Align your intentions.
Most people overestimate what they can do in a day,
and underestimate what they can do in a year.
Goal-Crafting Intensive 2023 July
Make time to make a plan, online on July 15th or 16th
registration now closed
Keep reading to learn more about the event and how to find out about future events...
2023 is getting along! How's your year going? What else do you want to make happen by the end of the year, in your work, in your art, or in your personal life?
Planning can be hard, and it's easy to get discouraged. Virtually all plans need course corrections on the way, whether minor or a completely new approach. That said: planning is a skill, and you can get better at it.
This Goal Crafting Intensive is an online workshop that guides you through a personal trajectory to orient towards the future with a combination of plans & creative improvisation. It helps you get clear on what's important to you—your goals and values—so that you can stay focused on what matters, whatever may come.
What you can accomplish with us:
- Get clarity on what your most important goals are
- Identify possible actions and approaches you could take, and prioritize between them
- Develop strategies to stay motivated and focused on moving towards your goals
- Put in place systems to help you continually reflect, adjust and improve
The Intensive includes advance content so that you arrive ready to hit the ground running, instruction and coaching to provide you personalized support, and a practice group that meets weekly so you can continue learning with peers throughout the year.
Choose from these sessions:
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Having Goals Matters
The scientific literature broadly agrees that goals have (at least) four important effects[1]:
- Goals direct attention toward goal-relevant activities and vice versa
- Goals energize you to work harder
- Goals challenge you to persist longer
- Goals cause you to become more strategic
Some people (notably Dilbert creator Scott Adams) have claimed that instead of goals, you should have "systems". Nonsense. Have both.
And in fact everyone already does have both goals and systems. Any rough sense you have of what you'd like to happen, on any timescale, is a goal. We're here to help you clarify some of the big goals that you want to organize your life around.
Goals + Systems > Resolutions
Isle of Man
"I was worried that the workshop would basically just be a marketing event for Intend... yet another webinar trying to upsell me. But it was totally the opposite.
The content was generally applicable, and the coaches were consistently focused on helping me with what I needed most. This workshop was truly about supporting me in defining, refining, and going for my goals"
Pay What You Want
The Goal-Crafting Intensive is offered on a PWYW basis, for the following reasons:
- Interested people can attend even if they're short on spare cash.
- It lets people pay what they feel the event was worth to them, meaning no buyer's remorse.
- It incentivises us to make the event be really impactful, and gives us really tangible feedback on that front.
- We've done it for 5 years and it's worked great!
There will be a $25 ticket price up-front, to confirm that participants are serious about the event. Then at the end of the event, when we settle up, you pay whatever you want. There's no minimum (and no maximum).
We know some people would rather not engage in economic experiments though, so if you'd rather, you can go ahead and just pay a market rate of $350 up-front.
Pick a session:
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Session {[{session.number}]}
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(only {[{session.spotsRemaining}]} spots remaining) Sold out
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Pick a payment option:
Prices are in USD
Registration closes for each workshop 2 hours before it starts
(or when tickets sell out!)Registration closes in {[{timeUntilRegistrationCloses}]}
(or when tickets sell out)Your ticket includes
Pre-workshop course content
Start reflecting now and arrive ready to hit the ground running.
Instruction & coaching
Learn from professionals and receive customized support.
Structured co-working
Dedicate time to dream and strategize alongside other workshop participants.
Weekly practice groups
Continue learning alongside a community of peers.
Meet your coaches
Benjamin Carr
I’m good at helping people get clear about their big picture and staying aligned with that big picture on a daily and weekly basis, over a longer period of time.
I’ve got a background in mindfulness meditation and helped develop a lot of the GCI content.
I’m particularly interested in working with individuals in organizational and management contexts, around topics like leadership, strategy, org design, change management, etc.
Malcolm Ocean
I've designed many workflows, the biggest of course being Intend itself. I've also experimented with dozens of other systems, habits, and techniques for making my life more intentional. I used to coach for Beeminder, so I'm a good person to talk to about hard accountability systems too.
I'm a great person to talk to if you need encouragement or guidance going serious with a lifestyle business.
Sarah McManus
I enjoy catalyzing flow through internal conflict debugging and creative responses to stuckness, along with meaning-making and mindset work. I can help you experience more coherence between what you’re doing and what you care about, build a supportive mindset to get your whole self on board for action, and troubleshoot systems for scaffolding your goals.
I also have quite a lot of experience in helping people integrate intense emotional or transformative experiences.
Mary Bajorek
I’m a life coach for anyone at crossroads in their life asking themselves the question of “Who do I want to become?” My specialties lie in deconstructing internal narratives and limiting beliefs through gentle inquiry and presence with the experience.
I will help you in getting to know yourself better, making short- and long-term decisions that deeply align with your core self and ensuring you stay on the path that feels the most energizing and enlivening to you.
...and more! 
We have over a dozen other coaches with a variety of experiences and expertise, and each session has a different mix of those coaches depending on their availability. We'll have them introduce themselves so you know who to ask, or you can just post in your coach channel and we'll find the best person to answer your question.
We also have a directory of all past coaches that are offering ongoing 1-on-1 coaching, so you can reach out to them.
Frequently Asked Questions
We'll use a Zoom call to say hi and to orient you to the event. You get your own coaching channel on a private Slack workspace for chat-based coaching. The course content—video presentations, model, and exercises—is hosted on a wordpress website that participants have access to before, during, and after the event.
You can still get a lot of value out of attending just part of the event. The course content is available anytime, so the main benefits you'd be missing are the live coaching and the accountability to work during the event. But you can also get accountability throughout the year from our community of practice weekly meetings.
The videos are pre-recorded so you can listen to them at any time including years later. In the first few years, we did the presentations live, but now we mostly use Zoom for a sense of presence and shared timekeeping—you can navigate through the content not just at your own pace but in whatever order makes the most sense for you.
Not at all! While the techniques we teach are compatible with Intend's philosophy, they also work with other tools. Our coaches will recommend whatever systems they think will work best for your situation, which might be Intend but might also be competitors!
There are 5 main course modules:
- Goal-setting: what's the possibility space & what most excites you?
- Planning: what do you need to do to make it happen?
- Execution: how can you work hard, work smart, & have fun while doing it?
- Reflection: how do you notice when you've gotten lost, and get reoriented?
- Longer-term: vision, values, uncertainty, complexity & resilience
You're free to focus on just one or two of those modules, or go through all of them. You can also just spend most of the event talking with our experienced coaches about whatever you're stuck on, which could be anything from a habit change you want to make, to a big decision, to a challenging situation in a work or personal relationship.
For those who've tried a lot of systems already and are worried it'll just be stuff you've heard before: first of all, we've got some in-house techniques you probably haven't heard of. But more importantly... we know that a single powerful insight can change your life, and we'll work with you to find a new perspective on your situation that gives new leverage.
Except... registration is closed
(tickets sold out)
...now what?
To be among the first to find out about future events like this, sign up for our newsletter (we'll also send you some of our finest intentionality advice, but it's a pretty infrequent list most of the time).
To get some immediate guidance thinking big picture about your life, check out the Intend goal-setting & review process:
Create an Intend account
Then come back & click here to access your Q1 review.