How to be an Intentional Mum: Benefits of goal setting as a parent
Intentions as we know is a mental state that represents a commitment to carrying out an action or actions in the future. Quite necessarily it involves planning and forethought. And hence as intentional beings, goal setting is a very critical aspect of our lives, we all feel the need and necessity of setting goals and working towards their accomplishment. I read somewhere long back that, without goals, and plans to reach them, you are like a ship that has set sail with no destination. Whatever facet or phase of our life we might be in , we all have challenges to subvert, obstacles to overcome and places to reach. When we talk about intentions, we mean what we aim or plan to do, not just moving forward, but moving towards something meaningful, of course the purpose and meaning would be distinct for each one of us and we are left to figure that out for ourselves.
In my last 9 years, I have evolved as a mother, and am still on my journey to becoming an intentional and mindful mum, I think at some level we all do… after I got married I procrastinated having kids, the whole idea of someone’s absolute dependency and vulnerability was quite overwhelming for me. And I pledged myself that when I’ll have my own kids, I’ll give them my best, not just in terms of time and attention, but most importantly being a mentor, a guide and a good role model for them. I read some hundred books on parenting, even took courses on child psychology (yes I really took my job seriously) and I still regret not having read about the sunnah parenting early on in my motherhood, nevertheless better late than never. So I started reading about the children around the prophet and the behaviour and actions of our beloved prophet towards children.
One of the hadith says – “Actions are by intentions and verily every person will only have what they intended” (Bukhari and Muslim). This is profound, it teaches us the power of intentions, every action we do is in fact the culmination of a thought that arose in the mind, an objective behind that thought, and eventually turned into the physicality by being executed in the form of action. But this says that the onus/reward of the action is based on the intention.
We all set goals be it personal, professional, family or community goals. As a believing mum, my foremost intention and hence goal is to parent in a way so as to please my Creator. If I’ve got this straight, I guess everything else aligns itself to serve the purpose. And so when I began my journey with this intention in mind, I was clear on my major goal, and then there is a stream of cascading goals, but eventually, all these goals were a subset of this major goal, so when I made an intention to be grateful, kind, patient or perseverant etc. they all had the larger purpose of pleasing my creator. Not only am I self-developing, but also I am setting an example for my kids who are learning not from my words but my actions.
Categorizing/Classifying goals is important, it’s good to practice setting goals for each category and working towards them, for example, there will be academic goals which we all are quite aware of but other than that there will be character goals that would include practising patience, kindness, gratefulness, trustworthiness etc., life skill goals would include teaching kids conflict resolution, resilience, emotional intelligence etc., there should be some community goals where by kids and we as a family should set some goals for the benefit and upliftment of our community, like volunteering for community events, doing fundraisers for someone who needs help in your community etc.
I would conclude this by adding that being intentional has immense benefits, not only does it gives life a purpose (an innate quest for a purpose-driven life in mankind ever since existence), but it also leads us to being productive, when we work bit by bit by setting goals, things are a lot more organized, less daunting and achievable. Keep your goals realistic and achievable and as you get into the pattern of accomplishing them, you can increase the magnitude and gradually move out of your comfort zone to stretch a bit as the real change happens here.
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