RECLAIM YOUR INTENTIONALITY: 🫣 The Unsexy Side of Living on Purpose
Intentional living sounds beautiful until our values cost us something. It is easy to say rest matters when nothing is competing for our time. It is easy to value boundaries before someone is disappointed by one. In the final episode of RECLAIM YOUR SUMMER, Brittany explores the uncomfortable, ordinary choices underneath a life lived on purpose and shares a framework she developed while coaching women: Awareness, Action, and Adjustments. This is not about arriving at a life we never wander from. It is about becoming women who know how to come home.
In this post we'll chat through why autopilot can look productive; what gets the best of our energy and what receives the leftovers; how the three A's move us from insight into a different choice; why intentionality requires adjustments instead of perfection; and how returning to the same lesson can be an upward spiral rather than a hamster wheel.
LET'S DIVE IN. 🖤
Hey hey friend. Welcome back to The Self Care Sisterhood and to the final episode of our RECLAIM YOUR SUMMER series. I’m so glad you’re here. I can’t believe it, but we made it—the end of our first-ever 12-week series here on the podcast.
I won’t give you a full recap, but each month in this series, I’ve given us a bigger theme that holds all of the weekly conversations together. This final month has been about rooting and rising. We’ve rooted into what matters, explored the routines that can support the lives we’re actually living, and now we’re going to talk about how all of that begins shaping the choices we make.
We’re reclaiming our intentionality.
Whether you’ve spent the entire summer with me or this is the first episode that found you, you are joining us at exactly the right time. This conversation is for the woman who knows what matters to her but keeps looking at her life and wondering why her choices don’t always reflect it. It’s for the woman who has done the journaling, listened to the podcasts, read the books, written down her values, and still finds herself saying yes when she wants to say no—or giving the best of her energy to things she says aren’t supposed to matter most.
Because most of us already have some idea of what we value. We know we want to be present. We want our calendars to reflect our priorities. We want to protect what matters, make Best Self Choices, and build days that feel aligned with the women we are becoming.
Knowing what matters is an awesome place to start. But eventually, we have to take what we know and let it change the way we actually move through our days—the things we say yes to, what we protect, where our energy goes, and the choices we make when no one else is watching.
And friends, that is where intentional living becomes a whole lot less pretty.
THE UNSEXY SIDE OF INTENTIONAL LIVING
Intentional living sounds beautiful in theory. We picture meaningful morning routines, slow cups of coffee, quality time with the people we love, work that lights us up, and calendars that perfectly reflect our priorities.
But there is an unsexy side to intentionality that we don’t talk about nearly as often.
Sometimes intentionality means making the inconvenient choice. It can mean disappointing someone, closing a door, changing your mind, or following through after the clarity and motivation have worn off. It may require us to move more slowly, earn less money, tolerate someone else’s discomfort, or admit that something we once chose no longer fits.
It is easy to love the idea of intentionality while resisting what it requires from us.
We say family matters, but work continues receiving our best energy.
We say our mental health matters, but we keep agreeing to the things that drain it.
We say we want a slower life, but every open space makes us uncomfortable, so we fill it.
We say we want to create, but our creative work receives whatever attention remains after we have responded to everyone else.
That doesn’t make us hypocrites. It makes us human.
There is often a gap between what we value and what we repeatedly choose. That gap rarely appears through one dramatic decision. One rushed week becomes a rushed month. One yes becomes an expectation. One season of pushing through becomes the way we live.
Eventually, we look around and realize parts of our lives have been shaped by choices we never consciously made.
Intentional living is not only knowing what matters to us. It’s letting what matters change what we choose.
That is how the life we want becomes the life we are actually living.
THE THREE A’S OF INTENTIONAL LIVING
For years, when I was coaching women more closely inside my memberships, programs, and coaching spaces, there was a simple framework I taught and brought them back to again and again. I called it the three A’s:
Awareness → Action → Adjustments
This framework has helped so many of the women I’ve worked with understand what was happening in their lives, move beyond only thinking about change, and begin making choices that actually supported them. It also gave them permission to make adjustments along the way instead of believing that one imperfect choice meant they had failed.
I want to pass it over to you today because this is exactly where I would take us if you and I were sitting down together and working through a place where your life and your values have stopped matching.
AWARENESS
Every intentional choice begins with awareness because we can’t change a pattern we don’t see. Awareness is the moment we recognize that something feels off. Maybe our schedule no longer reflects what matters to us. A commitment is costing more than we expected. Our best energy keeps going toward things we say aren’t supposed to matter most. We hear ourselves saying yes while every part of us wants to say no.
Inside the RECLAIM YOUR SUMMER workbook, there is an Alignment Snapshot that helps us look at where our energy is going right now. Two of the questions I included are:
What is currently getting the best of my energy—and what is receiving the leftovers?
Those answers can reveal so much. We may say our family matters most, but they receive the version of us who is already depleted. We may say our health matters, but our bodies receive whatever energy work doesn’t consume. We may care deeply about creativity, rest, or our relationship with ourselves while continually giving those things whatever is left at the end of the day.
Awareness isn’t about searching our lives for evidence that we’re getting everything wrong. It helps us notice where our choices already reflect what matters beautifully and where a gap may have quietly formed.
ACTION
Once we see the gap, the second A asks us to do something with what we now know.
This is where intentional living becomes less pretty because awareness can feel like progress before anything in our lives has actually changed. We can journal about the boundary, talk about the boundary, and understand exactly why the boundary is necessary. Then someone asks, and we say yes again.
I say that with so much love because I have lived it too. Insight matters, but insight alone does not create a different life. At some point, what we know has to be allowed to change what we choose.
Action may look like saying no, having the conversation, changing the routine, protecting the time, asking for help, or finally making the decision we have delayed. It doesn’t always require a dramatic life overhaul. Often, it is one Best Self Choice that brings our actions a little closer to what we say matters.
And yes, the aligned action may still be inconvenient. Someone may feel disappointed. We may have to move more slowly, release an opportunity, or tolerate the discomfort of responding differently than we have in the past.
The action is where our values become visible.
ADJUSTMENTS
Then we reach the final A: adjustments.
This is the part that keeps intentional living from becoming another standard we have to perform perfectly. We take an action based on what we know, then we pay attention to how that choice actually supports us. We learn from it and adjust as needed.
Maybe the boundary was right, but the way we communicated it needs to change. Maybe the routine supported us for a while, but our capacity shifted. Maybe we made the best decision we could with the information we had, and now we know something we didn’t know before.
Changing course does not automatically mean the original decision was wrong. It means we are staying in conversation with our lives as we continue to change.
That is the full rhythm:
We become aware.
We take action.
We make adjustments.
Then we repeat it, because intentional living isn’t a decision we make once. We will drift. We will enter a new season, return to an old pattern, or realize that something which once fit no longer does.
That doesn’t erase the work we’ve done. We notice, tell ourselves the truth, and choose again.
We don’t reclaim our lives once. We reclaim them every time we notice we’ve drifted and choose again.
CHOOSE. BUILD. LIVE.
And that brings us to the heart of everything we’ve been working toward this month:
Choose what matters.
Build support around it.
Live it on purpose.
We reclaimed our focus by deciding what matters most right now and what isn’t going to receive our attention in this season. We reclaimed our routines by building support around the women we actually are and the lives we’re actually living. And today, we’re reclaiming our intentionality by taking what we know matters and allowing it to shape the way we move through our days.
Choose. Build. Live.
Just like awareness, action, and adjustments, this is a rhythm we can return to again and again. Because there is no final arrival here. We don’t reach a point where our lives never change, our routines always fit, and every choice perfectly reflects our values.
And honestly, I don’t want you to picture these frameworks like a flat circle on a piece of paper. When I hear that we’re going to keep moving through the same cycle, it can sound like a wheel that never stops turning. Like we’re running on a hamster wheel, revisiting the same struggles, and somehow going nowhere.
But that isn’t how I see this work.
I picture it more like a spiral moving upward—almost like the shape of a cone. Yes, we circle back. We return to awareness, action, and adjustments. We choose, build, and live. Then the season changes, and we begin again.
But we are not beginning from the same place.
Every time we move through the cycle, we carry greater awareness. We know ourselves a little better. We recognize the pattern sooner. We make the next choice with more honesty. We adjust with a little less shame.
The circle may feel familiar, but we are meeting it from a higher place.
That means returning to the same lesson doesn’t mean the work failed. It doesn’t mean we’re back at the beginning or going nowhere. We are growing as we move through it. We are building on what we’ve already learned and reclaiming the pieces of ourselves that were always meant to come with us.
We are reminding ourselves who we are while gently nudging ourselves toward who we know we are meant to be.
Friends, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this is episode 12 of RECLAIM YOUR SUMMER. We made it through our first full 12-week series here on The Self Care Sisterhood.
And I want you to know that I needed this series as much as I hoped and prayed you would.
I didn’t create these 12 conversations because I had already mastered all of this and wanted to teach it from the other side. I needed to remember my why. I needed to ask whether my wellness was truly supporting me. I needed to reclaim my wonder, find my light again, and give my body permission to come down from carrying so much.
I needed the conversation about enough. I needed to decide what deserved my focus, acknowledge that some of my old routines no longer fit, and look honestly at whether my daily choices reflected what I said mattered.
I have been doing this work right alongside you.
That has always been the heart of The Self Care Sisterhood. We are not waiting until we have everything figured out before we care for ourselves or one another. We are learning, practicing, drifting, returning, and choosing again—together.
We spent the first month of this series setting the tone and laying a foundation. We got clear on what mattered, built awareness around the lives we were living, and explored what it looks like to care for our wellness in ways that truly support us.
The second month invited us to soften into and savor our lives. We reclaimed our wonder, our light, and our calm. We practiced noticing the life in front of us, remembering the parts of ourselves that had gone a little dim, and releasing some of the weight we were never meant to keep carrying.
Then, in this final month, we rooted and rose. We chose what matters, rebuilt routines for the seasons we’re actually living in, and learned how to let our values move beyond beautiful ideas and into our real, everyday choices.
Twelve episodes. Twelve conversations. And underneath every one of them was the same invitation: to come back into relationship with our own lives.
I named this series RECLAIM YOUR SUMMER because I didn’t want us to reach the end of the season and wonder where it went. I wanted us to be here for it. I wanted us to feel present inside our lives instead of constantly rushing toward the next version of them.
But I hope we’ve discovered that none of this work belongs only to summer.
There will be other seasons when we need to remember our why. There will be times when wellness begins feeling like another weighted vest and we need to ask whether the things we’re doing are still supporting us. We will lose touch with our wonder, feel our light dim, or realize our bodies have been carrying stress they never had the chance to release.
Our focus will scatter. Our routines will stop fitting. We will look up and realize our days no longer reflect what we say matters most.
And when that happens, it does not mean we are back at the beginning.
It means we have reached another turn in the spiral.
We return to awareness. We take the next action. We make adjustments. We choose what matters, build support around it, and live it on purpose. And every time we do, we return with more of ourselves intact.
Because the goal was never to create a life from which we would never wander. The goal was to become women who know how to come home.
We do not reclaim our lives once. We reclaim them every time we notice we’ve drifted and choose again.
Thank you for spending this summer with me. Thank you for listening, reflecting, working through the workbook, sharing these episodes, and bringing your own stories into these conversations. Whether you were here for all 12 episodes or found this series somewhere in the middle, I hope it gave you language for what you were feeling and practical ways to care for the life you are building.
More than anything, I hope you leave this series remembering that we get to participate in creating our lives. We get to decide what matters before the world decides for us. We get to build support around what we’ve chosen. And we get to live it—imperfectly, honestly, and on purpose.
Choose what matters.
Build support around it.
Live it on purpose.
I love you so much. I’m rooting for you. And I will see you right here, next week, on The Self Care Sisterhood podcast.
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