Intentional Choices: Re-Aligning with Your Values

As moms, we’re faced with so many choices every day. Should we feed our kids Cheerios for breakfast, make them hearty bacon and egg sandwich or should we just head to our nearest drive-thru to give them the nutrition that they need?

Every day you’re making choices. And you’re making choices about your health, you’re making choices about your business, and you’re making choices about your family. One of the things that I found was not all of my choices were in alignment with who I wanted to be, where I wanted to go, how I wanted my business to grow and what kind of kids I wanted to raise.

And I give it a pause because that was a really tough realization to realize that I wasn’t being true to my own wild and free values. But sometimes we get down the road of survival, of coping, of having so many things on the go that we start into making choices that maybe don’t feel so intentional anymore but they just feel easier in the moment. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s okay to just survive for a while.

But as soon as we’ve come back to ourselves and we’ve come back to the place where we are and we realize it’s not where we want to be, it’s time to make different choices. The choices that are really intentional. And why I always say living the intentional life that you want is because you have a certain way, you know, whether it’s a lifestyle, you want to live on a farm versus in suburbia, or whether it’s the kind of kids you want to raise or the kind of business you’re growing, there are choices to be made there.

We only have so much energy in a day.

There’s only so many things you can do. So if you’re considering that, you’ve gotta consider the intentionality of your choices. I’m not here to make you feel bad about them. Heaven knows I’ve spent days where I haven’t gotten out of bed and I’ve read my book and ate Doritos all day too. I’m not saying there isn’t periods of rest and relaxation that go along with those periods of busy hustle, but we’ve got to be okay with those intentional choices and what outcomes that they have.
I’ve made a lot of intentional choices. I’ve made an intentional choice to live on a farm as opposed to in the city. I’ve made the intentional choice to live three provinces away from my nearest and dearest. I’ve made a lot of these choices because I have a bigger vision in mind. I have a bigger vision in mind for my family and for my growth.

How to Start Being Intentional with Your Values

So if you’re considering what yours are, I usually start by making a value list. So what you can do is you can prioritize the things that are important to you right now. I would suggest not putting more than six things on this list and that’s going to cause you to be really intentional about what those things are.

So if you’re in a stage right now where your children are the number one, that’s okay. Just write down that list as your day-to-day priorities and how they’re going right now. And then, I want you to write a second list. This second list is going to be the things that you want to value and the things that intentionally you want to create. And I want you to rank them from one to six, one being the most important and six being the least important. If I had a guess, I would guess Netflix isn’t on there.

So there’s a lot of things that we do every day, there are habits that we fall into, there are routines that we fall into that might not be the ones that are making us move closer to the intentional dreams that we have. Now’s time to look at those intentions and think about how you’re living them in your day-to-day life. Are you giving the most time to the things that are truly important to you and the things you really want to accomplish?

There’s no guilt in this. It’s just a way to have a checkpoint to say, here is where I want to be and I want to move closer to that. And then I want you to take a look at your daily, your weekly, your monthly, whatever, routine and see what you could change there. Where can you find little pockets of time or maybe you’re going to take out something completely and make time for the things you really want to do. If you want to read more, maybe instead of doing Netflix in the evening, you’re gonna take that time to read. If you want to work out maybe you’re going to get up earlier and you’re going to have an hour of workout before the day starts.

If you want to get better in touch with yourself, maybe you’re gonna give yourself 15 minutes of meditation in your day. Maybe there at lunch, maybe there in the morning, maybe there in the evening, it doesn’t really matter. You just need to start finding the time so you can switch what you’re doing to what you truly want to do.

When you can do that on a consistent basis, that’s when things really start to change. That’s when you’re gonna see the things you really want and those intentions that you have because you’re now working on them and they’ve become a priority, they’re going to start to happen.