By Kimine Mayuzumi
A client once asked me:
“Is there a particular format you use to help people set an intention? I’ve been experimenting with different ones to use with students, but I haven’t found an explanation I love yet — especially one that helps them understand the difference between an intention and a goal.”
This is a wonderful question. And I actually hear two questions within it:
- How do I differentiate an intention from a goal?
- What format do I use to help people set an intention?
Drawing from our Being Lazy and Slowing Down (BLSD) approach, I respond to both questions in this post. I share this not as an argument, but as a perspective shaped by practice and experience.
Let me start with the first question — because the way we differentiate an intention from a goal informs how we approach planning, work, and daily life.
Goals and their limits
For me, a goal often pulls our attention toward outcomes. It can easily become about hitting a target, checking a box, or measuring success. Sometimes that is helpful — and sometimes it isn’t.
Having a specific and measurable goal, such as sending a manuscript to a publisher by a certain date, can be useful. It allows you to break the work into concrete steps, allocate time, and make strategic decisions about pace, energy, and approach. In that sense, goals can help make things feel doable and realistic, one step at a time.
At the same time, goals tend to live in the future. While they can motivate focused action, they can also narrow our attention. When a goal is not met, it can leave people feeling as if they have failed. It can also lead us to overlook the process and our lived experience — unless we are very intentional about noticing them.
Because Being Lazy and Slowing Down centers the mantra:
“be mindful, trust the process, and let go of outcomes”
as a core orientation for everyday life, we often question exclusively goal-oriented ways of thinking and living.
What intentions offer instead
An intention, on the other hand, helps us anchor ourselves in the experience we want to cultivate as we move toward a broader vision. An intention can include outcomes, tasks, or even goals — but it does not depend on them.
An intention is about the quality of how we want to show up: the feelings, pace, presence, focus, or pleasure we want to embody as we move through our days.
When we set intentions, we deliberately reflect on how we want (or don’t want) to carry our tasks. This can prevent us from beating ourselves up. It gives us permission to check in with our physical and mental state first, soften obligation-driven pressure, and transform work into something more humane and even joyful.
A purely goal-oriented perspective, especially in academic spaces, can easily pair with imposter feelings and guilt. Many scholars learn to ignore their bodies in order to “push through.” Intention-setting gently interrupts that pattern.
I see intentions as coming from within, even when there is a goal in mind. Setting an intention takes both our state of being and our external conditions into account. What we do may be part of an intention — but it is not the whole story. How we carry the task, and how we experience ourselves while doing it, matters just as much.
Intention as embodied practice
Visualization and imagination can be especially helpful in intention-setting. In a previous blog post, I wrote about Tai Chi’s movement from:
- 心 xin (heart),
- 意 yi (intention or visualization),
- 気 qi (energy flow), and
- 力 li (manifestation or action).
Intention (or visualization) allows our inner source of energy to emerge in the way we want to experience movement and flow. There is nothing inherently measurable about this process, yet it is deeply energizing, fulfilling, and rewarding in itself.
This is why I often emphasize intention rather than goal in my Writing Circle (WC) and Weekly Reflection & Planning (WRP) sessions. These reflections are shaped by the BLSD approach, and by what I have seen help people move through overwhelming weeks with more ease, grounding, and self-trust.
That said, there are absolutely contexts where specific goals are useful. In our Monthly Reflection & Intention-Setting sessions, for example, I sometimes introduce S.M.A.R.T. goals when people need something concrete and measurable to support them.
So what does the “format” look like?
Even though we can set intentions anytime and in any situation, the Weekly Reflection & Planning practice offers a helpful example.
In the WRP sessions I lead, the structure usually includes:
- Adding known events, appointments, and routines for the upcoming week
- Creating task lists by category so everything has a clear home
- Allocating time for tasks on the schedule
Within this process, intention-setting becomes a grounding element.
I often ask myself — and invite WRP members to reflect on:
“During and/or at the end of this week, how do you want to feel, given everything on your plate?”
For example:
Grounded? Accomplished? Not burned out?
Sometimes I ask myself the question a bit differently:
- How do you want to show up in your precious space and time?
- How do you want to lead your Tai Chi class or your Writing Circle?
I visualize it. And if exhaustion is already present, I ask myself:
What would help me feel rested and energized enough to make wiser decisions and move steadily, rather than forcefully?
Often, this leads to creating more empty space between tasks. I invite participants to reconsider what is less urgent or less important and to make more room for breaks, for what truly matters in their lives, and for self-care.
In this way, we prioritize not only tasks but also wellbeing in practice — because wellbeing is the foundation for everything else.
Intention as a compass
Your intention becomes a compass. It guides how you move through your week, your day or even your particular work like writing and teaching — not only what you choose to do, but how you show up for yourself along the way.
And for many people, that shift makes all the difference.
Image Credit: Kento Higashimura