How to Find Your Core Intention

a powerful tool to create your work that matters

I’m still celebrating my first-ever royalty check for my book that came out in 2017, Work That Matters: How to Create a Livelihood that Reflects Your Core Intention. What can I say? That was a long-delayed celebration so I’m going to milk it for all it’s worth! See my previous post here, which is an excerpt from the book. For this installment of the festivities, here’s a piece that goes into more detail about the first “Key to Liberation-based Livelihood.”

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For many years in my own search for work that matters, I got stuck on the question, “What’s my passion?” — one that seems to be the starting point for so many books on the subject. I even felt something was wrong with me because I couldn’t answer that question. Or alternately, I came up with a long list of things I loved to do and then I was even more confused.

Things began to shift when I realized that, for me, that was the wrong question.

Now when I work with people who want to find their heart’s calling, I start from a different direction. “Become intimate with your Core Intention” is the first of my Six Keys to Liberation-Based Livelihood, indicating the fundamental position it holds in this process of moving toward right livelihood. I spend a lot of time giving clients tools to dive deep and get to know their Core Intention before we do anything else.

In contrast to “passion,” your Core Intention is not connected to an object or an activity — it’s the essential reason that you’re inspired to do those things. Once you hone in on that, you realize you have many more possibilities to create work that matters than you first thought.

For example, you might recognize that you love cooking. But when you start to uncover your Core Intention, you discover that the driving force underneath that passion is actually that you love to nourish people. And that desire to offer nourishment can take many forms — cooking is simply one of them.

The problem is that it’s easy to get obsessed with an object or activity — in this case, cooking — and overlook the energy at the heart of it that is uniquely yours to give to the world — in this case, the act of nourishing. You might think you have to get a job as a chef or caterer to fulfill this vision, but if you end up in a workplace where that value of nourishment isn’t shared, that can backfire and you end up burned out.

Consider how often this happens with teachers and those in the healing and helping professions. You may land up in a work environment where the ostensible mission is to educate or help people heal, but what’s actually going on is quite the opposite. Many school systems are designed to teach conformity rather than a true love of learning. Much of the healthcare system is driven by the need to make a profit, not to heal people. No wonder we end up feeling disillusioned even though we got the job title we thought would be fulfilling.

The beauty of intention is that it focuses on “why” you do something rather than “what” you do.

As you become more intimate with your “why” — the “vitality” and “life force” as Martha Graham beautifully describes it — you will vastly increase your capacity to make wise and powerful choices related to your work life.

So how can you find your Core Intention?

Mining for Gold / Photo by Leiada Krozjhen on Unsplash

I strongly believe mindful awareness is the ‘secret sauce’ that makes the exercises I’m about to share with you come to life. The deeper the place inside from which you answer the questions below, the more transformative this process will be. If you don’t already have a contemplative practice, this is a fine time to start one! (Check out this article for tips on how to begin or deepen a practice.)

Here’s a starting point. Get out a journal and pen (or a sketchbook and paints or pastels if you’re a visual person), and give yourself free rein to play with the following questions:

• What lights you up like a holiday tree?

• What makes your internal tuning fork vibrate at a high frequency?

• If your financial needs were taken care of and money was of no concern, what would you most enjoy doing with your day?

• What activities do you engage in that make you completely lose track of time?

• What comes so naturally and easily to you that you rarely think of it as your strength?

• If you knew you only had a year to live, how would you want to spend the majority of your time and energy? How about if you only had a month to live?

Some of those questions may fall flat for you — don’t worry about that. Just keep your pen or paintbrush moving and move on to the next one. As much as possible, let your answers flow from an intuitive place rather than an analytical perspective.

As those responses come, I encourage you to take this another level deeper and consider the ‘why’ behind your answers. For example, if being in nature is what really lights you up, why is that? What are the gifts you receive from time in nature, and how do you in turn share those gifts with others?

Another exercise that I give to participants in my Work That Matters online course (and you can find it in my book) is called “Mining for Gold in Your Job History.” To paraphrase 12 Step recovery work, this involves taking a “searching and fearless” professional inventory of all the work responsibilities you’ve ever held — including unpaid gigs such as volunteer work and being a parent.

There’s an extensive process and form in the book, but here’s a shorter version. Think about five jobs (which can include volunteer work) that you’ve held over the course of your lifetime. See if you can include some from your younger years as well as more recent ones. Once you’ve got these listed, go through each one and rank from 1 to 5 for how how excited you felt in that position… how eager were you to get out of bed and start each day of work. Here are the scale ratings:

1=Not at all

3=Medium

5=Incredible, off the charts!

Once you’ve done that, pay special attention to every job/volunteer work that you ranked with a 4 or 5. What were the common elements of those? What patterns do you notice?

You’d be amazed at how many clues are hidden in this work history that can help you uncover your Core Intention, as well as identifying the conditions you need to thrive in a job.

As you spend time with these questions and exercises, what starts as a fuzzy glimmer of a Core Intention will gradually clarify. Keep doing this until it turns into a short and pithy statement that you can literally feel ringing in your body — that’s how you’ll know you’ve got it.

Your Core Intention doesn’t have to be long; in fact the shorter and simpler it is, the better. Mine is “To open up people’s hearts and minds.” That’s it!

Later in the process offered in the book, your Core Intention will form the heart of your personal mission statement. This is where you add the “what” factor, the work activities that are an expression of your Core Intention. My example: “My mission is to open up people’s hearts and minds through my writing and creating spaces for transformative learning.”

While your personal mission statement may change over time as you choose other activities, the Core Intention itself usually remains pretty stable over your lifetime. Once you’ve dialed in on your Core Intention and personal mission statement, you’ll find them to be invaluable guides to helping you make decisions about your career path.

If you give either of these exercises a try, please let me know how it goes!

I truly believe that when each of us is clear on our Core Intention, we create an intentional world — and that means a world with less harm and more joy.

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