Setting intentions – the Day Crafting tool you’ll use most

Have you heard of a stitching pony? Every craft has ubiquitous tools, the potter's wheel, the smith's anvil, the carver's chisel – and the leatherworker has the stitching pony which is used to grip the material. To the Day Crafter the tool used most often has to be intention setting.

I recently reviewed the tools introduced on the Day Crafting Apprentice Course and the processes using those tools and setting intentions were in every flow whereas some tools are only used once. It all depends on the effectiveness of the tool to solve a problem and how regularly we have that problem. A problem for most days is focussing on what's most important – and the difference between urgent and important. What is important can easily be pushed aside by what is urgent – the time-critical crisis, other people's agendas and the difficulty in saying no. I find the quickest way to shape the day to enable meaningful progress is to take a moment to set an intention for the day. This may be an answer to a prompt question such as, what is the most important thing to get done today? but there are many others. The intention is the Day Crafter's stitching pony, used every day to hold the rest together.

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Setting an intention is a nice thing to do. There are added benefits to the practice. I find the moment of intention setting each day a delight. It connects me with myself by bringing clarity and often surprise. I hear myself slotting into place as I'm calmed and unified and grounded. The surprise is that one of my pre-prepared prompt questions jumps out at me and brings a moment of delight – 'oh yes, I'd forgotten about that'. And then stuff gets done; day by day, step by step, intention returns value.

The Practice

The practice is simple. Set an intention for the day such as the most important thing to get done, or by asking, as Benjamin Franklin did, what good can I do today? You can set a day's intention as we do on the Day Crafting Apprentice Course or set an intention for the next activity. You can experiment further by introducing the practice to group work or meetings, asking all participants what their intention for the session is.

Written by Bruce Stanley on Fri, January 15, 2021

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