Intentional Living Experiment

Last year I wrote The Intentional Living Experiment, a discipleship training book for Parkview Church. The idea of the book grew from several conversations I had with Pastor Stan Loutner about my development of a holistic, intentional approach to life planning. Stan encouraged me to write a book on the subject and teach the discipleship training class. That experience was life changing.

Prior to this writing project, I worked (very slowly) to develop and implement a personal life plan. The process of writing the book helped me bring clarity to how I can better live life with purpose, direction, and intentional daily actions. This journey has taken a great deal of time, patience, and practice. It has also included a great many false starts, restarts, breakthroughs, frustrations, celebrations, setbacks, and successes. And I'm not through yet, but this series of experiments has been and continues to be an amazing experience.

In the book, I broke down the process of intentional living into 5 parts. Assess, Aim, Act, Achieve, and Adjust. First, you ASSESS your life to get a better understanding of yourself, your beliefs, and hopefully a sense of your purpose. Then in each of the key areas of your life, you take AIM at your future and ACT by experimenting with different ideas. By taking daily actions, you ACHIEVE daily wins and make small, incremental gains. Then you take what you’ve learned so you can ADJUST and start the process again. Here's a quick look at the 5 parts.

Assess

Examine Your Life

Contemplate Your Beliefs

Reflect on Your Purpose

Aim

Visualize Your Future

Determine Your Direction

Set Long Term Goals

Act

Develop Short Term Action Plans

Choose Daily Practices and Priorities

Make Intentional, Daily Choices

Achieve

Build Specific, Purposeful Habits

Practice Deliberately and Patiently

Grow Incrementally and Consistently

Improve Areas of Intention

Adjust

Assess Progress Over Time

Refine Regularly

Learn Continually

Start Now

The beautiful thing about an intentional living experiment is that it's a process where you get to try new things, make tiny gains, and make personal discoveries. The only rule is that you have to show up and keep showing up. Enjoy the false starts, restarts, breakthroughs, frustrations, celebrations, setbacks, and successes. Enjoy the process of intentionally building your life. Enjoy the experiment.

Enjoy the day!