I’ve been working on my capacity to be intentional for quite a while. When I chose it as a core value for YAY, it was the most aspirational of the bunch. By that I mean I wish I were more intentional naturally, and I have to work at it. Yet I’m committed to it because I know when I am focused and thoughtful, I can do better work.
I was delighted to sponsor the recent Creative Mornings where Amy McAdams Gonzales of Matinee Creative spoke on the topic of intention. By luck, the topic of the month aligned with this core value, which gave me the opportunity to revisit it, and to see it through a new lens.
Amy shared how she used a simple recipe to build up her design portfolio. It went something like:
Wake up.
Work hard.
Have fun.
Sleep.
Repeat.
And she said intention was the easy part. It’s the action where the real magic lives. Maybe I’d been placing too much value on the intention itself, and not what happens surrounding it. What a gem of a take away!
My sketch notes from Amy’s Creative Mornings talk on Intention
As I sat through Amy’s talk, and she shared her creative process, this truth crystallized:
There’s a tension between creativity and intention.
I shared this with Amy and Ryan, the CM host, after her talk. Then, we joked about it being a kind of funny coincidence that the word “tension” is kind of hiding in there. INTENSION. Ha!
View Amy’s full talk here:
Here is how I previously described living out the value of intention on the YAY about page:
Start only what can be finished.
Judiciously give time and focus.
Know when to call it.
My notions suddenly seemed like a limited view on intention. There’s much more to it than that. For my own creative process, I often balance a process and plan with down time or unstructured space. And there is intention in that. So I changed my list to include making space for reflection.
You know pages in legal documents and such where there’s empty space? That’s sort of like the buffer or unstructured time I need to do my best work. Once I get so far with my plan and process, I need that space for reflection, that extra round of sketching or thinking toward that unexpected discovery or a-ha. But I also need it to have an end cap, a clear finish, or constraint, so I can move into the magical action part.
And now I have a new way of thinking of this value: