Stepping into your power as a deliberate creator

Written by Alex Poeter

I want to invite you to take a moment and think of all the major achievements in your life and career. This could include academic and professional achievements, relationships and friendships that are important to you, moves to new locations, skills you’ve learned, challenges you’ve overcome, and whatever else comes to mind. Now think about the types of abilities and strengths it took to create those experiences. Can you see how powerful you actually are?

However, too often we don’t use our power to create the life we truly want. There are a few reasons.

One is that we internalize habitual patterns over the years that originated from fear and resistance, and which continue to drive our actions and decisions on a daily basis by default. For example, we act out behavioral patterns that are driven by the need to prove that we’re worthy and that we’re good enough. Most of the time we’re not even aware of these patterns – they’ve become completely automatic.

Another big reason is that we allow others to influence our actions and decisions in ways that don't serve us. We allow our actions and decisions to be driven by fear – fear of being judged by others if we don’t do what’s expected of us. So, instead of creating experiences that would bring us joy, we prioritize “acting in ways to not disappoint others.”

If we don’t set intentions for how we want to show up, what qualities we want to embody, and how we’d like to experience the situation we’re about to enter, we’re much more likely to succumb to our own habitual default patterns, or to other people’s influence and agenda. And then we not only run the risk of becoming reactive and defensive, we’re also more likely to sacrifice our own needs and wants.

Here is a practice that I’ve found incredibly helpful when it comes to creating experiences that align with our needs and wants. The idea behind this practice is to set intentions for everything we do throughout our day. This means we not only set intentions at the beginning of our day based on how we’d like to experience it, we continue to set intentions each time we move into a new situation, experience, interaction, or task.

I invite you to give this practice a try. Set reminders if that helps. And then set intentions for what you want to experience, whether it’s when you’re about to eat a meal, interact with someone, get on a call, travel somewhere, work on a task, exercise, cook, go for a walk or engage in any other type of activity throughout your day.

The key is to keep remembering to do it and to keep practicing diligently until the practice becomes second nature. And when that happens, your life will transform in magnificent ways.