written by Coach JoyGenea and Claude AI, Image by ChatGPT
Intention is a decision made before action. It is the internal directive you give your brain before the meeting starts, before the conversation happens, before your feet hit the floor in the morning. It is not a goal. It is not a to-do list. It is a directional set point, the answer to the question: who am I choosing to be, and what am I choosing to move toward, right now?
Most high-performers, and in particular men, never set one. And they wonder why they continue to have outcomes that they did not want, sometimes multiple times.
Your Brain Goes Where You Point It
Here is what the neuroscience actually says: your conscious and unconscious mind are in a constant negotiation. Whatever you fix your attention on, your brain begins organizing around. It filters information, flags opportunities, primes your responses, all in the direction of what you have told it matters.
When you set an intention, you are not doing something soft. You are programming the most sophisticated operating system on the planet. You are telling your brain: this is the signal, filter out the noise.
When you skip that step, you are still being directed. You are just letting everyone else’s urgency write the code.
Why Unconventional Leaders Get Hit the Hardest
If you are wired as a different thinker, a guy whose brain moves fast, jumps tracks, and hyperfocuses on whatever is loudest, the absence of intention is not a minor gap. It is a significant vulnerability.
Without a set point, you default to reactivity. And reactivity, for a high-output brain, is not idle drift. It is a full-speed sprint in whatever direction the first interesting or urgent thing pointed you. By noon, you have been extraordinarily productive on things that had nothing to do with what you actually needed to move.
The capacity is there. The execution is there. The direction was just never loaded.
The Difference Between a Goal and an Intention
A goal is a destination: close the deal, hit the number, finish the project.
An intention is the operating state you choose to bring to everything: I intend to be present in this conversation. I intend to lead with clarity today. I intend to listen before I respond.
Goals live in the future. Intentions live in the next five minutes.
Brendon Burchard, who has spent decades studying high performance, built a framework around this distinction. The sequence is worth understanding: intention shapes behavior, consistent behavior becomes habit, sustained habit becomes identity. You do not become a different leader by deciding to be one. You become one by choosing, repeatedly, how you are going to show up, starting before the day gets loud.
How to Actually Use This
It does not require a morning routine overhaul. Two minutes works. The drive in. While the coffee brews. The first thirty seconds before you open your laptop.
The question is not: what do I need to get done today? That list already exists and it will find you.
The question is: who do I intend to be today? What is the one thing I want to be true about how I showed up, when I look back tonight?
Set that. Then let it anchor you when the day tries to take the wheel.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Think about the last high-stakes conversation you had, with a client, a partner, a direct report, your spouse. Did you set an intention before it? Or did you walk in operating on whatever state you were already in?
Now ask: how might that conversation have gone differently if you had?
That gap is where a lot of the friction in your business and your relationships is living. Not in your strategy. Not in your effort. In the two minutes you skipped before things got started.
May you live into your intention today,
Coach JoyGenea
Video transcription:
One of the most important things in coaching is someone’s intention. So It just amazes me how often we do not take a moment to set our intention. What is our intention for this conversation? What is our intention for setting this– sending this text? What is our intention in the next action that we’re taking?
My intent… I’ll give you an example. My intention for creating this video today is to help give you a new perspective, and possibly to shift how you are going to spend your day-to-day to have a greater outcome in the direction that you want to grow, that you are looking at expanding yourself or having a better, more healthier, stable, balanced life.
Whatever success looks like for you, however you measure that is my intention in making this video. And to help unconventional thinkers and leaders hear and see in themselves other people that think and feel similarly to themselves, and also to find language around some of who they are and how they engage with the world, ’cause it is a little bit different.
Those are my intentions with this video. So intention is just that, setting out the direction that you want to go. Think of it as like l- the start of the map. It’s not that this thing is happening, it’s I intend for this thing to happen, or I intend to be this person, or I intend to behave in this manner.
And what inspired this was actually a mentor that I really admire and someone I’ve spent a lot of time training under, and that is Brendon Burchard. I can go on and on about what a great influence he has had in my life, and recently he was talking about intention. He has a framework around that. It’s actually very popular.
Feel free to Google that and check it out and explore it a little bit more. I’m gonna use a little piece of that and expand it more in the, the unconventional different thinkers direction, and that is the f- the… So you set an intention, and then what follows behind that is behavior, and when you shift your behaviors, you create habits, and then you…
Habits are just consistency. And after that, when you do something consistently for quite a long period of time, before you know it, it’s actually something that’s just becomes part of you. You’ve mastered it, and at that point, it then sinks into your identity. It becomes who you are. So the intention is actually the start of everything else, and it’s such an under-discussed thing, and what can often happen for unconventional leaders is that They don’t set that intention for the conversation with that staff mem- member.
They don’t set that intention for even the day and what their focus is and where their goal is. And without that, it’s very easy to get caught up in other people’s intentions or to get caught up in whatever the most important thing is that’s landed in your world in that moment. So intention is a bit of an anch…
I see it as a bit of a set point and an anchor that you create in your day by setting that intention in the morning, that you go back to at lunch, that you revisit again. It’s very simple. It can be just a few words. So For me, often it’s setting an intention in the morning. One of the things I do when I’m having…
So I’m around computers so much that it was brought to my attention by an eye doctor that I was I was acquiring uh, the potential for having my glands, the water glands in your eyelids and stuff, they were closing up. Anyways, it’s a thing that happens when you don’t blink enough, and when you’re working on computers, you don’t blink enough.
And so thereby, this, this forms. They shared with me that I could do this heated eye compress thing often, and I’ve been doing that now for a couple of years, and that 15 minutes that I do that each morning is when I set my intentions. That’s when I do some mindful meditation. That 15 minutes is such a valuable…
Like, it’s so good physically for my eyes because I was just at the eye doctor’s recently, and I can report incredible improvement. She was so impressed that I was doing that, and it was having great results, so I’m actually walking myself back from having that issue and not having to worry about that, which is…
we’re celebrating that. And it allows me that opportunity to set my intention. My intention for the day is this. My intention is to be this person. It’s different things every day. But today, my intention was to be of service to other people and to reach out and connect and communicate. And so, with that intention this morning, I looked through the projects and things I needed to do, and those are my priorities today, are things that are in alignment with that intention because that’s where my focus is today.
I- my intention is to reach you and to allow you to think about things a little bit differently. So my encouragement for you, if you are an unconventional leader and a different thinker, is to take a moment, literally the drive into the office, the couple of seconds while you’re brushing your teeth, you can use those two minutes, um, to be like, “What?
What is my intention for today?” Not, “What are all the things I need to get done?” That’s all there, trust me, I’m very aware. But what is my actual intention? Who do I intend to be today? What happens when we set that intention is we actually live into it. It allows our brains and our neurology to re-anchor to that potential and then- that awareness in our conscious mind and our unconscious mind, we actually go in that direction.
And doing that consistently, having patterns of that behavior, actually creates the mastery and the outcome that you’re looking for. So in coaching, I’m often having conversations about what’s your intention with that conversation? What is your intention in asking somebody that? ‘Cause maybe you need to start with that.
When you are leading people, here’s the intention. I’m JoyGenea, unconventional leadership coach, international neurodiversity coach, and champion for everybody having the opportunity to find and connect with their best selves and grow their lives into a great, successful experience. Thank you, and bye now.