Photo Credit: Abi Ismail
Most of us have heard by now that there’s a difference between our intentions and the impact of our behavior. If you break someone’s leg because you were trying to help them move a ladder, they don’t really care that you were “just trying to help.” They only care that their leg is broken!
People don’t care what your intentions are, they care about the impact of your behavior. That is, they care about the result that you’ve created in their life. However, your intentions make all the difference in the world to you. Your intentions determine the type of energy you bring to whatever it is you're doing. That impacts you psychologically and emotionally. Intentions are very similar to motives, and our motives matter enormously.
In other words, there’s a difference between the external impact of your behavior (broken leg) and the internal impact (trying to help from a place of caring).
Here’s an example of motives from my people-pleasing years. Until I got into recovery, I didn't understand that my people-pleasing behaviors were about trying to control and manipulate others. I was trying to control what they thought of me by manipulating them into being pleased with me. Sometimes I was trying to be helpful so things would go my way. My underlying motive was to manipulate and control outcomes and/or people’s opinions of me. I can see this with crystal clarity now, but I was completely blind to these motives back when I was doing all that.
My motives were disguised as helpfulness. I thought I was helpful because I was “nice.” I didn’t realize that my primary motive was to get people to think good things of me and/or to get my way. This knowledge has led me to one of my most important questions when trying to understand what the “right” thing to do is: What are my motives? Why am I doing this?
Here’s an illustration. I had a sponsor who said to me, “It used to be that I made you a cup of coffee because I wanted you to like me. Now I make you a cup of coffee because God wants me to be a good, kind person, and I want to live a God-centered life. Either way, you get coffee.” The impact is that the person gets coffee in both cases. But her motives, her intentions, were completely different in each case.
If we think intentions don't matter, just impact matters we’re thinking in a shortsighted manner. That type of thinking doesn't address the internal impact on the person who’s taking the action. When I was being helpful to people to manipulate and control them, the impact was they got helped. Now when I help people because I want to be helpful, people still get helped. The impact may very well be the same to the person getting helped in both of those cases. But from my perspective, I’m living in line with my principles when I help with the intention of truly being helpful. I'm being honest with myself about what I'm doing and why.
When I was people-pleasing, I didn't understand why I was doing what I was doing. I couldn’t consciously see that I was manipulative and controlling. My intentions mattered to me psychically, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. It “fragmented” me to have unspoken and impure intentions.
Impact absolutely matters. But it’s not just your impact on the external world that matters, the impact on your internal world matters too. Intention is the thing that determines how your behavior impacts you internally.
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