Everything Starts with Intent

My Decision to Leave the Office Life

 

This was not a new desire of mine, but was now a definite intention rather than a nice idea. I started a blog stating my desire to Leave the nine-to-five lifestyle behind, just as I was making plans to get a new job!

The success of this particular plan in my life has given me all the faith, evidence and confidence I need to know I am a free man. Free from the constraints of what people tell me I can or cannot do, but not in a bullish, pig-headed way. I mean that I choose the outcomes in my life, whether I am conscious of it or not, so I make a deliberate choice rather than a random, unconscious one now that I am aware of that choice.

I also learned that often, something is required along the way that will appear counter-intuitive or at odds with the direction you are trying to move and the reason it is required is because there are still personal areas in which you need to be ‘trained’, so you are ready to see and be able to handle what comes next. In this case my requirement was getting an office job, the opposite to what the vision for my new life looked like!

Everything starts with intent. You have to intend something to have a hope of seeing it realized. You have to intend something to gain the clarity and detail of what it is you are intending, so that is what I did. In a seemingly dark couple of days after returning home from a trip from an exotic land where I spent the most memorable 6 weeks with a woman I knew I wanted to share my life with I set to work in putting into motion what needed to be put into motion in order to create the reality of what I wanted.

During those couple of days I wrestled with feelings that were painful. I caught myself in a destructive mind loop where i was thinking about what I wanted to do, but kept coming up against thoughts about how it was not possible or any other reasons that would make it too difficult or unattainable. What I did in that moment changed everything:

I went for a walk and just allowed my mind’s chatter to continue whilst I made attempts to observe the internal conversation and interject with suggestions of ‘What if?’ and ‘How about?’. By the time I got back home knew what I had to do. I got clear about what I wanted to do regardless of how, just the end result and I gave myself a time limit. It wasn’t a strict time limit, but it was fairly finite: Between 12 and 18 months, in fact was the time scale I set.

My intention: To start a new life in Thailand, marry my girlfriend, have a family and enjoy a life of freedom, joy and fulfillment.With that set I just needed to put a few details in there, just a like a baseball player has to pass all the bases to complete a home run. I set my bases, but they weren’t set as milestones in time. They were just things I desired to achieve along the way to make the possibility of succeeding in what I wanted to do more feasible.

I decided that I needed to save a certain amount of money, so I set that. In order to do that in the time I had, with the resources I had I needed to get a job. I had no doubts about getting a job that would pay well enough. I would keep my outgoings down to a minimum, of course, but I would also require at least a certain amount of time off work to visit my girlfriend in THailand, so we could still maximize the time to get to know each other better, which I felt was essential. The time I required would be at least two 3 week holidays, more than is normally available to a full-time employee, especially when first starting a job.

After looking at my intention and its details it looked quite far fetched! A job providing me a with a full-time salary, but with the kind of free time that would only come with a part-time job! Well I had worked shift work before and I knew that some shift jobs are structured in a way that many of your hours are concentrated in a shorter period of time, so you have more days off, even though you work the same hours as you would working 9 to 5.

That was pretty much what I set in my mind. I would save as much of my salary as possible, get a job working night-shifts and spend as much of my time off focusing on my goal and making it a reality!

Five days later I saw a job advertised online and applied for it. I received a phone call from the agency about this job after about an hour and I was set up with an interview a few days later. The guy interviewing was an old friend from a past job and a week later I was starting my new job.

I was officially taking the first step on the path of my next, significant, personal success and there was an amazing twist just around the corner too.

Tagged as: intention, Music, story