First of all, we here at TMS Americas hope you have a wonderful time over Christmas. Each of us, in our own ways intends to have a wonderful time as well.
It’s interesting what often gets thought about when we use the term intentions.
In the model we use to illustrate the flow of interaction, intentions flow into the interaction, often being considered before the interaction takes place. Intentions are then affected by the gesture and response of the interaction itself and the flow continues.
The interesting thing that happens with intentions is that we often get very specific about those intentions. Our intentions become full of ‘content’. At Christmas time we want our gifts to be perfect, we want the dinner we make to be cooked to perfection, we want smiles to be on everyone’s faces and we want to feel loved and wanted in specific ways as well. What this often means is that our ‘gestures’, in quite specific ways become our intentions and the responses of others are assumed to be what we ‘should’ get back. And if we don’t get back what we assumed we ‘should’ something has gone wrong.
Christmas is a good time to let go a little of the content of our intentions and let ‘concept’ rule the day(s). When intentions become more conceptual they are far broader and much more open to letting the responses to our gestures be fine, even if they are different from what we might have expected. Then our present can be perfect because we thought a lot about them, even if the receiver doesn’t like them as much as we hoped. Then we can be happy to have a phone call from someone stuck in an airport and not being able to get home rather than it ruining Christmas. We can be wonderfully surprised when someone loves the turkey stuffing we forgot to add the sliced almonds to.
And maybe, we can all be a little closer to what the intention of Christmas is meant to be. And maybe as well we can learn from this and let our intentions be a little more about concept and a little less about content throughout the entire year.
Have a great Christmas everyone!
The TMS Americas team.
