This week is all about intention setting. Have you ever considered setting an intention for your content, before you create or before you share it? A big piece of mindful content creation is both creating and sharing intentionally and thoughtfully. Your intentions don’t have to be fancy or noble, just true to you. I share seven possible questions you can ask yourself to help create an intention.
Have any reflections on this episode or on intention setting in general that you want to share? I invite you to share your experiences in the comments below. Enjoy the episode!
Below is a transcript of the episode for your reference—please excuse grammatical errors!
Hello everyone and thanks for joining me for episode five of the Mindful Content Creator Podcast. Today we're talking all about intention. When I started developing the concept behind the mindful content creator, one of the words I felt was deeply tied to this concept was intention.
To me, mindful content means content that is created intentionally and thoughtfully. Content that you are inspired to create, and that is inspiring or thought provoking for those who receive it. It honors your needs and your community's needs.
I know for me that anytime I set an intention for something or create something with intention, I'm much more committed to what I'm doing, and that intention doesn't have to be over complicated or fancy, and it's not about meeting certain goals. Honestly, your intention could be simply to have fun and to let your creative self roam free.
It does not need to be, I will create this piece of content and it will receive X number of views.
If you want to set an intention that's specific, perhaps you're naturally a numbers person, which I'm definitely not, you could do that, but only if that feels right to you. I find a lot of those who follow the manifestation method find being specific is very important, but to me, intention setting is a little bit different from that.
Your intention, just like your content, should be true to who you are. If you don't like getting super specific and focusing on numbers, then don't. What is more important is finding an intention setting process that works for you.
I think of this as similar to when a yoga teacher asks their students at the beginning of class to set an intention. I used to always freeze up when a teacher asked that, but then I realized it really doesn't have to be that complicated most of the time. My intention in class is simply to be as present as possible for the practice or to experience a few moments of peace and calm.
Your intention will most likely be tied to your why that we explored in episode four, but since every piece of content you create could have its own unique intention, I see intentions as another level of specificity beneath that overall, why.
I'll use myself as an example. I realized that I actually never shared with you my why in the last episode. I meant to, and I forgot, but I'll just share it with you now.
My why for creating mindfully is because I truly believe that every person, myself included, has a unique and valuable story to share. We have our own messages to share from these stories, and they are tied to each of our soul's experiences in this lifetime and in other lifetimes. I believe the process for sharing these stories and messages is sacred and therefore it should be done with care in a way that is, again, true to who we are.
When I share my story and messages, it helps others share their stories and messages, and so despite setbacks and self-doubt, I remain committed to this in all of my work and content.
I also believe in the importance of creative expression, and that is very much tied to the sharing and telling of our stories and messages. I think creativity is how we channel through the wisdom and messages from our soul and higher selves, and so I'm committed to my creative practice. When I allow myself to be creative, everyone around me benefits because I'm more at ease. I'm more authentically me, and I can then inspire others to remain connected to their creativity.
So your why does not need to be as lengthy as mine. I'm a writer, so that's what naturally comes to me. And if anything, I have trouble editing things down. But in staying true to myself in this moment, I'm not editing anything.
When it comes to my intention, when I am creating something, as I mentioned before, my intention might be to simply let my creativity come through in a way that resonates or inspires my community.
Sometimes my intention is to make others feel less alone by sharing a more difficult or challenging piece of my story.
And on some days, my intention might be to call in a few new members to my community by authentically sharing my message.
I admittedly have trouble with doing anything more number driven, such as I want to gain X new followers or subscribers, since impact can't be so easily measured by likes and follows. But I have done visualizations instead to try and picture the people I wanna reach with a specific piece of content. And I will try and share some of those meditations with you, either in future episodes or as bonus downloads through our Substack community.
Clearly intentions can look different depending on the piece of content, the person, the overall vibe of the day. But I'm going to give you a list of questions that you can ask yourself or journal on in order to create an intention.
You can choose just one of these or try out as many as you want. Just see what calls to you that day for that particular piece of content, and some of them will lead you down a similar path, some of the questions will, and that's also intentional. Sometimes we need to ask ourselves the same question in a slightly different way in order to unearth our truth.
I will also include this list in the show notes, but for now I'll read them off:
Number one, who am I speaking to, or who am I calling or inviting in?
Two, who most needs to hear this message?
Three, what type of energy am I hoping to share or exchange with this content?
Four, how do I want someone to feel when they receive this content and its message?
Five, what do I wish for someone to do, learn, or cultivate as a result of receiving this content?
Six, what do I wish to experience as the creator of this content?
Seven, what changes, elevations or transformations would I like to spark in either myself or others through this content?
Again, choose whichever of these speaks to you in the moment, or even come up with your own variation of these questions. Play around with it and honor the method that ultimately works best for you.
And if you've attended moon rituals or moon circles before, you might have heard about the importance of physically writing down your intention. If that's something that excites you and is easy for you to do, please do so. You could even create your own ritual for writing down and setting this intention.
But depending on how much content you create, it might not be possible to do something this specific every time, and that's okay. In that case, simply taking a moment to think about it and saying it to yourself is great, even if you boil it down to just one word. And you'll get much faster at this and probably do it automatically as time goes on.
I originally saw this intention setting practice as something you do before you sit down to create. But I don't wanna be too prescriptive about that. Sometimes we just get a hit of inspiration and we start creating, and I think those moments and sparks should be honored and not hindered in any way. So if setting an intention before you share rather than before you create makes more sense, then I'd try that out as well.
In a future episode, I'll get more into other rituals we could work in before we create and share. These could include visualization, exercises, meditations, affirmations, or prayers. My hope is to help guide you through many options to see what fits you best and helps you get into a good creative flow.
Finally, I wanna share with you the intention I wrote down for this episode as an example in case you are still unsure of what this could look like.
For episode five, my intention has two parts:
One, to help my listeners think more deeply about the purpose of their content, whether it serves their own soul and creativity, or it serves to help their community in some way, or maybe both.
Two, to remind people that what we create is sacred, even if it's something seemingly insignificant or silly. It's all an expression of ourselves, and therefore it is valuable.
Just writing these two out really helped me narrow down exactly what I wanted to convey through this episode, and I think it serves as a great summary.
And again, yours don't need to be as lengthy as mine. Like I said, maybe you even boil it down to one word, but do what feels right to you and see kind of how things develop over time.
If you have questions as you begin your intention setting practice, or even if you want to share one of your intentions with me and the community, jump into the comment section for this episode over on Substack. Head to themindfulcontentcreator.substack.com.
Thank you so much for listening today. May we all create with intention this week and beyond.
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