The Discipline of Intent

The first of the human capacities worth developing on purpose is the one we assume we already have: knowing what we actually want. It is rarer, and harder, than it looks.

The want beneath the want

I have sat across from many people who arrived certain they wanted to leave their job. The certainty is often the most convincing thing in the room. They have the reasons ready, the frustrations rehearsed, sometimes the resignation letter half written. And then, somewhere in the second or third conversation, a quieter sentence arrives, and it becomes clear that leaving was never quite the want. The want was to be taken seriously. To be trusted with something that mattered. To stop feeling invisible. Leaving would not have touched any of it, and might simply have carried the same ache somewhere new.

This is the most ordinary thing in coaching, and also the most revealing. We are far less certain about what we want than we believe. We mistake the first want for the real one. We inherit wants from our parents, our peers and our profession, and carry them for years without ever checking whether they are ours. We chase the proxy, the promotion, the house, the exit, and are surprised when arriving there leaves the deeper thing untouched.

Knowing what you actually want turns out to be a discipline, not a given.

Why it matters now

This has always been true. What is changing is how much it costs to get it wrong.

I have spent a good deal of my working life on the other side of this question, helping people and organisations direct increasingly capable technology. The lesson that surfaces again and again, long before any of the current excitement about AI, is that the hard part was never the doing. It was saying clearly what we actually wanted done. Give a capable system a muddled instruction and it will pursue the muddle, faithfully and at speed. The quality of the outcome is capped by the quality of the intent behind it, and no amount of capability further down the line can rescue a request that was confused to begin with.

That is a technical observation. It is also, uncomfortably, a description of a life.

As machines take on more of the execution, the doing, the optimising, the getting-there, the part that remains most stubbornly ours is deciding where to go. And the more efficient the machine becomes at carrying us towards whatever we point it at, the more it matters that we are pointing at the right thing. Efficiency in service of the wrong intent is not progress. It is just a faster way to arrive somewhere you did not want to be.

Why it is so hard

So why do we find this so difficult?

Partly because wanting is noisy. Underneath any stated want sits a stack of others, and they do not always agree. I want to be free and I want to belong. I want to be chosen and I want to be left alone. Much of what looks like indecision is really two genuine wants pulling in different directions, and the work is not to silence one but to understand what each is actually asking for.

Partly because so many of our wants are borrowed. We absorb them so early and so completely that they feel like our own: the career our family respected, the definition of success our industry handed us, the life that looked right from the outside. It takes real effort to hold a want up to the light and ask the genuinely unsettling question. Is this mine, or did I simply never put it down?

And partly because the honest answer is often inconvenient. Knowing what you want can oblige you to change something you would rather not. It is frequently easier not to know, to stay busy, to keep pursuing the agreed-upon thing, than to discover a want that would ask something of you.

A practice, not a discovery

The reason I call it a discipline rather than a discovery is that it does not arrive once and settle. There is no single conversation after which you simply know, forever, what you want. Wants shift as you do. The practice is one of repeated, honest attention: noticing when a want is really a fear wearing a want’s clothes; noticing when you have talked yourself into something; noticing the small resistance in the body as you say a thing out loud that you do not quite believe. It is the willingness to be wrong about yourself, repeatedly, and to keep looking anyway.

Like any discipline, it strengthens with use and wastes with neglect. And it is exactly the kind of attention an automated world quietly discourages, because the machine is so very good at helping you pursue a want that it rarely pauses to ask whether the want was worth pursuing. That question was always ours to ask. It is becoming ours alone to ask.

The root of everything else

I am beginning the series here, with wanting, because everything else depends on it.

The capacities I want to explore in the pieces that follow, presence, judgement, the drawing-out of others, all assume a person who knows, at least roughly, what they are for. You cannot be fully present to another while you are lost to yourself. You cannot exercise good judgement towards an end you have never honestly named. You cannot help someone else find their intent if you have never done the work of finding your own. Intent is the root system. The rest grows from it.

There is a phrase I have used often about directing technology: govern intent, delegate execution. Decide what matters, and let the machine handle the how. This series is, in part, an argument that the same instruction applies to a life, and that the governing is the harder half. The execution, the getting-things-done, we are being handed extraordinary help with. The governing, knowing what is actually worth wanting, no one can do for us. It is the one thing that cannot be delegated, and it is becoming the thing that matters most.

The real work

So if you take one thing from this, let it be that knowing what you want is not the soft, preliminary part that comes before the real work. It is the real work, and it is getting harder precisely as everything around it gets easier.

We are about to be very efficiently carried wherever we choose to point. The discipline of intent is the practice of making sure we have actually chosen, and that the direction is genuinely ours.

Everything else, the whole automated future included, is just execution.

Next Article ->

The Power of Presence in an AI Age

Some of the most important moments in coaching are the ones where nothing happens. No clever question, no advice, just staying with someone while they find their way to what they came to say. That quality of attention is presence, and it may matter more than ever.