Are You Choosing Your Future Intentionally?

Every morning I am up at 5.00 am. I meditate, do my Duolingo exercises, listen to a Blinkist book, go to the gym, and walk Vinnie. By 8.00 am I am ready for the day.

Would I prefer to stay in bed? Heck yes.

Why don’t I? Because I am very intentional about what I want to achieve, how I choose to live, and that choice sits squarely on my shoulders. I have a lot to pack in, and getting up an hour later would mean some of the things that matter to me would quietly fall off the list. How I start my morning is how I live my life, intentionally.

The small things are the point

None of these things are particularly dramatic on their own, which is rather the point.

The French is so that when I am sitting in a café in St Tropez or somewhere along the Côte d’Azur in a few years, I can hold a real conversation beyond deux cafés s’il vous plaît, without Google Translate stalling every exchange. The meditation is so that I can keep my cool with family, life, and politics. The gym is so that I can stay strong and mobile, and travel and hike well into my 70s. The study is so that I can add value to the people I work with, help them achieve their goals, and support their success.

Each one is a small bill paid now, against a future I have already decided I want.

This is what most people miss when they look at someone else’s morning routine and feel either inspired or guilty. The routine is not the point. The future the routine is funding is the point. Strip the future out and the routine collapses into discipline for its own sake, which is exhausting and unsustainable. Anchor the routine to something specific you have decided about your life in ten or twenty years, and it becomes obvious what gets to stay and what doesn’t.

Living intentionally is not about a perfect morning routine. It is about deciding what you want your future to look like, then choosing today’s behaviours in service of that future. Every habit, every meeting, every yes and every no is either funding the future you want or starving it.

The diary tells the truth

Every Monday I revisit my annual, quarterly, and weekly goals, and check that my diary is aligned with them. If something is pulling me away from where I want to be, it gets moved or deleted. Most diaries are accidental rather than designed; they accumulate, and that is where the gap between intention and reality shows up.

I am not the only one who has noticed this gap. Harvard’s twelve-year study of how chief executives actually spend their time, led by Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria, found that roughly a third of CEO time is spent reactively, handling whatever has unfolded. The Harvard study tracked 27 CEOs and found that around 36% of CEO time was spent in reactive mode, handling unfolding issues, both internal and external. Most CEOs in the study could clearly describe the agenda they wanted to pursue. Their diaries told a different story. MGMA

This is the pattern I see again and again in executive coaching across New Zealand. Strong founders, clear strategies, real ambition. Then a calendar full of meetings nobody designed, favours that became habits, and reviews that could be delegated. The strategy on the wall and the diary on the screen are not the same document. They should be.

The Monday review is not glamorous work. It takes twenty minutes, sometimes less. The discipline is not in the doing; it is in being honest about what is actually pulling you forward and what is just accumulating.

The work I do now is a dividend, not a lifestyle

The work I do now, I love. I only do what brings me joy: building strategy with a client, coaching someone through a self-limiting belief and supporting their breakthrough, writing a book, and studying to keep developing in my field. The work I find less energising, I delegate to people who genuinely enjoy it. I work solely with founders and leaders who see our relationship as a true partnership and are equally committed to their success.

This is the dividend on three decades of intentional choices: studying, selling my business, choosing leverage over title, and saying yes only to the work and the people that fit.

I want to be very clear about this, because it is easily misread.

The freedom to choose my clients, my hours, and my work is not a personality trait. It is not because I am temperamentally lucky, or because I happened to find a niche that suited me. It is the compound return on a long series of small decisions, made over decades, most of which were not glamorous at the time. Studying when I was tired. Selling a business that could have kept paying me. Saying no to good opportunities that were not the right ones. Choosing leverage and scale over title and ego. None of those choices made sense in isolation. Together, they bought the position I am in now.

McKinsey’s work on leadership development makes a similar point in a different register. The inner resources a leader needs to navigate complex decisions later are built deliberately, through self-awareness and reflection, before the situation that requires them ever arrives. McKinsey’s research argues that the essential prerequisites for the inside-out leadership journey are self-awareness and self-reflection, developed before they are needed. The same logic applies to freedom, autonomy, and the right to choose your work. You cannot draw down on a future you have not funded. McKinsey & Company

Choosing who you journey with

There is a lot of play in here too. I spend time with people who bring out the best in me, who give it to me straight, whose banter makes me laugh uncontrollably. They make me a better person. Again, who I journey with in life is intentional.

The same applies professionally. The founders and leaders I work most closely with are the ones who treat coaching as a partnership, who do the work between sessions, who are honest about what is not working, and who want a peer in the room more than a cheerleader. Those relationships generate the results everyone wants to see, because both sides are equally committed.

When the relationship is one-sided, the results are too.

The diagnostic

If you are a founder or a CEO in New Zealand, here is the question worth sitting with.

If I looked at your last seven days, your diary, your decisions, the meetings you took, the ones you didn’t cancel, the work you did yourself instead of delegating, the study you skipped, the conversation you avoided, would I see a leader building the next decade intentionally? Or would I see a leader hoping the next decade builds itself?

If you are choosing your focus, your behaviours, and your actions from somewhere other than intention, you may be quietly jeopardising your own success. Success doesn’t just happen; it is intentional. The people you see succeeding are grafting, whether you see it or not. It is intention compounded, not luck.