John sat down in front of me with a sour look on his face.

We were filming his first video in the Causative Communication training session. I have the students role-play a real situation with me, a situation from their lives that’s challenging for them so I can see how they handle pushback. We hadn’t even started and he was already looking at me with resentment.

It didn’t help that the look on his face was overlaid with a thin veneer of artificial civility. The first words he said to me were the forced polite, “Hello, how are you?” with a small, tight, fake smile. The look in his eyes told me he didn’t care.

John had no idea he looked this way.

Then John told me what he wanted from me in a tone of suppressed exasperation.  He was restraining his frustration, but it was unmistakable.  His face and tone betrayed him.

This made his communication feeble, the outcome hopeless.  It made him powerless. 

When we were discussing it afterwards, I asked John what he was thinking when he first sat down with me.

He said, “The last two times I tried to talk to this person, it really didn’t go well. I got nothing but resistance. I was expecting the same resistance again.”

And this was exactly what I was seeing – his overwhelming anticipation of a person he couldn’t influence, anticipation of an unsurmountable problem.  Which is the same as saying that he came into this situation dragging the past into the present and anticipating failure.

John had no idea he was doing this. And he had no idea the impact it was having on his outcome.

Why is this important?

It’s the beginning of the New Year and I’ve been writing about dreams. Now it’s time to write about making your dreams come true, which is my fervent wish for you. It’s what being causative is all about.  Making your dreams happen.

It’s time to talk about intention. Your intention is what will make your life a dream come true.

Intention is deciding you’re going to accomplish something, combined with the expectancy of success. It’s different than hoping, wishing, wanting or longing for something. Most people spend their lives hoping, wanting, wishing, wanting and longing for many things. Causative Communication is all about making them HAPPEN.

When you are causing things, you are determining your fate. When someone or something else is determining your fate, you are the effect of their cause.

Insufficient intention makes you the effect and the other person cause. This can make you miserable if they’re not creating the effect you want to have created.  That’s why intention is important.

Here’s one of the more common things that messes with intention:

Having your attention stuck on the last time you tried to talk to this person and it didn’t go well.

It can make you anticipate a similar failure.

The word anticipate comes from root words that mean, to cause to happen before it happens.

When you anticipate failure, you cause it to happen before it happens.

Intention is positive certainty and expectancy of success.

Most people wait to see “how the situation is going to turn out” before they become positive about any success. It’s a, “Let’s see what happens.” approach.

That’s not going to create much success. Positiveness is something that you have to decide in advance.  And it’s a decision.

You may not be positive about the other person or the audience. That’s irrelevant. It begins and ends with being positive about you:

•  I’m positive I can communicate well.

• I’m positive I can make myself understood.

• I’m positive this is going to go really well.

And you channel this positive expectancy of success into your communication.  In other words, you communicate with real intention. When you emanate intention, the world picks this up and responds positively.

This kind of positive intention takes practice (and skills) and is something that requires you to apply consistently to life‘s situations. It’s like a muscle that builds quickly. The more you practice it, the stronger it gets. The stronger you get it, the more causative you are.

Intention makes your communication effective.  It puts the outcome you want within your reach.

It’s a conscious, deliberate decision on your part. Enter your conversations and meetings with intention.

When your intention becomes strong enough, these situations turn out as you intended, and often even better.

In the corporate world, you don’t often hear the word “magic”.

When people learn intention, they use the word “magic” a lot. My inbox is full of it.

Intention must be coupled with affinity. I cannot stress this enough. Intention plus affinity is the recipe for becoming irresistible. People come to me wanting to learn how to be compelling. I take them beyond compelling and help them become irresistible.

John came up to the front of the room for his final video with me. I took one look at his face and saw an abundance of affinity and intention. It was game over for me. In less than two minutes, he overcame all of my resistance and got the outcome he wanted. And we were smiling the whole time. When it was over, the whole class cheered. John can now cause what he wants to happen. This enables him to make his dreams come true. He’s walking tall.

2024 is a new year. It does not depend in the least on what happened last year. It depends on the strength of your intention.  And that depends on the strength of your decision and self-belief.

What do you want for this year?

No matter what it is, the magic of intention is how to make it happen.

Once you experience it, your life will never be the same.

Don’t anticipate! Create!

Be the cause!