Hope Is Cute. Intention Is Dangerous.
If you’re walking into the New Year saying, “I just want to feel better,” “I just want more ease,” or “I just want things to change,” but you haven’t decided who you are becoming, you are not setting intentions.
This is called hope.
And hope is nice. But intention is fierce.
Because intention is clear. And clarity kills identities that can’t come with you because you are upleveling too hard.
So, for my first blog post of the year, we’re talking about intentions. Not resolutions to go to the gym or vision boards that you forget about by February, or “good vibes only” toxic positivity. But the kind of focus that locks in your nervous system, behavior, and bank account.
And yes, we are also going to talk about grieving what you are not taking into 2026. Because pretending that part doesn’t hurt is one reason why people stay stuck in old identities and behaviors.
Before we even talk about intentions, we need to talk about grief.
Because every New Year triggers the same evaluation of your life.
In all fairness, you should be doing this more than once per year, whenever necessary, but this is a time of year when most people arrive at an evaluation cycle.
As you evaluate your life, ask yourself: what can’t come with you to 2026? This could be family, friends, jobs, or habits.
But this also includes versions of yourself that hold beliefs such as:
· “My worth depends on what I do for others.”
· “If someone is upset with me, I’m unsafe.”
· “Rest must be earned.”
· “I’m responsible for everyone’s emotions.”
· “I have to work hard to make money.”
· “Money, love, etc., is not available to me.”
· “If I shine, someone else will be disappointed.”
You don’t just drop those identities without an emotional reaction.
There is real grief in outgrowing survival versions of yourself, even when they were exhausting and causing you pain.
So, if you’re feeling tender, emotional, or unusually heavy right now, nothing is wrong with you. You’re not lazy or unmotivated.
You’re integrating. If you don’t consciously grieve old identities, you’ll unconsciously recreate them.
What does setting an intention mean?
An intention is not:
a goal
a wish
a manifestation you check on twice a year
An intention is what you agree to focus on, repeatedly, even when it’s uncomfortable. Because your nervous system follows your focus, your behavior follows your nervous system, and your results follow your behavior.
Which means: You don’t get what you want. You get what you focus on.
If your focus is:
“I don’t want to be broke.”
“I don’t want to burn out.”
“I don’t want another bad relationship.”
Then you are focused on being broke, burned out, and in a bad relationship. And those will be your results.
Intention says: “________ is who I’m becoming, so __________ is what I am focusing on.”
Here’s where this gets practical.
Most people only set intentions for the year. And just to be clear, I highly recommend doing that. Set an intention for this entire upcoming year.
But don’t stop there. Because your life happens daily.
At the beginning of the year, I started practicing setting a daily intention. And as long as I was focused on that intention throughout the day, whether it was serendipity, a new opportunity, making a new connection, or whatever, that would happen that same day.
And even more recently, I started practicing segmented daily intentions. Within your daily intention, before you touch your phone, before you get in your car, before you wash the dishes, before you do anything, you set an intention. And it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. I tend to have similar intentions throughout the day.
The entire point is to be mindful of how we are moving through our day and to live in coherence with who we are becoming
The intentions are usually simple, such as:
· Calm.
· Decisive.
· Regulated.
· Bold.
· Spacious.
One word. That’s it. Before a meeting, date, content creation, dinner, errands, ask yourself, “Who am I being in this next hour?”
Not “what I am doing?” but “who am I being?”
This is how identity shifts happen without force.
Let me tell you a story of what this looks like in practice.
In early 2018, I lived in Chicago, and I decided: I am moving to Hawaii. Not wishy-washy “maybe,” “someday,” “or “if it works out,” as I had been telling myself for years.
The cost of living in Chicago and Hawaii was very similar, except for real estate. The problem was that to afford a comparable condo in Hawaii, I needed $100k more than I had saved.
I didn’t obsess over the how. I obsessed over the alignment.
Every decision ran through one filter: “Does this move me closer to Hawaii, or further away?”
opportunities that expanded me
work and hobbies that stretched my capacity
getting out of my comfort zone every single day, no matter how seemingly small
being the kind of person who moves from Chicago to Hawaii on their own
What I stopped focusing on:
distractions
proving myself
identities that kept me small
believing that it was impossible or not for me
And within six months, I made 100k from several unexpected places. Not because I hustled myself into the ground. But because my nervous system had a north star that I constantly recalibrated with.
When your intention is clear, your nervous system stops panicking, and your decisions sharpen.
Even though it sounds like magic, it’s coherence with who you are becoming.
If you keep saying: “I don’t know what I want,”
You probably do. You’re just afraid of who you’d have to disappoint if you admitted it.
Intention threatens people-pleasing, old dynamics, and versions of you that survived, but never thrived.
And that’s why most people stay vague. Because vagueness feels safer than power.
But when you’re clear, life responds. Maybe not instantly or perfectly, but consistently.
I’ll end with this.
I want you to pause and do this exercise.
Write this down: “Watch out everybody, I’m _________.”
Not what you’re doing. Not what you’re quitting. Who are you becoming?
Watch out, everybody, I’m:
regulated
self-trusting
wealthy and rested
emotionally unavailable for chaos
the woman who follows through
the woman who doesn’t abandon herself
going into 2026 on fire
going to shine my light and not care about what anybody thinks
Say it. Feel it in your body. Let it scare you a little.
Because intention isn’t about controlling the future. It’s about deciding who you are now.
And when you do that, everything else rearranges.
Glow Tip:
Clarity Over Comfort
If you keep saying “I just want to feel better,” but haven’t decided who you’re becoming, your nervous system stays stuck in limbo.
Because vagueness feels safer than power, but it’s also why nothing changes.
For most of my life, I thought staying open, flexible, and agreeable was a strength. What I was really doing was keeping old identities alive, so I didn’t have to disappoint anyone, or grieve who I was outgrowing.
Clarity isn’t aggressive. It’s regulating. When you decide who you are becoming, your nervous system stops scanning for approval and starts orienting toward alignment.
Grieving old versions of yourself isn’t a weakness. It’s the price of becoming someone who no longer survives on hope, but moves with intention.
When you stop asking, “How do I make this easier?” and start asking, *“Who am I being right now?” everything sharpens — your choices, your energy, your life.
That’s what it means to shine from the inside. ✨
Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqHihI9Z4GY
If this story stirred something in you…
You don’t need more willpower, better intentions, or another year of hoping things change. You need an identity that no longer abandons itself for approval.
People pleasing isn’t who you are. It’s a survival pattern your nervous system learned a long time ago, and intention threatens it.
That’s why I created the People Pleaser → Powerhouse: Break Free From Approval Addiction YouTube playlist.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtihsVOp1d0pV0s1rR_istGQn6HiMwRAL&si=u3ZuDf6hl4soikqO
This is not motivational fluff. It’s grounded, honest work that helps you stop outsourcing your safety, your worth, and your decisions to everyone else.
Inside the playlist, you’ll learn how to:
• recognize people pleasing as self-abandonment (not kindness)
• understand where these patterns came from without blaming yourself
• feel safe disappointing others without spiraling
• shift from survival-based identity → self-trusting leadership
• stop performing for love and start becoming the source of it
There’s no race. No rules. No fixing yourself. Just real tools for real life, especially when you’re tired.
This is about nervous system safety, identity shifts, and reclaiming your power, without forcing boundaries, rehearsing scripts, or becoming someone you’re not.
This is the work that changes how you move through everything — your relationships, your money, your career, your sense of self.
You don’t need to become someone new. You need to stop abandoning who you already are.
Let’s turn your light back on.
