Why I Wrote The Twelve Intentions

I didn't begin with twelve intentions. I began with questions—questions that seemed to follow me through different seasons of my life.

What is this experience trying to teach me?

What matters now?

Who am I becoming?

For a long time, I did what many people do. I moved through life responding to what was in front of me. I served in the Marine Corps, built a career, became a husband and father, and learned how to solve problems, meet expectations, take responsibility, and keep moving. From the outside, much of my life probably looked fairly defined. Inside, it was more complicated.

There were parts of myself I didn't fully understand, questions I postponed, and expectations I accepted without always stopping to ask whether they still belonged to me. Then life began disrupting the plans. A marriage ended, my career changed, and I found myself beginning again in places I had never expected to be. I came to understand and eventually live more honestly in my identity. Cancer entered my life and forced me to confront uncertainty, mortality, my body, and the future differently.

I had spent years believing that resilience meant continuing forward. Eventually, I learned that sometimes resilience begins by stopping long enough to ask whether you're still moving in the direction you actually want to go.

The Lessons Life Kept Repeating

The Twelve Intentions didn't arrive as a framework. They emerged gradually through meditation, writing, conversations, relationships, running, disappointment, success, fear, illness, and starting over.

The circumstances changed, but the lessons kept repeating themselves.

I needed to Breathe when fear wanted to take control. I needed to Focus when everything seemed equally urgent and to Ground myself when circumstances threatened to define who I was. I needed Courage when I couldn't know the outcome in advance, and I needed to Create when there was something inside me asking to become real.

I came to understand that Thrive didn't mean waiting until life became perfect before participating in it. Balance was not something I could achieve once and keep forever; it required continual adjustment. Gratitude changed what I noticed, while Compassion changed how I understood other people and, eventually, how I understood myself.

Wonder reminded me that there were still experiences, people, ideas, and possibilities I had not encountered. Hope allowed me to imagine a future even when I couldn't clearly see its shape. And Transform helped me understand that becoming doesn't require abandoning who we have been.

Over time, the twelve intentions organized themselves into four collections:

Foundation — Breathe, Focus, Ground

Growth — Courage, Create, Thrive

Connection — Balance, Gratitude, Compassion

Expansion — Wonder, Hope, Transform

At first, I thought I was writing about twelve separate ideas. The deeper I went into my own stories, however, the more I realized I was wrong.

Fear existed beside courage. Grief existed beside gratitude. Uncertainty existed beside hope. There were seasons when I was thriving and struggling at exactly the same time. Life wasn't asking me to practice one intention at a time. It was asking me to pay attention.

I Didn't Want to Write a Rulebook

One decision became important very early in the writing process: I didn't want The Twelve Intentions to tell people how they should live.

I've lived long enough to know that another person’s life cannot be reduced to a formula. Your relationships, losses, dreams, fears, values, disappointments, identities, and experiences belong to you. I cannot tell you what your intentions should be, and I don't believe that twelve ideas I discovered through my own life are the only twelve ideas that matter.

They're simply the lessons life returned me to most often.

That distinction became central to the book. The Twelve Intentions is not twelve rules. It is twelve invitations—an invitation to pause, notice, become curious, ask better questions, examine the choices you're making and the assumptions underneath them, and recognize what you want to carry forward and what you may finally be ready to release.

Intentional living, as I have come to understand it, isn't about controlling every outcome or always making the perfect decision. None of us can do that. It's about bringing greater awareness, honesty, compassion, and purpose to the choices that gradually shape our lives.

Writing the Book Changed the Writer

I expected writing this manuscript to require me to look backward. I didn't expect looking backward to make me so curious about what's ahead.

I revisited experiences from different periods of my life, some I remembered fondly and others I would never choose to live again. But distance changes what we can see. Experiences that once felt disconnected began to speak to one another, and lessons that were invisible while I was living them became clearer years later.

That process caused me to begin wondering what I'm living today that I may understand differently ten years from now. The question changed something in me.

For a period of my life, particularly during cancer, the future became smaller. Life could be measured by the next appointment, the next test, the next treatment, or whether I had enough energy to do what I wanted that day. Writing brought me back into conversation with the future—not a future I can control, but a future I can remain curious about.

Sedona, Arizona — a place that became part of my own reflection on intention and transformation.

There are still places I haven't visited, people I haven't met, things I haven't created, ideas I haven't encountered, relationships I want to deepen, and parts of myself I haven't discovered.

Becoming doesn't have an expiration date.

I Had to Reconsider What It Means to Begin Again

One of the recurring themes in my life has been beginning again. Sometimes I chose the new beginning. Sometimes life chose it for me.

A relationship ends. A career changes. Children grow and our role changes. We move. Our health changes. A dream no longer fits. A version of ourselves that once made sense no longer does.

Starting over can make us feel as though everything that came before has been lost. Writing this book helped me understand the opposite.

We never begin empty-handed.

I still carry the discipline the Marine learned and what fatherhood taught me. I carry decades of professional problem-solving and lessons from relationships that succeeded and relationships that ended. I carry what running taught me about patience, endurance, consistency, and taking the next mile rather than demanding the entire distance at once. I carry what illness taught me about uncertainty, and I carry what coming to understand myself more honestly taught me about courage.

Those earlier versions of me didn't disappear simply because my life changed. They came with me.

That realization changed the way I think about transformation. I've become less interested in reinventing myself because reinvention can sound as though we should discard the person we were and manufacture someone new.

Transformation feels different.

Transformation is integration.

Running taught me that progress is built one mile at a time—and that beginning again doesn’t mean beginning from nothing.

It's carrying forward what still serves us, learning from what does not, and allowing ourselves to become something we could not fully see before.

I wrote in the manuscript about the runner I once was and the body I live in today. After cancer treatment changed my strength, energy, weight, and physical capabilities, I could keep asking, How do I become the runner I used to be?

Or I could ask a different question:

What can the runner I am now become?

That question leaves room for possibility without requiring the future to reproduce the past.

Who Have I Been? Who Am I Now? Who Do I Want to Become?

Near the end of the manuscript, I found myself looking across the different versions of my life: the young man trying to understand himself, the Marine, the husband and father, the professional who learned how to solve problems, the runner who discovered what discipline could accomplish, the man who eventually found the courage to live more authentically, the patient confronted by uncertainty, the survivor learning that surviving and living aren't necessarily the same thing, the student who wondered whether he could become a coach, the coach who discovered that helping someone else find their own way forward could give his experiences another purpose, and now the writer.

For a long time, I might have thought of those as different chapters. Writing this book helped me see them differently.

They are all me.

I don't have to decide which version was the real one. Each brought something here. Each learned something. Each left something for the person who came next.

And I'm still unfinished.

There was a time when not knowing exactly who I would become might have felt unsettling. Today, it feels like possibility.

So the question is no longer simply, Who am I?

It has become:

Who have I been? Who am I now? Who do I want to become?

The answers will change. The intention is to keep asking.

What I Hope This Book Does for You

I don't need someone to finish The Twelve Intentions agreeing with everything I believe. That's not the goal. I don't need you to memorize twelve words, nor do I want you to read my stories and decide that you should make the same choices I made.

What I hope is much simpler.

I hope something in these pages causes you to notice your own life differently.

Perhaps you pause before reacting to something that normally would have carried you away. Perhaps you finally ask a question you've been avoiding or make a courageous decision you've postponed. Maybe you recognize that a dream still matters, or gratitude changes what you notice in an otherwise ordinary day.

Perhaps compassion allows you to understand someone differently. Maybe you begin creating something you've carried quietly for years. Perhaps you realize you don't need to return to the person you once were and become curious instead about the person you're still capable of becoming.

And perhaps, in one unexpected moment, you ask yourself the question that has changed the way I experience my own life:

What is this moment trying to teach me?

You may not have an immediate answer. That's okay.

Some of the most important questions of my life took years to answer. Others are still answering themselves.

Intentional living isn't having everything figured out. It's paying attention. It's recognizing that while we cannot control everything that happens to us, we can become more conscious of how we meet what happens.

We can breathe, focus, and ground ourselves. We can choose courage, create, and participate more fully in our lives. We can adjust, notice, extend compassion, remain curious, hold onto hope, and continue becoming.

The Book I Thought I Was Writing

When I began, I thought I was writing a book about twelve intentions.

Somewhere along the way, the book began writing something in me.

It helped me make peace with parts of my past without needing to live inside them. It helped me understand that difficult experiences don't have to become the whole definition of a life. It reminded me that wisdom is not simply what happens to us; it's what we eventually learn to carry forward.

Perhaps most importantly, writing The Twelve Intentions helped me understand that the goal was never to arrive at some finished version of myself. The goal was to become more fully myself while remaining open to everything I might still become.

That is the invitation at the heart of the book.

Not to become me. Not to follow my path. But to become more conscious of your own—to look at the life you've lived, the life you're living, and the life you still hope to create.

Then, with whatever understanding you have today, take the next intentional step.

Because we don't begin again from nothing.

We begin again from everything life has taught us.

The Twelve Intentions grew from these questions, experiences, and lessons. If you’d like to see how they came together, you can explore the full framework and the ideas behind each intention here.

Discover The Twelve Intentions →