Welcome to the first episode of the Live an Intentional Life Podcast. I’m so happy to have a space where I can bring you really helpful information and tools that you can use to craft the life of your dreams. I am Dr Natalie Barre, and I am first and foremost a scientist, so I plan to bring you evidence-based strategies on the topics of time management, goal setting, and a wide range of brain science so that you can take and use what’s helpful, and cut through the noise that you see online.

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I am a former Clinical Neuropsychologist, which means that I am an expert in brain function, and you’ll hear more about my background in the next episode. For this episode though, I want to take you through 12 core principles that will help you understand what this podcast is all about, and inspire you to take charge of your day so that you can take charge of your life.

This podcast is for you if you feel overwhelmed with all the elements of adulting, you’re juggling kids, work, home life, and trying to squeeze in social time, with about 3 seconds leftover on the weekend for hobbies. You know that there’s a better way to live, but you have no idea where to start. We’re bombarded with so many messages online, that are often contradictory, about what works and what doesn’t work, what you should and shouldn’t be doing, and this just adds to the feeling of overwhelm. Then you get to the end of the day feeling totally stressed, so you mindlessly scroll on social media to numb out, and then feel guilty that you didn’t spend your time wisely. Sound familiar? Well my essential message to you is that can do the things that you want to do, feel fulfilled, and still have time to play, rest, and spend time with the people that matter most. I have 12 principles to go through with you, in no particular order, and while there are many more ideas to the concept of living an intention life, these are a great place to start. So let’s dive in.

1. You have cognitive skills that you can utilise to make the most out of your day.

What is cognition, or cognitive skills? Cognition means thinking, and so your cognitive skills are all the thinking skills that you have, like memory, attention, language, visual processing, planning, impulse control and even things like being creative and generating ideas. You can think about these being separate to things like emotions, movement, and sensation, which are other main functions of the brain. Understanding your cognition better is one of the key ways that we can improve our self awareness, and get closer to operating more effectively in the world. Now, cognition is my bread and butter, it’s the area of expertise for Clinical Neuropsychologists, so you are going to hear me bring you a lot of the science in this area and more importantly, how we can use this knowledge about our brain in our everyday life.

2. Time is your most precious resource, it’s non-renewable

I want to inspire you to really take this on board, and think about it like this. If I said to you hey can you spend an hour with me so I can pick your brain, or help me with something? You’d probably say yes. But if I said hey can you give me $100, you’d probably ask a few more questions and be a little more reluctant. Now I’m certainly not saying don’t be generous, but you will never get hours in the day back. Money is renewable, and you can get more things, but every second that passes is one less second you have to do what you want in life. Please don’t squander it. We all want to get to a point where we do have the flexibility to be generous with our time, and give it away in the way we want to, and we can only do that when we are intentional with what we are doing with our days.

Now I’m not saying to cram as much into your precious hours as you possibly can. Time management and productivity often get a bad wrap, because it seems like the goal is to do more and more and more. What I am saying is that you want to spend your 24 hours per day doing things that are important to you and enjoyable, rather than whittling them away with procrastination, unintentional actions, and habits that don’t serve you. You want to have time each day or each week when you are doing important focused work, and time that is actually kept free, unpressured, and restful.

3. Sleep and relaxation are top priorities.

You won’t hear me saying to get up earlier to crush your goals. Sure, get up early if that’s when you work best, but then you have to go to bed early to maintain good sleep. Your brain needs good quality sleep to maintain good function. We can’t work for hours and hours on end, and there is a whole body of research that shows that sleep deprivation and working very long hours increases errors and mental wellness issues such as burnout. Now the optimum level of sleep differs slightly from person to person, but getting less than 7 or so hours can affect your short term wellbeing and your long term health. Sleep is vitally important, and should not be overlooked as part of wellbeing, and should not be sacrificed in order to get more done. In the same way, rest is incredibly important, we know that taking breaks improves our ability to pay attention and do a task correctly. And, rest is actually thought to be even more beneficial the longer you are working. So building in time for rejuvenation is incredibly important not only for how well you can do a task, but also for your enjoyment of your tasks as well – you don’t want all your days to feel like a hard slog and not actually enjoying anything. So, make sure that breaks and sleep are built into your week so that you have a sustainable routine.

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4. Daydream about your life.

You can only craft the life of your dreams if you know what you want. This can be really hard to realise for some, we’re not born knowing what our passions are, it’s only with curiosity and experiences that we start to hone what we actually want, but it also takes spending time to dream. Daydream about your best life, imagine what you want to spend your life doing, and get really really clear about it. It’s not until you can see what you want to aim for that you can start taking steps and making changes. Then we can more easily work out what our priorities are, and how we should spend our limited time. This one is related to number 5, which is…

5. Manifesting is not magic.

Hear me out on this one. There is a reason why manifesting works, and it’s not because the universe thinks you should have a certain thing or not. It’s actually the way your brain focuses on things that are related to what’s in the forefront of your mind. Things that you want actually happen because of cognitive bias, and we’ll talk more about that in future episodes. The most important thing I want you to know now, is that thinking of manifestation as some magical thing takes away all your power, and you don’t realise just how incredibly powerful your brain actually is. So to get what you want, and bring it into reality (which is what manifesting means), you get really clear on it, and then your brain will notice opportunities related to this.

6. Work on your mindset.

This also isn’t anything mystical or ineffective. The thoughts that you say to yourself create your reality. Your brain comes up with thoughts, many of which are negative, because it’s easier to think the things you’ve already been thinking. If you can consciously choose your own thoughts, by noticing what comes up and then choosing a new idea, you can slowly over time think and believe new things. And this is where things become really interesting – this is where you can harness your strengths, make a clear path, improve your resilience, and, like I always say, craft the life of your dreams.

7. Set goals properly.

Living an intentional life is about using your time with intention, but you can’t do that if you aren’t clear on what your goals are. Trying to achieve goals can be a difficult process, because there are setbacks, disappointments, and lulls in motivation. But when you learn to focus on the actions that you take, or your process goals, rather than the results, or what we call outcome goals, this will absolutely be a game-changer in achieving what you want in life AND enjoying the journey.

8. Write things down to support your working memory.

What is working memory? It’s a temporary storage of all the things you’re thinking right now. Guess what? It’s probably overloaded with things like what’s for dinner, did I fill out that form? I need to go to the uniform shop and get my child a new jumper, should I buy an electric car? I forgot to put the dishwasher on, will I have enough time to finish that report for work? You get the picture. This is one of the main reasons you feel OVERWHELMED! The quickest and most effective way to get all this out of your mind is to write it all down in a brain dump. It‘s not the best name for something, but it really is effective in releiving your mind of all the pressure, and then it allows you to look at it all, prioritise, and decide on tiny steps that you can take today. I want you to end your day peacefully, and this is a big part of that.

9. Stop multitasking.

This is a big tip and it’s important because it’s based on what we know about the attentional system. Your attentional system is really quite limited in many ways, and we need to be careful not to overload it. Did you know that you actually can’t multitask? There’s no such thing. When you attempt to do more than one thing at once, then your brain is acutally making many many fast switches between the two things, and this is bad for three reasons – one because you get slower, two because you can make more mistakes because you’re missing things, and three, you feel exhausted because you’re burning a lot of calories. You would actually do better if you did one task, and then did the second task separately. I know we don’t like to hear this, but it’s the truth I’m afraid!

10. You’re not a procrastinator.

Everyone procrastinates, but if you think that that’s just YOU, then you are less likely to believe you can change it. Procrastination is a behaviour, it’s not a personality trait, so you can absolutely work on it and procrastinate less. Procrastination mainly occurs because your brain is trying to avoid pain, so try and take a moment to ask yourself what pain am I avoiding? Then think about the reward or benefit, and see if you can find a good reason to stop the procrastinating behaviour and move onto something more meaningful for you.

11. Work life balance is attainable.

There is a lot of push-back in the online space about work-life balance being a myth. I think that this implies that work-life balance is some perfectly balanced scale with equal parts work and homelife, but this is not only unrealistic but also not really what we’re striving for right? Each day, each week, each season in life changes and so work-life balance simply means having appropriate time for doing both, and I think this is much more attainable than we claim it to be. If we can put in effort into what we are doing, stay mindful, be aware of our goals, say no to things that don’t align with our priorities, then I think that we precisely are achieving work life balance. If instead you feel like you’re on the hamster wheel and just can’t see a way out, then you are in the right place with this podcast.

Now the twelfth and final one…

12. Willpower is not like a depletable battery.

Now willpower is an important idea because it relates to our habits and goals, and helps us to avoid temptation. Traditionally we think about willpower as something that runs down, and when it’s low we find ourselves eating that bowl of icecream. This assumes that we are not really in control of our willpower, and that it’s governed by things like time of day, how exhausted you feel, how much sleep you’ve had, but in fact more recent research indicates that willpower can actually be sustained if you believe it can sustained. So let me explain this. There is a wonderful study from Carol Dweck and her group in 2013 that showed that people only performed worse on self-control tasks when they believed that their willpower was depleted; those who believed that their willpower had not run out continued to perform well on self-control tasks. The researchers indicate that if we can alter the common belief that willpower is limited and “used up” by exerting self-control already, and instead believe that self-control continues to generate more self-control, then we remove or lessen our dependence on things like sugar or alcohol to anything else to get us through the day. This is a really cool idea, and I’m just learning more about it myself, I want to explore it more in future episodes.

There you have it!

Those are your 12 principles for living an intentional life, let’s recap them. 1. You have cognitive skills that you can utilise to make the most out of your day. 2. Time is your most precious resource. 3. Sleep and relaxation are top priorities. 4. Daydream about your life. 5. Manifesting is not magic. 6. Work on your mindset. 7. Set goals properly. 8. Write things down to support your working memory. 9. Stop multitasking. 10. You’re not a procrastinator. 11. Work life balance is attainable. 12. Willpower is not like a depletable battery.

I believe these principles to be so important to your experience of the world, that you would do well to take time to work on these kind of things everyday. I believe that your days all put together make up your life, and if you’ve found yourself somewhere where you don’t really want to be, then now is the time to make changes. It’s not too late, you’re not too old, you’re not trapped, you have choice, and even the smallest change will alter your trajectory and have you actually enjoying your days.

I can’t wait for you to join me on this journey as I explore these topics a lot more, and I’m going to end this and every episode on my favourite quote, it’s by Mary Oliver. Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? See you next time.

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Want to dive in further? Join my signature time management course TIMEWISE where you’ll learn how to move from busy and burnt out to feeling productive and at ease.

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I mention the following research article in the episode:

Job, V., Walton, G. M., Bernecker, K., & Dweck, C. S. (2013). Beliefs about willpower determine the impact of glucose on self-control. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(37), 14837-14842.