Power of Intention

Hi, guys. My name is Donnie Rouse and you are listening to the podcast One Life. So first I want to start off by wishing everyone a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year that'll be coming in a few days. Today at the farmer's market, I had this idea that didn't exactly work out to plan, but nevertheless, while I was at the farmer's market, kind of set it a ball in motion. And the idea was to set intentions for the new year how I had planned it. I wanted to do a countdown to the new year. So I wanted people to come in 11:30 to get a cup of cold room to sign an intention to that cup. And then as 12 o' clock in the afternoon approached, I was going to do a countdown to 12 o'. Clock. Everyone was going to activate their cold Roman. And by sipping that cup with the intention written on it, they were going to be setting that intention into their body. And that didn't work out because it was never put in the email. And thinking that I could do it alone was kind of an expectation that was. It was just wasn't gonna happen. I get really busy at the market and trying to do all that stuff just was pretty difficult. But nevertheless, while I was at the market today, I had a couple Sharpie markets. I put the Sharpies on the. The tray, and every time someone would come up and order a cup of coffee, I would hand them their cup and I would give them that Sharpie marker saying, well, before I can make your drink, first you have to put the intention. And I would give them that and they'd be like, all right, intentional. What do you mean? Like a New Year's resolution? I said, no, an intention. So something you want to see, feel, do or be in the upcoming year. So some people would kind of get this kind of this pondering. They're like, you know what? I'm not really sure what I want. And what I would tell them is, well, it doesn't just think. What is one thing that would excite you if you were to do it in this upcoming year? Could be a trip, it could be hanging out with a friend, could be anything. What's one thing that would excite you if it were to happen this upcoming year? And it doesn't have to be anything big, it could be something just simple. And so they would think about it and they would kind of write something down on the cup. And then their chemistry started to change a little bit. They would actually start to get a little excited and they would start to think about different Possibilities in the year to come. So what exactly is intention and what is the power of the intention? And I'll kind of share that as to what the experience has been from this farmer's market, as well as some of the habits and things that I've noticed in my own life. So what does intention do? The three things. One thing it does is it allows us to think outside of our current reality. Because by not putting it in the past, we're projecting out into the future. So we're able to see in this realm of possibility which we normally don't go to in the day to day lives that we live. It also helps us to take the focus to focus on the result we want as opposed to. Again, it's similar to the first point I made, but we get to focus on the result we want. So on the first part we are able to go outside the reality. The second part is focusing on the result. So rather than say I have to go to a friend's for New Year's, focusing on the intention or on the result that you want from that is saying I am going to go to a friend's, I'm going to catch up and just enjoy the company, be present and enjoy the company of people with. It's a very different expectation. And then lastly is to feel that outcome as if it's already been experienced or it's already happened. So starting with the first one. So thinking outside of your current reality. I was at the market today and as I was right, having people write these down more often than not, travel was one of the big things that came up with people. And one person came to my booth and he put Europe on his coffee. Europe. I was like, interesting. Well, can you elaborate a little more on what that is? And he told me that he was expecting a job offer to come through which would move him to Luxembourg. And how he was kind of looking at. You could tell he was starting to get excited and he was putting himself there. So he put Europe on the cup being because he's really looking forward to the possibility of going to Europe. So when he told me that he also purchased a bag of coffee, so on that bag of coffee to kind of drive it home even further as he drinks that coffee every day, I just put a note with that Sharpie, I took the Sharpie I put on and said, enjoy Europe, exclamation point. And he said, you know what? I'm going to keep this bag and if I do end up getting this job offer, I'm not going to open this. I'm going to save this bag and then I'll come by next week and I'll buy a new one. So thinking outside that current reality, he was already projecting himself in that job, living in Europe. And then his girlfriend that was with him also, she put something else. I think she might have put health. But he. Yeah, it just. You could see that he was actually transported there. Focusing on what you want. I spoke to several people and when they were telling me what they wanted, when they were writing their intention, some of the times they were putting on that, they weren't putting things that were positive. So they said, focusing on losing weight, for example, if you think about that, what is the problem with saying losing weight and setting that as your intention? The issue with losing weight is your or you're focusing on not necessarily something negative, but something that is not necessarily positive in the sense that it's not something that's going to look. You're looking forward to look at. Focusing on losing weight is not really something that is going to make you feel. I mean, it might make you feel, but it's kind of focusing on negative because as a result of feeling that you have to lose weight, you're kind of saying, I feel fat and I need to lose weight. So that's what I'm focusing on rather than saying, you know, I want to focus on having a healthy lifestyle. I want to focus on feeling vital, I want to focus on feeling more energy, I want to focus on feeling more confident. It's kind of a different, maybe even the confidence thing, but it just comes from a different standpoint or say, making a statement. So they put that there. And I kind of help people rework what their intention was by saying, well, you know what, what if this was really what you're after, wanting to feel more vibrant, more health and more excitement for your life. Like, oh, yeah, well, you know what? That kind of sounds nice. Then I kind of scratched it out and I wrote that new intention, and they activate it and they drank that intention down, kind of putting it back in there and then feeling what the outcome is. So I was watching this video. I can't remember the guy, Joe Dispenza, I think his name is. And he was talking about the power of the mind. And he wasn't really referring to intention. It just kind of seems to work with what I'm talking about now. He was saying that unless you have a future vision to look forward or a future vision to look at, you're doomed to repeat the past, not just repeat the past, but you're doomed to kind of feel and relive that pattern of the past, those past memories. And it's something that it was kind of. That reoccurs in my own life because when I. People ask me, oh, well, what do you want for your future? What do you want for your business? It's often very difficult. So I was having people set out their intention. They would say, well, what's your intention? I was like, oh, shit, it's kind of hard. And it doesn't have to be hard. And part of it is just deciding. And that indecision of not deciding what it is we want in our lives is what keeps us glued, what keeps us stuck into the same place where we are. So I was like, all right, well, what do I have to choose? Or what do I. What do I really want? And I was thinking about it, what would really excite me for the year to come? And I said, relocate to Europe. I put that on my intention. But then there's also a side of me that feels like I'm giving up something with my business. Then I was like, all right, well, what else is it that I want? I was like, well, I want the flexibility in my business, because it's not like I just want to live in Europe and kind of do that thing. I want to feel purpose. I want to do something well. I want to be able to have this coffee business, and I want to be able to impact people and have that power to impact their days through the coffee ritual, such as me being at the farmer's market and putting an intention on the cup and have people think about their coffee differently. And I'm sure once they go back and they'll have the cup of coffee, they will think about their coffee differently. And putting that thought out there for me just kind of shifted. The way I was looking at the year to come is also my willingness to surrender and set an intention, the power of an intention. Going back to what I had just mentioned about with, if you don't have a future, if you don't have something to look forward to, you're going to focus on those past events. There's a big nugget of wisdom in there. And by focusing, we live 95% of our lives subconsciously or subconsciously or unconsciously. I'm not sure which one it is. And that's to say that only 5% of our day is live consciously. That means that 5% of that day, that's. That willpower that you have is only reminiscent, represents 5% of your day. Do you know how incredibly hard it is to make any kind of change? 5%, if 5% of your energies are conscious and everything else is run by your subconscious is extremely difficult. So then how does one create change in one's life? And I was listening to different, different YouTube videos, different audios and one thing that kind of, one thing that. A theme that was kind of underlying in all of this was this ability to kind of. Well, if you can't, if your mind by default is going to go to the things of the past, then how do you create a new future? And the way to create a new future is by visualizing this future in a state of presence, Visualizing what it is that you want and really feeling those feelings. But you have to do for. So from a state of presence, a state of in a way, I guess kind of like relaxation because you need to feel what that is. So in the past I noticed I've done this thing in the past and it feels good for the moment that you're doing it because like yeah, you feel like you're getting it in your body. But then all sudden it might be short lived. And when I was doing this, usually it's like when I go to sleep or when I wake up in the morning and I might devote thinking that I have to rush off to some part of my day. I might devote maybe a minute, two minutes max to doing these visualization which is better than nothing. But then I was doing this guided meditation and I was being that I just watched this video talking about how you have to feel these feelings. I did this guiding meditation. One of the first things I noticed was that there was this. One of the meditations was based on gratitude. Another one was based on, on wealth and like opening up your mindset to being able to build wealth. And one of the things that I noticed in this meditation was that there was this kind of prolonged gap of feeling the feeling of abundance, of gratitude, feeling the feeling of having abundance monetarily. And it's through this cue of feeling the abundance and not just putting like a couple minutes, but really spending five minutes and starting and ending your day with that that you start to build up that repetition. You start to build that memory of this is what I'm driving towards, not the, not what my past conditioning has left me. And to. I mean, I don't know if any of you guys are familiar with. You know, I don't even want to call it affirmation. Say it's kind of like neuro linguistic programming, NLP this one of my New Year's resolutions. I'll kind of state it here, so this way you could hold me accountable, is that I'm going to be a certified NLP practitioner. What is nlp? The way I understand it now, and I know there's different schools of nlp, NLP is neurological, neuro, linguistic programming. And the idea is this, that everything that we do, every emotion that we feel, is first represented by a picture in our mind. From that picture, we then take. We put, like, audio cues, visual cues, and all these things kind of create the experience which drives the emotion that we feel in the day. So really, this whole visualization is kind of really similar to that nlp. And I'll give you an example of how I've used it in my real life. I think it was back in 2011, I wanted to go skydiving. I know I feel like I'm going off on, like, a tangent, but it's something that I typically do, so just kind of roll with it. I was going to go skydiving, and if you had known me before that moment, I was really, really terrified of heights. Having just gone through a Tony Robbins seminar where I did a firewalk. I was, all right, well, let me apply the same logic, the same tool of visualization to skydiving. I mean, it scared the shit out of me. But after doing that firewalk, I was like, you know what if I could do that? The idea is that if I can do firewalk, what I thought, which I thought was impossible, I could jump out of a plane 14,000ft up. So for, I think it was like a couple weeks leading, maybe even a month leading up to that skydiving experience. I would visualize this, the skydiving, me getting going up in the plane, jumping out of the plane, and then celebrating when I got to the bottom and I landed and when I went in that plane, as a result of doing all this repetition and when. If you have any questions, I'll be more than happy to talk more about this. But in that repetition, you're focusing on the first step. Not so much like the jumping out of the plane, but you focus on what's leading up to that jump and. And then celebrating on the bottoms you're leaving, you're not thinking about all the negative, potential negative or potential stress stuff that you would go through in the course of that result. Another way of putting it is like, if you were building a business, you would focus on the starting point from that business. If you want to start your own business, signing Maybe the papers to incorporate your business and then celebrating it being successful. However many years out, you kind of not looking at all the small minutiae that happens leading up to that. Because a lot of the time, if you're focusing on that, you're not going to take any action because you're going to get overwhelmed by everything else that has to be done or what might happen. So I was doing this with my skydiving experience. And what I noticed was that as I. When I actually went to the sky to do the skydiving, we're going up in this plane. My friend Nando, we both did it. He says that I was afraid. I did not see a look of fear in my face. If you looked at the video we had, he was literally looked like he was about to crap himself. I was. Had this. This feeling of anticipation as I stepped up to the. Up to the. The door. When I was at the door, that was a completely different story. When I was at the door, I'm looking down like, holy shit, that next step, there's nothing there. But thankfully, the guy who's on back of me ended up saying, 1, 2, 3. And we end up tumbling out of the plane. But when we got to the floor, it was this euphoria. It was one of the best experiences that I've ever had in my life. And, you know, when they pull the chute, you feel yourself go up and like you're. We. It was cloudy that day, so I kind of drifted through a cloud. And you felt this cool mist all around you. The experience was surreal. And then I got to the. I landed and there was this euphoria that kind of came over me. So I don't think I would have been able to do that had I not first visualized it before doing the jump. And again, going back to setting the intention, all of that is about feeling that result and being constantly having that focal point of what it is that you want way out in the distance. So that is one of the things I'm going to hold myself accountable this year, and I encourage you to do the same thing. You have a new year. It's funny, here in America, we have this thing where once a year we make a goal. If we don't follow through on that goal, we feel like we have to wait until the next year to create that goal again. And so this way we could start all over. But you can start really at any time. So I will commit if you guys will be. You guys could commit as well. And we kind of hold each other accountable. What I'm going to do is this year I will be NLP certified and then secondly, I am going to make it a point to do this morning and night ritual of focusing on setting in the intention of what I want for this New Year and focusing on that feeling, the feeling of the result as opposed to the process it's going to take to achieve that result. So that is my invitation for you. If you have any questions, please leave some comments. I'd be more than happy to. You can reach out to me via Facebook donnyrous facebook.com d o n n Y R A U S Or you could ping me on Instagram onnydony Rouse one word and let me know your thoughts. Let me know what your New Year's resolutions are. If you have any questions on the best way to kind of, you know, set this intention, as well as set up the habit of creating these daily rituals in terms of how to visualize, feel free to just shoot me a question. Be more than happy to share my experiences with you and this way we could do it together. That is it, guys. Have a awesome new year and I look forward to connecting with you soon.