INTENTIONAL
By David Amerland
When The Sniper Mind (https://thesnipermind.com) was completed I was left with a dilemma. There were two book ideas in front of me that would take my writing to the next thing that consumed our attention. Both were pertinent in terms of the issues we faced at the time and still face today, and both had the potential to be of huge practical help to a business audience.
Because I couldn’t decide at the time, I did a full workup of each title writing some 80,000 words over six months, fleshing out their outlines and fully exploring the ideas each contained. In the end I wrote neither of them. At the back of my mind the mountain of research I couldn’t physically put into The Sniper Mind without making it too large a book to lift and too unprofitable for my publisher to print kept nagging at me.
Decision making is a critical ability to get right. We most often get it wrong because we are never quite aware of what it is we react to when we do react to things. Emotional regulation is hard. The environment we experience, always pressures us in some way. The past we carry within us is ever present in our present. This makes the future we want that much harder to attain.
These were thoughts that bounced around in my head until they became difficult to ignore, impossible to not explore. Why do we, mostly, get the life we are given and not the life we want? Why do we make decisions that are at odds with our values? Why do we find it hard to be ourselves? These are questions that are at the core of Intentional.
The idea behind the book is simple: What is it we must
understand if we are to live each day the way we want to and make decisions
based on who we truly are? Over eleven chapters I then explored the fragments
of the self that must come together in order for us to do just that. In the
process I explored subjects such as identity, motivation, attitude, grit,
beliefs and mindset deeper than I had ever managed to with The Sniper Mind.
While Intentional is a smaller, in length, book than The Sniper Mind it is in many ways much, much deeper and therefore more challenging. In writing it I found myself asking one question over and over again: How can we, as individuals, become better versions of who we are?
If this was a fitness book, like Fighter’s Codex, (https://www.amazon.com/Fighters-Codex-Martial-Training-Program/dp/1844810003) this would have been an easy question to answer. Incremental physical exercises each of which builds on what has been achieved before and produces a fresh challenge to overcome each time, create a progression. Progressions create motivation and provide a sense of achievement.
When we talk about the mind though things are not quite so straightforward. We can’t flex our brain and see if it is smarter or more self-aware or capable of grater self-regulation. We can’t stand in front of a mirror and pat ourselves in the back for having raised our emotional intelligence or having achieved a better understanding of what drives the calculus of our personal decision making. Lacking such feedback we then become gladiators who only find out whether they are ready or not by being thrown in the arena.
That’s a challenge I had to solve. This is why each chapter of Intentional: How To Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully ends with just three, seemingly simple questions. Each of these however is a flail. It will help you peel back the layers of who you are and what you experience. Those questions, or rather the answers you provide, become the equivalent of posing in front of the mirror or stepping onto the scales each morning. They are the progression you will feel in the mental journey you’ve embarked upon and the gains you will make as you go deeper inside yourself in search of the answers of who you really are and why you are the way you are.
In the 21st century our greatest weapon is our brain. This, of course, has always been our greatest weapon but until we got to this nexus point in our history we could rely on evolution and use it fairly instinctively. What has changed for us now is complexity. Once the world becomes too large to manage instinctively and too complex to navigate by gut feeling alone we have to learn to deploy the power that is inside our head and the ability our brain has to deal with such issues.
Intentional: How To Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully then is exactly about this. In better understanding what’s under the hood of our being we become capable of steering ourselves from the present we are in, to the future we seek. That, is most definitely what we need most right now.
-- David Amerland
Live your life the way you want to. Manage stress better. Be more resilient and enjoy meaningful relationships and better health. We all want that. Such life leads to better choices, better jobs, loving romantic partners, more rewarding careers and decisions that are fully aligned with our aims.
What stops us from getting all that is the complexity of our brain and the complicated way in which the external world comes together. The misalignment between the internal states we experience and the external circumstances we encounter often leads to confusion, a lack of clarity in our thinking and actions that are not consistent with our professed values.
Intentional is a gameplan. It helps us connect the pieces of our mind to the pieces of our life. It shows us how to map what we feel to what has caused those feelings. It helps us understand what affects us and what effects it has on us. It makes it possible for us to determine what we want, why we want it and what we need to do to get it.
When we know what to do, we know how to behave. When we know how to behave we know how to act. When we know how to act, we know how to live. Our actions, each day, become our lives. Drawn from the latest research from the fields of neuroscience, behavioral and social psychology and evolutionary anthropology, Intentional shows how to add meaning to our actions and lead a meaningful, happier, more fulfilling life on our terms.
You can order your copy at Amazon.
David Amerland is a Chemical Engineer with an MSc. in quantum dynamics in laminar flow processes. He converted his knowledge of science and understanding of mathematics into a business writing career that’s helped him demystify, for his readers, the complexity of subjects such as search engine optimization (SEO), search marketing, social media, decision-making, communication and personal development. The diversity of the subjects is held together by the underlying fundamental of human behavior and the way this is expressed online and offline. Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully is the latest addition to a thread that explores what to do in order to thrive. A lifelong martial arts practitioner, David Amerland is found punching and kicking sparring dummies and punch bags when he’s not behind his keyboard.
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