The Happy and Prosperous Blog

The subject of today’s post is intention. Let’s start with some definitions.This first definition is from www.dictionary.net

• A stretching or bending of the mind toward an object; closeness of application; fixedness of attention; earnestness.

The second one comes from www.margaretmccraw.com/glossary.html

• Blending strong desire with strong belief to create a deliberate outcome.

John Locke, the British philosopher said

Intention is when the mind, with great earnestness, and of choice, fixes its view on any idea.

Use of Intention

I’d like to suggest that setting an intention is a useful tool we can all use to help ourselves get more of what we want. There are lots of ways in which we can use intention but first of all we have to be clear about what we want - we need to be specific about the outcome we want to create. I have written on the blog here before about being clear and specific about our goals and objectives in life. It is equally important to be clear and specific about much shorter term things too. And I’d like to focus on the short-term today.

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Just a brief post today. If you’re a regular here you will have noticed the ‘I Recommend’ section that I have added on the right. Sounds a bit pretentious or even arrogant so perhaps I need to change the title of it. Anyway, I want to use this to promote books, DVDs or anything that I think fits in with the purpose and objectives of this blog.Amazon provides this facility and allows me to chose what to display here from anything in their catalogue. If you choose to buy anything from my selected titles here then Amazon will give me 5% of the purchase price. So I hope this is a win-win-win situation.

• It’s a win for Amazon, because they sell something and hopefully make a profit from that (otherwise why would they do it ?)
• It’s a win for me because I get a small kick-back from Amazon
• Most importantly it’s a win for you, as you can get resources that I have found useful and which I hope you will find useful too. I think there’s a very good chance of you enjoying these items if you like reading this blog.

I have started with listing the DVD of The Secret which, as you will know if you read here often, I believe has a huge amount of wisdom contained within the hour and a half running time. Worth watching again and again.

There are 2 Science of Getting Rich items - a book and an audio CD. The Secret is based on this book. Although it’s nearly a hundred years since it was first published, it is still full of useful insights.

I also wanted to bring to your attention a book called ‘Money is Love’ by Barbara Wilder. This is the book I am reading at the moment. It goes into the history of money (briefly !) and explains how it once had a sacred meaning. The author believes that if we can restore some of it’s sacredness and can keep it flowing, we can all have much more wealth in our own lives.

As more books or other items occur to me, I’ll add them into the list. You can be sure that they will be relevant to the topics we discuss here. If you have any recommendations, please feel free to let me know via the comments.

Thanks for reading.

I’ve written before in this blog about Gratitude. When I was commenting on the Science of Getting Rich, I wrote about the author’s convictions regarding being grateful for what we have and what we will have. More recently, I wrote about the Virtuous Spiral in which I suggested that the more grateful we are for what we have, the more we will have to be grateful for.Today I want to talk about the related idea of Appreciation. I looked up definitions for the word and the one I liked best was ‘To recognize the quality, significance, or magnitude of’.

Recognise

The way I think about this is that gratitude is something I do internally and appreciation is something I do externally - like outward gratitude !

I am grateful for a lot of things and mostly I keep that to myself. Sometimes, I take the next step and say to someone that I appreciate something they have done or that I appreciate something about them. This last one is the most challenging one for me but I am getting better at it. Going back to the definition, it’s about saying that I recognise the significance of something they have done or a quality that they have, be it patience, calmness, insight, whatever.

How do you feel if someone thanks you for something you have done ? What if someone gives you a compliment ? What if your boss says thank you for something you did at work. My guess is you would feel good - it would lift your spirits.

In any team - whether at work or at home - giving appreciation, I think, is essential to keep up motivation and support. Let’s do more of it - try it with you partner, your friends, the children. Take care though to keep it genuine - empty praise can have the opposite effect.

Onwards and Upwards

Maybe this is the Law of Attraction again. If you give appreciation to someone, then they are likely to do more of whatever it was you appreciated ! It is positive reinforcement. What goes around, comes around. Don’t wait for someone else to start the process - start it yourself, start now. Start small if you like and thank someone for something they have done. Then work up to appreciating something about someone - a quality they possess. Let me know what happens.

Thanks for reading.