No rest for the weary! So for getting your goal you must keep on working even though you’re exhausted or tired. This is the way you can be focused on, but…

If there’s a secret driver behind your personal power and your feeling level of empowerment, it has to be intentionality.  Intentionality?  And what is intentionality?  It is your intent—the thoughts in the back of your mind about what you are wanting to do and to achieve.  It is the direction that you set regarding where you want to go.  It is your motive and of course, from your motive comes your motivation, your agenda, and your purpose.


Your intention stands in contrast with your attention.  So in Neuro-Semantic trainings, and especially the APG training, we run an Intentionality Pattern as part of the Accessing Personal Genius pattern in order to facilitate the development of a laser-beam focus.  And why?  So that you can get your attentions at the primary level to be aligned with your intentions at the highest levels of your mind.  And when you can do that, you have the foundation for another facet of personal empowerment, namely, self-discipline, the ability to get yourself to do what you say you’re going to do and what you intend to do.


These two facets of consciousness (intention and attention) describes what’s on our mind (attention) and what’s in the back of our mind (intention).  To live attentionally is to live only in the moment and only in reference to whatever is happening right now in sensory awareness around you.  This is valuable for being in the moment and yet it has its downsides.  To live attentionally is the life of an animal or small child and the downside is that you tend to respond / react to whatever or whoever gets your attention.


Choosing to shift to being fully present attentionally is a great choice.  And to do so implies that you are living intentionally— living by your choices and intentions and to do that is a much higher level of consciousness.  Now you direct these forces rather than being the subject of them.  Living intentionally enables you to develop a laser-beam focus and then to move through the world responding to what matters and to what’s relevant, rather than to the plethora of stimuli around you.


Your intentionality operates like a secret power behind your thinking-feeling and other fundamental powers.  There’s a reason for this.  It’s because by your intentionality you set your direction, you decide on your values, you choose your meanings, your understandings, and so on.  It is with your intentionality that you step up to your highest executive functions and become the CEO of your own life and inner world.  It is here that you make your executive decisions.  It is with your intentionality that you operate at choice point and become the author (authority) of your own life.  Pretty powerful, wouldn’t you say?


Question:  If intentionality is so powerful, then why do we not see everybody accessing and operating from this power?


Part of the answer is that the challenge of requires the development of your intentions and intentional powers.  It is far, far easier to live attentionally than intentionally.  Attentional living is passive—simply react to whatever or whoever gets your attention.  Just bounce off of the stimuli around you.  Let others, let the media, let your environment determine what you think, what you talk about, what you focus on.  It is easy to live this way, it is passive and reactive.


Conversely, to develop your intentional powers, you have to think.  You have to exercise your mind and your mental-emotional powers.  You have to decide—what’s important, what’s truly valuable.  You have to think through where things could go, you have to think consequently about directions and the costs that will occur.


Then once you set intentional desires, objectives, and values, you have to set your intentions and use them as your guidelines for what’s relevant and what’s not relevant.  The challenge here is the courage to be yourself, to be independent, to choose your own way, to resist the forces of conformity, to go against the current, to stand up for what you truly value and for the talents you want to develop.


It is easier to go along with the crowd, with media, with your immediate environment and let all of these influences define you, describe your world, and plot your pathway.  It is easier and it is also less satisfying.  That’s why people living attentionally eventually start asking, “So where am I going?  What’s it all about?  What do I want to accomplish?  Why don’t I ever stay with something and become highly skilled with it?”


Living attentionally feeds ADD— constantly shifting attention here and there until it becomes a habit of mind.  Then people wonder why they don’t follow through, why they can’t concentrate, focus, have a laser-beam intentionality.  Most often, they just have not developed their intentional powers.  If you’re ready to develop your intentional powers for your own personal empowerment, see Secrets of Personal Mastery (1997) or get yourself to an APG Training as soon as possible (see the list of APG trainings on the website).


Dr. Michael Hall


Neuro-Semantics homepage


Everyone as best as he can!
Have Joy
Giannicola