In this post, we will talk about how to transform your to-do list from “what I have” into “what I want” by setting each item as an intention.
Barbara was pondering her ever growing to-do list one day while also working on her accomplishments and wish lists. It is important to us in our wish practice to notice that these three lists are intimately connected. What we have accomplished often appears first on either - or both - a to-do list or a wish list. We also have the practice of moving wishes that come true from our wish list to our “I have …” list. At first, Barbara didn’t connect the link between all three lists. She “got” that wishes, accomplishments, and “have’s” are connected, but in considering her to-do list, all she got was a fuzzy and somewhat uncomfortable feeling of overwhelm, as in “Gosh! I have so much I have to do!”
Then, as she was considering her wish list, she realized that many of the items on her to-do list are things she really wants to do. If wishes start with “I want …”, then how is that different from these “to-do” items? The answer is… they aren’t!
So Barbara tried something. She took her to-do list and changed it into a wish list. She added “I want to…” in front of every item on that list and read them out loud to see how they resonated. The first thing she noticed is that the item “I want to complete my income tax submission by March 15th” did not exactly bring her joy. Income tax preparations are a chore she has to do, so she reframed it with the feeling she would have when the income tax preparations were complete. Now that is joyful! "No more income tax worries or work until next year? Yay!" Thinking of it in that sense made her heart smile and filled her with so much happiness.
In our language of wishes, what she did was to change the vibration around each of the items. There’s not much visible in this transformation other than adding the words “I want to…” at the beginning of each “to-do” item. With a few small tweaks to some of the items, she put the spotlight on the joyful outcome she desires in each of those situations. The big change, however, is the vibrational change. It’s about sitting with the feeling of joy and relief that comes when she presses the final upload button to hand-off the tax preparations to an accountant.
If you prefer to rewrite the wish, it would go something like this:
“I want the feeling of joy, relief, satisfaction [fill in your feeling] that comes when I complete my income tax preparations.”
She did the same test with each item and transformed her overwhelming to-do list into a list of joyful outcomes - a new kind of wish list, if you will.
If you have a similar situation, where your to-do list brings feelings of overwhelm, burden, weightiness, or despair, try turning it into wishes, like Barbara did, and see how much closer you can come to more joy, more fulfillment, and more of the life you desire.
There is a lot more to this practice than we have space for here, but we will return to some other aspects of this in future posts. Among other things, prioritizing and time management begin to feel different in a positively fulfilling way. Keep coming back to learn more. And, as always, we would love to hear from you about your experiences with this idea or any other of our ideas.
Next time, our blog post will be the story “Be Careful How You Wish!”
Until then,
Peace and All Good
Margie and Barbara
The Wish Mavens
Photo Credit
The photo featured in this post was taken by (and is copyrighted by) Margaret A. Herrick.