this podcast, is that you will hear exactly what you need to hear in order to use this in your business to be more effective in your life and with your clients. I define intention basically, to me, if it's not intentional, it's accidental, that which is not done with intention is done accidentally, right? you get the default. And so to me it's so important that absolutely everything that we set out to do is done intentionally, A lot of times you'll hear me use the word strategic and things and what I very often mean by that is intentional. It's like if you're being strategic about something you're thinking about this leads to this leads to this and when we're being intentional, we're being very clear about what we want to have happen. When I start my calls with my clients, I'll say, “What's the intention for the call today? What do you want to happen by the time we're done?” And I think that kind of clarification is really helpful, it's looking at this thing kind of begin with the end in mind. It's like, “What do we want to come away with in the end? And knowing that, what do we need to do now in order to get there?” It's been really helpful.

Just recently in the last week, I had a VIP day with an agenda so we know what we want to cover. But do we really know what we want to come away with in the end? What is the intention for this day? I think that nuanced clarification can be helpful to you.

Gary Zukav defines intention as the heart of creating authentic power. I think what's important about creating authentic power for ourselves is that it's not power over others, it's power that we share with others. The power you can bring to situations we want to be in our power. We want to have that clarity of intention in our lives to make happen what we want to have happen. And that's a lot of the work in our businesses is getting clear on what we want to have happen and then making that stuff happen.

What's your goal for the business? What is the intention of the business in the world? What's the intention of your business? What are you doing on a yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily basis to make that happen? An intention to me is a declaration of what we want to have happen and it's just as simple as saying I intend to. When I was a little girl, my mother helped me one day when I was feeling down to begin the day with intention and she said, “Just get up every day and say today is going to be a great day.” You could argue that that's more of an affirmation but as I grew older, I intended to have a great day today. When I was a young consultant, I was just learning the ropes and what I needed to do every day in my business. I would wake up and literally one of the first thoughts in my mind - in order to shout down the anxiety that would sometimes be there - I would say to myself, I intend to get a new client today.

So that intention is a way for us to take power, take control over our day and you know there's so much that we don't control in running a business. But what you can control is your attitude. You can control your intentions and it really helped me to be able to say, at least for myself, I know this is what I want. Again, using this with our clients, what do I intend in this client relationship? What does the client intend to have happen? We don't necessarily have authority over our clients, we have influence so I can't come in there and make them do what they hired me to help them do but I can influence that. A lot of times the way that we can do that is by helping them to intend things and to get clear on that. It's specifically why I wanted to bring this to you right now. It's because I have, over the last couple of weeks, been saying over and over again to clients, what's your intention for this? And I know that if you're using intentions with your clients more often, you're going to see them get better results and that is so much of our work, right? Getting their results through them, with them and sometimes for them. So that's how I want you to think of it.

Now, how can we use intention? To me, classically, it's the start of anything, it's the start of the year, I intend to have this happen in 2020. I wonder how many of us had some great intentions for this year. Here's what I intend to have happen, it might not end up looking like I intended it to happen. But I intended 2020 to be the year of connection, I would say I have connected incredibly meaningfully with so many people, not in person as I had thought I would so you know things don't always look exactly as we intend, but the intention very often will come true anyway.

As I mentioned, in these situations where you're expecting conflict, but you want to have a different result than that, you can affect that change through your intentions. So at the start of anything, the start of a consulting relationship, when you go in, once you've been even in the conversations, but especially once you've been hired, it's really important to say, what's your intention for this for this project or what's your intention for our work together? and then revisiting that, I will revisit that definitely on a milestone basis for this next section of work, what's your intention for this on a meeting by meeting basis? What's our intention today? What do we want to have happen?

And again, you can get yourself out of things that you don't need to be involved with. If you are clear on intentions and you make others clear, right if you hear that their intention is something and you're like, “I'm not here for that.” Then you get to say, “Actually I don't need to be here’ either this doesn't align or I just don't need to be a part of this you can do this on your own.” So, it's a very clarifying articulation of something that helps everyone.

The other thing is, when you say your intentions, what happens is parts of your brain kick in just like with visualization, right. Parts of your brain kick in and things around you start to kind of come in to support the achievement of that intention. And again I don't want to sound like it's too much magical thinking, but a lot of times it seems very kind of synchronistic, coincidental and things like that. But it's just that, the parts of your brain that are watching for that have been alerted to look for it by that clear intention. So, it does really help to state an intention, clearly so, with manifesting in goals and things like that there that is launched by the intention.

Really anytime I'm beginning an activity, I'm a marketing thing, any endeavor, a webinar, you know those kinds of things, and I also love to turn to intention in times of unclarity. If I'm unclear or my client is unclear and a classic example of this will be I'll be working with someone and they'll say I'm doing this thing, but it isn't working and I don't know why it's not working. So, it's like, why isn't my webinar converting or why isn't this email sequence doing anything or I've been doing LinkedIn outreach for months and it's never turned into anything. What's your intention for this? And so, sometimes we have to back up and get in touch again with what that intention is.

How does this fit in with the other things that you're doing? Are there things which are in conflict so that you think you want this from it, but actually you're taking actions which are not supporting that. So, intention is amazing for clarifying, any kind of unclarity that someone is having or things that they thought they shouldn't be doing a lot of times as I said, they don't know the intention for it because I just thought I was supposed to be doing this. My intention was to do the thing that the unintended intention or the unspoken intention was to do the thing that everybody else is doing that I thought I should be doing.

So, that can really help you to get your clients to articulate something that you can then support them with. I've always thought it was interesting, this piece of information that when you're working on your muscles and in muscle bodybuilding, that if you think about the specific muscle that you're working on as you're working on, it kind of amplifies the effect it really makes it better. And to me, that's exactly what intentions are doing, it's like I'm doing a thing, but I'm also clearly articulating my desire to do a thing.

So what I'd like you to do next is to basically write the word intention down and then put it in some place you're going to see it every single day and I want you to begin to just meditate on intention, what is my intention broadly? How can I use intention with my clients to get better results? Is there any place that I feel like what's happening is unintentional or accidental or the default mode? What can I do about that? To harness the energy around that and create a clear intention and get a result that I'm looking for? What do you want to have happen and how do you make that happen?

So I think that it's simple to use intentions, I think that's something that you can easily do as long as you're reminded of it. The reminder is the thing that I want you to do, I want you to keep this in your awareness so that you can be setting these intentions. Make a note for all your calls this week, first, we'll take a look at your calendar and take a look at every single thing that's scheduled on it and ask yourself, why am I doing this? What's my intention here? What's my intention for this meeting?

I'm traveling to the state. What is my intention for that travel? I want you to think of that across the board on all of your activities and then, get in the habit of beginning each meeting, whether you're going to say this aloud inside the meeting or whether two minutes before the meeting, you set that intention, before you even open up the zoom, you say, “Here's what I intend to have happen on this call.” That's the habit that I want you to build. And I know that if you do, you are going to have a lot more of a profitable and joyful consulting business. Thanks, I'll see you next time.