“The quality of your commitments will determine the course of your life.” – Ralph Marston












If you were able to design your perfect day, what would it look like?

Mine would totally go in this order

• Wake Up
• Pray
• Read books
• Listen and dance to music
• Go out and laugh with friends
• Come home, enjoy a bottle of wine alone with my laptop watching my favorite movies.

One thing you’ll notice when you answer this question is you’re writing down things that you are interested in, things that matter to you, things that make happy and appreciate life better. These things are not influenced by the decisions of others rather this is what you’ll do if you were given this opportunity, so why not give yourself this opportunity everyday for the rest of your life. Today I’ll be writing about a topic that I’ve been reading a lot about lately considering that I’m trying to get my life on track as a young adult. 








                                  INTENTIONAL LIVING
If you’ve never heard of this, intentional living means living according to your values and beliefs, it could be religiously, politically, ethical value as well as for self improvement— this is the part I’ll be talking more about. Intentional living involves creating meaningful, fulfilling , thoughtful choices in the course of this journey called life. It means being actively interacting and engaging with your life, constantly evaluating yourself and making amends when needed. Intentional living helps you set a course for your life , it helps you make time for the things that are truly important to you. Its kind of  a roadmap that helps you navigate life in general. Intentional living comes with a plan but this doesn’t mean that the plan should be rigid and inflexible, of course we all know life happens, and sometimes we find ourselves in situations we totally wouldn’t bet would happen. So for the times that life isn’t constantly throwing jabs at us, that little time before the change of course, intentional living helps with making choices and having control of our lives.

Intentional living cuts across different aspect of life such as

• Health
• Relationships 
• Finance
• Personal/Spirituality
• Career

Of course there are more aspects of life that need our attention but these are my top five. These aspects of our lives are the most important and having a plan on how to navigate each and every one of them would really do us some good. There are certain ways I’ve learnt from friends and from books that would totally help with this.




BECOMING SELF AWARE:  Self awareness is the conscious knowledge of one’s character and feelings, this falls in the category of personal/spirituality. Self awareness is the ability to focus on YOU, your thoughts, actions, way of life , attitude, values and emotions —how these align with your internal standards. Being self aware helps you to be able to evaluate yourself, manage your actions and it helps with understanding how others perceive you. I know you’re probably wondering why should  anyone’s perception of me be important to me, truth is to some certain extent it is important. In order to have excellent result, ask people who you know will tell you the truth, people who really want to see you grow, not people who will be speaking from a place of contempt towards you, be careful of who you choose as this can make or mar your decisions. Being highly self aware helps in all aspects of life, from your personal life to your work life and even how to interact with the environment you find yourself in. Looking at your self objectively and truthfully stating you strengths and your weakness can help with being self aware. Also, perform daily reflection on how you handled situations over the course of your day and how you can do better in some cases, keeping a journal for all of these also helps.

GRATITUDE: You’re probably wondering why this is on the list but gratitude is a must, being thankful for the smallest things in life is one of the habits we’ve should cultivate as human beings. My mum always says that the little things that you think you survived, those things you don’t count, some people will give their whole wealth for that little thing. I remember it took me consecutive visits to the orthopedic hospital to really start thanking God for life. My time there showed me how much a second means to someone’s  life. How that sick person on the bed would give everything they own to breath that fresh air you wake up  to every day. You don’t have to be overly religious to be able to give thanks for life and the little things that matter so inculcate this into your daily habit.

TIME: Time na money o, time na money, use your time well, stop waka waka,stop gossip gossip...every Nigerian can relate to this popular song about the importance of time. To be honest, I haven’t fully mastered the art of using time effectively. Considering that everyone in life has equal 24 hours, one question you should ask yourself what you do with your time? In my journal, the first page clearly states:  What is the connection between what I do today and what I want most in life?. This clearly explains how we often spend our day doing things that don’t really matter to us. We are all guilty of bad time management but I’ve come to the understanding that we cant essentially manage time, we can’t control it, why not focus more on something we can control? Our attitude towards time, self management. There are several ways to go about this and these are also ways to live intentionally.

Set a goal
A dear friend of mine taught me the art of goal setting and ever  since then, working towards each and every one of them even when the odds are not in my favour has been my top most priority. Life may not happen the way we want it, i mean by my action plan for my goals of the year, I should be in broadcasting school by now but what do we have? A pandemic that is threatening humanity. Who would have thought? Setting goals should also mean setting realistic ones, something you can work towards. Imagine if your savings goal for the year is to save 5 million and you don’t even earn up to a 100,000, how do you plan to achieve that? Setting realistic goals is key in goal setting.



Create a foundation of small daily actions.
Write out each task for that day, what you hope to achieve. You can do that in your journal or use apps like 24 or your reminder app on your mobile phone but i totally advise to use a journal as reducing time on social media is also a part of this. Try out this, give yourself a to do list for a day that doesn’t include using your mobile phone, turn off all notifications on social media apps and religiously follow through, you’d find out that there isn’t much time to do some things you love doing outside of social media, so why waste your time on this? I personally turn off my notifications in such a way that if I don’t open a social media app for that day, I definitely won’t know if there’s an important message I need to reply that then takes me to Instagram, I watch funny cat videos, before you know it, I’m on twitter reading long threads, from there, there’s a YouTube video waiting for me, and so on. Till you spend hours on these platforms, it will feel like you spent a minute.  Truthfully, at first sticking to these daily goals will be tasking, trust me, I still battle with that but one thing for sure is gradually, it gets better. For me, no matter how hectic my day is, I always have to write how I feel about how my day went (if you’ve offended me, be sure to find your name in these writings but not to worry, all is forgiven), I also have to read anything for 2 hours in a day and listen to a podcast show. Start from somewhere and gradually you find yourself smashing your daily goals. Giving these goals a realistic timeline/tasking one is also key, it helps you manage time and also helps you stay focused.

DEFINE YOUR PURPOSE: This has to be the hardest of the whole journey to intentional living, from the first day I set foot in the university, till I graduated. Everything I heard from friends, Lecturers, Seminars on personal development is define your purpose in life. I don’t even know my purpose in life and so this doesn’t seem like oh, she’s typing all of these, does she know her purpose in life. We are all on a journey and if I tell you yes I do, I am lying but knowing this is an essential aspect of intentional living, it is important to take it one step at a time. So chill, before you run along to google how to find your purpose in life. Listen to this, finding purpose in life doesn’t happen in one day or in a year. Some people find it early in their life, some in the later part of their life and I want to strongly believe some people don’t till they die. So, in order to live intentionally, find your self. If you’re a king or queen of diverse interest like me, explore them. If injustice bothers you, examine how you react to news like that. Surround yourself with positive and truthful people who can see you and give honest feedback. One step at a time, it would become clearer.

MINDSET: With all the negativity in the world and our personal insecurities threatening  to mess up our perception of life and how we tend to live.  It’s enough to have a negative mindset but this doesn’t do any good to you, it only takes away from you. Imagine using a plunger to fix your bathroom, how it sucks all of that dirt in other to give way for water to pass through. That’s how negative mindset sucks the life out of you and gives room for setbacks and slow growth. It is not so easy to be optimistic about life especially when it has dealt you different blows but you owe it to yourself to change your mindset. The way the mind works cannot be overemphasized and if you’re knowledgeable about this, you won’t give room for negativity, albeit, sometimes this can’t be ignored, we just have to cultivate that optimistic mindset. So everyday, make use of daily affirmations. Affirmative statements like:
I am beautiful
I am smart
I can take on any task give to me and any other one that is applicable to your life.

The decision to live intentionally is a great step to a beautiful life, realizing that life is made up of choices and you have to be intentional about the choice you make should also be at the back of your mind. Learning from people who are way ahead of you is another great way to start this journey. I’m very sure if you follow everything I said above, you’ll find yourself doing more for you and not for others. One last thing I’ve learnt is the ability to say NO more than you say yes and considering that we have different personality traits, (you can take personality trait test to know yourself ) also looking inwards will also help especially if you’re a people pleaser . If something doesn’t work for you or is totally going to get you in the wrong place or wrong state of mind. It’s better to say no, than saying yes then regretting later on.
Also, there’s no journey without reflection. After putting into use the steps above, it is important to always reward yourself if you smash your goals, reflect on some of your past decisions and how they’ve shaped your life and if the steps you’ve taken are actually working for you, revise your plan always as life will happen and circumstances will change — for better or for worse.                      Rinse and Repeat.
Books recommended by a friend to learn more about intentional living.

BOOKS TO READ.

Soulful simplicity-Courtney Carver
Daring Greatly -Brene Brown
The habits of highly effective people- Stephen Covey
I haven’t read them but I totally trust this persons judgement so dig in and if you have read books you’d like me to check out too. Please drop a comment.

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