In this talk, Donna Brown presents intention as a powerful, often overlooked driver of business success. Drawing on her experiences with Buddhist teachers, she explains how setting a heartfelt intention before any action aligns work with the highest benefit for all who are directly or indirectly involved. She illustrates the concept with a personal story from an Italian daytime TV cooking segment: after meditating and intending her food to be a pure offering, the segment achieved the highest ratings ever recorded for the show. Donna describes how intention shifts focus from self‑concern to heart‑centered connection, which she argues is the true source of emotional buying decisions. She expands the idea of beneficiaries to include everyone in the supply chain—from the makers of the lighting equipment to the viewers’ devices—emphasizing the far‑reaching impact of intentional work. Finally, she offers practical guidance to pause, meditate, and set an intention before any business activity, encouraging viewers to adopt this practice to amplify influence and create ripple effects.
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Today I'm talking about something that is such a powerful motor for your business and can send ripple effects that you have that you can't even imagine and that literally no one is talking about. And that is the power of intention. And this may sound like a crazy weird thing and Especially for those who think this is a crazy thing, hang, you know, hang in there and give it a listen and tell me what you think afterwards instead of going away. But I learned a lot about intention, the intentionality of what you do, from spending time with incredible Buddhist teachers and Buddhist lamas and The intention that they put before they do something is incredible, and that the powerful practice of offering your work and of setting the intention that whatever you do is for the highest benefit of all those who are concerned is just really life-changing. And as I studied this more and I had, I practiced more, you know, sort of in sort of a sort of personal private way, the more I was inspired to bring this into my work and into my business. And I have a beautiful story that I'd like to share with you about that. I was on daytime television regularly in Italy, and for one particular program, I was doing a lot of show cooking, and it was so much fun. Great hair and makeup, and the people were super nice. But I didn't find it, let's say, enriching. It was fun, but I wanted it to have more meaning. I wanted to be meaningful, right? And one day I was particularly early and they were particularly late. I'm generally not that early, so this was really a once-in-a-lifetime thing. But I took the time in my dressing room to set— to do a meditation and to set an intention that this food that I was cooking for them may be the purest food, and may all those who see this or come into contact with it directly or indirectly, may they feel nourished and inspired and on and on and on. I won't go into too much of the details, but taking that time to really set the intention that this be the purest offering I could make to those who were to receive it either directly or indirectly was, first of all, for me, very powerful because of course when you're thinking about something like that, you're immediately connecting to your heart. And what happens there is that you stop thinking about, are they going to buy my thing? Are they going to like it? What are they going to think? Am I going to remember everything I'm supposed to say? Now what am I going to do? And, um, it's very relaxing, it's calming, right? And it takes— as people say, it's very centering or very grounding, but really it moves you into that heart space, and that's where people connect. You know, even the crassest salesman will tell you that people buy Because of emotion, so how can you connect to people if you're not connecting from your heart? And if you're connecting from your head and not your heart. So anyways, I did this big meditation. I went out. I did my thing, and then the next week I came back, and whoa! The executive producer was all you know sort of fawning all over me, and everybody was really excited, and Eric's like, Donna, Donna, Donna. This is like. Okay, you guys are usually nice, but this is weird. And so I asked my writer, I said, well, what's going— what is going on? Like, why is everybody— why is everybody going out of their way to talk to me? And this program is a huge program and it's on all year long and it's a big container program with lots of different segments to each thing. It's sort of like 90 minutes long, which is huge for television. And, you know, segments can be 3, 6 minutes. Really short. So you can imagine how much goes on in a program, in one episode, right? And they did 185 episodes per season. So this was year 3. So you think of, I don't know, I figured out it was probably about close to 10,000 segments at that time. And my segment had the highest ratings ever, as in ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. Wow. On that show, of any kind, of any person, of any time, of any episode, of any season. And so they were so excited, and they— and the proof, and that for me was absolute confirmation of the power of intention. It was absolutely connected to that time that I took and the effort that I put into really dedicating what I was doing. For the benefit of all those who are going to receive it. And there were times when I was late and they were early. Yikes. So it was very rushed. And I remember that one particular episode, it was really hard even to focus because I was late. And not only that, the person who was prepping all the food didn't get it right. So I had to, you know, do that too. And it was like a scramble, scramble. And it wasn't as good. It wasn't, it wasn't as good. And it And I feel that if, if we could just take that time to go into the— people talk about their why all the time. What if you were to just think about this before you did something? May this be for the highest benefit to all those who even scroll by my post and never open it, who never click on a single thing, just scrolling by. Will they receive a benefit or will they receive inspiration to do something for themselves, to do their business better, to eat more healthily? more healthy food, to be a little more active, or to be more patient with their kids, or whatever it is that, that we're teaching. It's super, super powerful. And then there's— I'm gonna throw in the last thing where we generally think about it being of benefit to the people who are working with us, right? Well, the other element of this intention is How far-reaching it is. And in the Buddhist tradition, they'll talk about it being— are those involved directly and indirectly. And by indirectly, they mean things like the, the people or person who made the ring light that is lighting up this video, the people who made the phone that I'm recording it on, the people who, you know, made the bench that I'm sitting on and, and the clothes that I'm wearing and the food that I ate to be able to be here in this moment to share this message. And so when you think of it that way, so it's not just the people who are watching this video on their laptop or on their phone, it's the people who made the laptops, people who created the Wi-Fi, people who built the places for them to sit, the clothes they're wearing, the food they ate. So think of how many people you can benefit with your work. There's so much talk about, I want to influence 2 million people, 5 million people, 20 million people, whatever it is, before I die sort of thing. Well, you can do that right away. You can do that today by setting these intentions and taking the time. I'm Donna Brown, and this is the Business Design Studio, and that's the thought for the day.
