by Jay Shetty
Most people are accustomed to looking for answers. Monks focus on questions. When I was trying to get close to my fear, I asked myself “What am I afraid of?” over and over again. When I’m trying to get to the root of a desire, I start with the question “Why?”
This monkish approach to intention can be applied to even the worldliest goals. Here’s a sample goal I’ve chosen because it’s something we never would have contemplated in the ashram and because the intention behind it isn’t obvious: I want to sail solo around the world.
Why do you want to sail around the world?
It will be fun. I’ll get to see lots of places and prove to myself that I’m a great sailor.
It sounds like your intention is to gratify yourself, and that you are motivated by desire.
But, what if your answer to the question is:
It was always my father’s dream to sail around the world. I’m doing it for him.
In this case, your intention is to honor your father, and you are motivated by duty and love.
I’m sailing around the world so I can be free. I won’t be accountable to anyone. I can leave all my responsibilities behind.
This sailor intends to escape—he is driven by fear.
Now let’s look at a more common want:
My biggest want is money, and here’s Jay, probably about to tell me to become kind and compassionate. That’s not going to help.
Wanting to be rich for the sake of being rich is fine. It’s firmly in the category of material gratification, so you can’t expect it to give an internal sense of fulfillment. Nonetheless, material comforts are undeniably part of what we want from life, so let’s get to the root of this goal rather than just dismissing it.
Wealth is your desired outcome. Why?
I don’t ever want to have to worry about money again.
Why do you worry about money?
I can’t afford to take the vacations I dream about.
Why do you want those vacations?
I see everyone else on exotic trips on social media. Why should they get to do that when I can’t?
Why do you want what they want?
They’re having much more fun than I have on my weekends.
Aha! So now we are at the root of the want. Your weekends are unfulfilling. What’s missing?
I want my life to be more exciting, more adventurous, more exhilarating.
Okay, your intention is to make your life more exciting. Notice how different that is from “I want money.” Your intention is still driven by the desire for personal gratification, but now you know two things: First, you can add more adventure to your life right now without spending more money. And second, you now have the clarity to decide if that’s something you want to work hard for.
If a person went up to my teacher and said, “I just want to be rich,” my teacher would ask, “Are you doing it out of service?” His reason for asking would be to get to the root of the desire.
If the man said, “No, I want to live in a nice house, travel, and buy whatever I want.” His intention would be to have the financial freedom to indulge himself.
My teacher would say, “Okay, it’s good that you’re honest with yourself. Go ahead, make your fortune. You’ll come to service anyway. It may take you five or ten years, but you’ll get to the same answer.” Monks believe that the man won’t be fulfilled when he finds his fortune, and that if he continues his search for meaning, the answer will always, eventually, be found in service.
Be honest about what your intention is. The worst thing you can do is pretend to yourself that you’re acting out of service when all you want is material success.
When you follow the whys, keep digging. Every answer provokes deeper questions. Sometimes it helps to sit with a question in the back of your mind for a day, even a week. Very often you’ll find that what you are ultimately searching for is an internal feeling (happiness, security, confidence, etc.). Or maybe you’ll find that you’re acting out of envy, not the most positive emotion, but a good alert to the need you are trying to fill. Be curious about that discovery. Why are you envious? Is there something—like adventure—that you can start working on right away? Once you’re doing that, the external wants will be more available to you—if they still matter at all.
TRY THIS: A QUESTION MEDITATION
Take a desire you have and ask yourself why you want it. Keep asking until you get to the root intention.
Common answers are:
To look and feel good
Security
Service
Growth
Don’t negate intentions that aren’t “good,” just be aware of them and recognize that if your reason isn’t love, growth, or knowledge, the opportunity may fulfill important practical needs, but it won’t feel emotionally meaningful. We’re most satisfied when we are in a state of progress, learning, or achievement.
SEEDS AND WEEDS
As monks, we learned to clarify our intentions through the analogy of seeds and weeds. When you plant a seed, it can grow into an expansive tree that provides fruit and shelter for everyone. That’s what a broad intention, like love, compassion, or service, can do. The purity of your intention has nothing to do with what career you choose. A traffic officer can give a speeding ticket making a show of his power, or he can instruct you not to speed with the same compassion a parent would have when telling a child not to play with fire. You can be a bank teller and execute a simple transaction with warmth. But if our intentions are vengeful or self-motivated, we grow weeds. Weeds usually grow from ego, greed, envy, anger, pride, competition, or stress. These might look like normal plants to begin with, but they will never grow into something wonderful.
If you start going to the gym to build a revenge body so your ex regrets breaking up with you, you’re planting a weed. You haven’t properly addressed what you want (most likely to feel understood and loved, which would clearly require a different approach). You’ll get strong, and reap the health benefits of working out, but the stakes of your success are tied to external factors—provoking your ex. If your ex doesn’t notice or care, you’ll still feel the same frustration and loneliness. However, if you start going to the gym because you want to feel physically strong after your breakup, or if, in the course of working out, your intention shifts to this, you’ll get in shape and feel emotionally satisfied.
Another example of a weed is when a good intention gets attached to the wrong goal. Say my intention is to build my confidence, and I decide that getting a promotion is the best way to do it. I work hard, impress my boss, and move up a level, but when I get there, I realize there’s another level, and I still feel insecure. External goals cannot fill internal voids. No external labels or accomplishments can give me true confidence. I have to find it in myself. We will talk about how to make internal changes like this in Part Two.
THE GOOD SAMARITANS
Monks know that one can’t plant a garden of beautiful flowers and leave it to thrive on its own. We have to be gardeners of our own lives, planting only the seeds of good intentions, watching to see what they become, and removing the weeds that spring up and get in the way.
In a 1973 experiment called “From Jerusalem to Jericho,” researchers asked seminary students to prepare short talks about what it meant to be a minister. Some of them were given the parable of the Good Samaritan to help them prep. In this parable, Jesus told of a traveler who stopped to help a man in need when nobody else would. Then some excuse was made for them to switch to a different room. On their way to the new room, an actor, looking like he needed help, leaned in a doorway. Whether a student had been given materials about the Good Samaritan made no difference in whether the student stopped to help. The researchers did find that if students were in a hurry they were much less likely to help, and “on several occasions, a seminary student going to give his talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan literally stepped over the victim as he hurried on his way!”
The students were so focused
on the task at hand that they forgot their deeper intentions. They were presumably studying at seminary with the intention to be compassionate and helpful, but in that moment anxiety or the desire to deliver an impressive speech interfered. As Benedictine monk Laurence Freeman said in his book Aspects of Love, “Everything you do in the day from washing to eating breakfast, having meetings, driving to work… watching television or deciding instead to read… everything you do is your spiritual life. It is only a matter of how consciously you do these ordinary things…”
LIVE YOUR INTENTIONS
Of course, simply having intentions isn’t enough. We have to take action to help those seeds grow. I don’t believe in wishful “manifesting,” the idea that if you simply believe something will happen, it will. We can’t sit around with true intentions expecting that what we want will fall into our laps. Nor can we expect someone to find us, discover how amazing we are, and hand us our place in the world. Nobody is going to create our lives for us. Martin Luther King Jr., said, “Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.” When people come to me seeking guidance, I constantly hear, “I wish… I wish… I wish…” I wish my partner would be more attentive. I wish I could have the same job but make more money. I wish my relationship were more serious.
We never say, “I wish I could be more organized and focused and could do the hard work to get that.” We don’t vocalize what it would actually take to get what we want. “I wish” is code for “I don’t want to do anything differently.”
There’s an apocryphal story about Picasso that perfectly illustrates how we fail to recognize the work and perseverance behind achievement. As the tale goes, a woman sees Picasso in a market. She goes up to him and says, “Would you mind drawing something for me?”
“Sure,” he says, and thirty seconds later hands her a remarkably beautiful little sketch. “That will be thirty thousand dollars,” he says.
“But Mr. Picasso,” the woman says, “how can you charge me so much? This drawing only took you thirty seconds!”
“Madame,” says Picasso, “it took me thirty years.”
The same is true of any artistic work—or, indeed, any job that’s done well. The effort behind it is invisible. The monk in my ashram who could easily recite all the scriptures put years into memorizing them. I needed to consider that investment, the life it required, before making it my goal.
* * *
When asked who we are, we resort to stating what we do: “I’m an accountant.” “I’m a lawyer.” “I’m a housewife/househusband.” “I’m an athlete.” “I’m a teacher.” Sometimes this is just a useful way to jump-start a conversation with someone you’ve just met. But life is more meaningful when we define ourselves by our intentions rather than our achievements. If you truly define yourself by your job, then what happens when you lose your job? If you define yourself as an athlete, then an injury ends your career, you don’t know who you are. Losing a job shouldn’t destroy our identities, but often it does. Instead, if we live intentionally, we sustain a sense of purpose and meaning that isn’t tied to what we accomplish but who we are.
If your intention is to help people, you have to embody that intention by being kind, openhearted, and innovative, by recognizing people’s strengths, supporting their weaknesses, listening, helping them grow, reading what they need from you, and noticing when it changes. If your intention is to support your family, you might decide that you have to be generous, present, hardworking, and organized. If your intention is to live your passion, maybe you have to be committed, energetic, and truthful. (Note that in Chapter One we cleared out external noise so that we could see our values more clearly. When you identify your intentions, they reveal your values. The intentions to help people and to serve mean you value service. The intention to support your family means you value family. It’s not rocket science, but these terms get thrown around and used interchangeably, so it helps to know how they connect and overlap.)
Living your intention means having it permeate your behavior. For instance, if your goal is to improve your relationship, you might plan dates, give your partner gifts, and get a haircut to look better for them. Your wallet will be thinner, your hair might look better, and your relationship may or may not improve. But watch what happens if you make internal changes to live your intention. In order to improve your relationship, you try to become calmer, more understanding, and more inquisitive. (You can still go to the gym and get a haircut.) If the changes you make are internal, you’ll feel better about yourself and you’ll be a better person. If your relationship doesn’t improve, you’ll still be the better for it.
DO THE WORK
Once you know the why behind the want, consider the work behind the want. What will it take to get the nice house and the fancy car? Are you interested in that work? Are you willing to do it? Will the work itself bring you a sense of fulfillment even if you don’t succeed quickly—or ever? The monk who asked me why I wanted to learn all of the scripture by heart didn’t want me to be mesmerized by the superpowers of other monks and to seek those powers out of vanity. He wanted to know if I was interested in the work—in the life I would live, the person I would be, the meaning I would find in the process of learning the scriptures. The focus is on the process, not the outcome.
The Desert Fathers were the earliest Christian monks, living in hermitage in the deserts of the Middle East. According to these monks, “We do not make progress because we do not realize how much we can do. We lose interest in the work we have begun, and we want to be good without even trying.” If you don’t care deeply, you can’t go all in on the process. You’re not doing it for the right reasons. You can reach your goals, get everything you ever wanted, be successful by anyone’s terms, only to discover you still feel lost and disconnected. But if you’re in love with the day-to-day process, then you do it with depth, authenticity, and a desire to make an impact. You might be equally successful either way, but if you’re driven by intention, you will feel joy.
TRY THIS: ADD TO-BE’S TO YOUR TO-DO’S
Alongside your to-do list, try making a to-be list. The good news is you’re not making your list longer—these are not items you can check off or complete—but the exercise is a reminder that achieving your goals with intention means living up to the values that drive those goals.
EXAMPLE 1
Let’s say my goal is to be financially free. Here’s my to-do list:
Research lucrative job opportunities requiring my skill set
Rework CV, set up informational meetings to identify job openings
Apply for all open positions that meet my salary requirements
But what do I need to be? I need to be:
Disciplined
Focused
Passionate
EXAMPLE 2
Let’s say I want to have a fulfilling relationship. What do I need to do?
Plan dates
Do nice things for my partner
Improve my appearance
But what do I need to be?
More calm
More understanding
More inquisitive about my partner’s day and feelings
And if you have a clear and confident sense of why you took each step, then you are more resilient. Failure doesn’t mean you’re worthless—it means you must look for another route to achieving worthwhile goals. Satisfaction comes from believing in the value of what you do.
ROLE MODELS
The best way to research the work required to fulfill your intention is to look for role models. If you want to be rich, study (without stalking!) what the rich people you admire are being and doing, read books about how they got where they are. Focus especially on what they did at your stage, in order to get where they are now.
You can tour an entrepreneur’s office or visit an expat’s avocado ranch and decide it’s what you want, but that doesn’t tell you anything about the journey to get there. Being an actor isn’t about appearing on scre
en and in magazines. It’s about having the patience and creativity to perform a scene sixty times until the director has what she wants. Being a monk isn’t admiring someone who sits in meditation. It’s waking up at the same time as the monk, living his lifestyle, emulating the qualities he displays. Shadow someone at work for a week and you’ll gain some sense of the challenges they face, and whether those are challenges you want to take on.
In your observations of people doing the work, it’s worth remembering that there can be multiple paths to achieve the same intention. For example, two people might have helping the earth as an intention. One could do it through the law, working with the nonprofit Earthjustice; the other could do it through fashion, like Stella McCartney, who has helped popularize vegan leather. In the next chapter we’ll talk about tapping into the method and pursuit that fits you best, but this example shows that if you lead with intention, then you open up the options for how to reach your goal.
And, as we saw with the example of sailing around the globe, two identical acts can have very different intentions behind them. Let’s say two people give generous donations to the same charity. One does it because she cares deeply about the charity, a broad intention, and the other does it because he wants to network, a narrow intention. Both donors are commended for their gifts. The one who truly wanted to make a difference feels happy and proud and a sense of meaning. The one who wanted to network only cares whether he met anyone useful to his career or social status. Their different intentions make no difference to the charity—the gifts do good in the world either way—but the internal reward is completely different.
It should be said that no intentions are completely pure. My charitable acts might be 88 percent intended to help people and 8 percent to feel good about myself and 4 percent to have fun with my other charitable friends. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with cloudy or multifaceted intentions. We just need to remember that the less pure they are, the less likely they are to make us happy, even if they make us successful. When people gain what they want but aren’t happy at all, it’s because they did it with the wrong intention.