Intention, Decision, and Action

On the second day of the IAF Congress 2008, we had the honour of being trained by Christian Tissier Shihan. One of the main take-away from his session was the idea of having your Intention, Decision, and Action being aligned.

Simply put, if your Intention is to go from point A to point B, and while you are at point A with your uke holding on to your hand; the only way you can arrive at point B is to 'bring' your uke along; using a kokyu-nage technique.

Just like during our NLP training, we were encouraged to set our intention for the day at the start of each class. The main reason for doing so is so that during the course of the day, we can be more aware of our surroundings and circumstances so that we don't fall back to our old habits.

For instance, sometimes when being snapped at, we may react in an angry manner. So, if we'd set our intentions at the start of the day to be patient, seek to understand then to be understood. Then we may remind ourselves under such circumstances to respond according to our intentions set at the start of the day.

Hence, according to my interpretation of Christian Tissier Shihan's "Intention, Decision, and Action", it means that after we set our intention, if our decisions and actions are aligned to our intention, we will have a higher probability of achieving our goals.

Which brings to mind an interesting application of this Aikido concept to our daily lives. We all set goals to achieve certain aims in life, be it professional, personal, and/or in our relationships with people (let's just call it "people" for parsimonity reasons). And what actions we take will determine whether or not we will achieve our goals. Of course the basic assumption here is that our goals are not evil by nature. (It can be though, but that's a different topic altogether)

But what determine our actions is basically our decisions. Our decisions are in turn largely determined by our conditioning. For instance one can set a goal to get at least 6 hours of sleep daily so that he can rise early in the morning and not feel tired and also not having to rush to go to work. But because of his conditioning (i.e. he has been sleeping late for a long while now) he may still go to bed late (action) and hence still get up late the next morning (results).

So in order for him to really decide (decision) to go to bed early, and to have him actually do it (actions), he will need to re-organise his routine or change his habits or working style (conditioning) so that it is possible for him to retire early.

So how does one go about this "conditioning" exercise so that his decisions and actions will help him achieve his goal? The answer is through setting your intentions right at the start. In other words, to make a promise and keep it. We can start with small promises so that we don't feel overwhelmed or have too big a promise that sets us up for failure.

Perhaps we can start by setting our intentions everyday before we start our day, so that we can be more aware of our schedule and the need to go to bed on time. So, why don't we try for the next 7 days by starting each day by setting our intention to decide to take some small actions so that we can achieve our goals be it in the personal, people, or professional realm?