How to be Intentional
A few weeks ago, I listened to a Design Mornings podcast about navigating a career as a designer. One of the panelists advised young professionals to be intentional in their career choices. If you want to be a designer, your career path should be filled with jobs that get you to your goal, not just whatever is available.As someone who has been trying to find a new path for the past five years, this stuck with me. My 26th birthday is quickly approaching, and with it, the end of my parental health insurance coverage. I’ve finally found a career path – UX design – where I think I will be happy, and want to be intentional in my pursuit of the right job in the field.
As someone who has been trying to find a new path for the past five years, this stuck with me. My 26th birthday is quickly approaching, and with it, the end of my parental health insurance coverage. I’ve finally found a career path – UX design – where I think I will be happy, and want to be intentional in my pursuit of the right job in the field.
Being intentional doesn’t only apply to career goals though.
With the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashanah, just behind us, and fall bringing pumpkin spice and leather jackets back into my life, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want to spend the next year.
Finding a job that is fulfilling, challenging, and fun is clearly a main priority. But I also want to be intentional in my down-time. I want to be intentional in my friendships, my side projects, my health. I want to set up some systems and hold myself accountable, and accept that inactive time is a choice to stand by, not hours slipped into a hole due to indecision. Instead of feeling like life and time and obligations are pulling me in every direction, I want to take back the reigns and embrace that every moment spent living is a choice.
The thing is, most of my life has been guided by intentional moves with varying results:
Being intentional means recognizing that every moment of life that you are breathing is a choice. Every minute, every second that goes by, is within your power to control. Being intentional means that you decide to let leisure time pass and fully accept the results without judgement or regret. Binge watching 8 hours of Gilmore Girls is a decision, not a lapse that happens to you, but a choice.
Being intentional means activating your mind and being aware, or actively choosing to tune out. It means showing up to work, an event, a dinner, without preoccupations, but arriving with intention, and doing your best, being the best self you can be, which really just requires being present. Accept that wherever you are, even if it feels like a choice out of your control, you still decided to be there, and so might as well BE there.
And most of all, being intentional means that if you write an article in your head on the train about living with intention, you go home and write that article.