necessity is the mother of intention

The road to failure, is as they say, paved with good intentions.

When I'm halfway up a pitch of dead vertical, fragile and friable frozen ice, my intention appears to be very clear and simple: to get to the top. However my true intention is often less clear and often less simple, which is why so many of us fail at something we say is important. Sometimes my intention is to stay comfortable and warm which is jarringly at odds with my other so-called intention of getting to the top. It's my net intention, the sum of all the forces working towards getting me to the top (like a need for achievement and challenge and a desire to use my skills and experience in a meaningful way) minus the forces working against (like fear, self-doubt, ego) that determines whether I succeed at my goal. My "goal" is not then my full intention. It's only part of the picture.

Goals are notoriously easy to set and famously difficult to reach. Many goals are in the category of "nice to have" rather than "must have."

At the start of the season, my goal to get to the top of the ice climbs I went out on were more in the nice-to-have category. Kind of like when someone says: "I'd like to have my own business", or "I'd like to finish a marathon" or "I'd like to be a millionaire". People utter the bulk of these statements without force, in the face of a large fantasy about how nice they'd be to have and without consideration of what it would take to actually have them.

My mountain guide Patrick has unfortunately figured this out about me and I'm now busted. He just doesn't let me down until I get to the top. The inclusion of Patrick in my life has made a nice-to-have into a must-have. I could of course not go with Patrick, knowing this about him, but, he has fortified my intention to reach my goal. The goal has not changed, but my intention is now much stronger. How do I know? Because I've gotten to the top every route I've tried in the last month. The goal has become the result. That's the value of good support. And every time I get to the top of one climb my intention is stronger to get to the top of the next one.

Learn more about good support at http://www.stepup.net/.