Intention-Mapping With Friends
a recommendation
This will be my twentieth post—which, if you’ve been reading unusually closely, you might remember as my near-term goal for this newsletter, the semi-arbitrary amount of posts that I figured would give me solid evidence that I am in fact capable of maintaining self-started writing projects pretty much indefinitely if I want to. I had never really tried something like this before, so it’s a nice thing to have evidence of.
I’ll note that I am also writing on time this week (i.e. on track to publish by midnight on Sunday), helped along by the fact that I told B. I’d give him fifty dollars if I didn’t. I wanted to experiment with motivating myself in this way, now that, thanks to certain adjustments in internal governance methods, self-administered penalties no longer have the feel of psychic floggings doled out by sinister and dim-witted overlords. That’s to say, losing $50 would suck, but I know I’d forgive myself for it, so it isn’t adding tension to my system the way it might have a few years ago. Interestingly, this is helping the gimmick to work. (I still want these fifty dollars.)
B. is a friend of mine—one of my closest—but since January 2021, just over two years now, he’s also sort of been my writing coach, or rather, we’ve sort of been each other’s writing coaches. Or, coaching is not quite the right word for this aspect of our relationship, but I don’t know what else to call it. “Accountability partner” is more standard, but also fails to capture what we’re doing, which is wider-ranging and, well, friendlier. In some way it seems better not to name it at all, but for the sake of this piece I will give it the very provisional name of intention-mapping.
Intention-mapping with B. has been a lovely thing, one of the better findings of my last few years. I sense that other people I know might like doing this with their friends, so I thought I’d say some things about it.
If I had to reduce this suggestion to an algorithm, it’d be something like:
Find a friend who has some aspirations relatively similar to yours. You probably chose your friends based partly on these things anyway. Mine and B’s thing started out being about writing, and it still is, but the scope has expanded a lot over time.
Set a regular check-in time. We talk on the phone Monday mornings. It’s a nice way to start the week.
Make the rest up. Mutually defining and redefining the game you’re playing is the fun part. Start with something simple and intuitive—”we’ll add weekly intentions to this Google doc, then next week we’ll see how we did and troubleshoot”—and then be open to everything changing as you find out more about what does and doesn’t work.
Here are a few limited notes on why our version of this has been good.
Sharing ambitions is weirdly liberating
Most difficult things involve the possibility of embarrassment. Peer groups have a way of subtly enforcing boundaries around forms and degrees of ambition, leading to relative equilibria in which everyone is careful not to aim for anything so impressive or spectacular or socially valuable as to make the people around them feel bad about themselves. Thanks to preference falsification, it often happens that everyone in a group wants the same thing while unanimously experiencing the idea of wanting that thing as taboo and unspeakable.
In reality—at least in a decent friend group—the ceiling is probably made of cardboard, and the rules are mostly self-enforced at the individual level. (Subtext: they aren’t actually rules.) People simply adjust their expectations, and generally find it in themselves to be happy for their friends’ achievements. Intention-mapping is itself a good way to practice non-rivalrous relating because your friend’s successes in this context are much more obviously your own.
But so yeah, it’s been oddly relieving for me simply to express things I wanted to do to someone I knew well and whose opinion I valued, and to notice that he didn’t shun me or find me ridiculous for wanting to do such things. A therapist can provide this service too, but you always kind of know it’s their job to validate you. A friend’s job is sometimes to validate, but mostly to be honest—and they’re actually part of your in-group, so their validation means more. For me this aspect of the process has served as a helpful bridge toward stabilizing the stance that desires don’t, in fact, require validation.
You probably have similar hangups, not to mention developmental needs
You’re friends for reasons. If they’re struggling with some particular psychological or relational patterning, there’s a much-better-than-random chance that you are too. If you’re around the same age, you’re likely to be going through similar tectonic rearrangements, and a good trick or mindset shift for one of you is likely to be helpful for the other.
Pretty much immediately in our sessions, B. and I both found that we had a strong tendency to punish ourselves internally for not doing the things we said we’d do, a tendency that felt no longer relevant or especially useful now that we were both adults doing things we ostensibly wanted to be doing. In many ways, the whole idea of goal-setting had accrued some bad feeling-tones—to which we had often responded by setting new intentions to try harder. This had worked well enough to be sustainable, which was probably why we’d had trouble seeing it clearly on our own. Speaking personally, it typically didn’t feel very good.
We found we were hard on ourselves in other ways. For a long time we would come to our calls with a sense of failure, prepared to recount a week of inexcusable sloth, only to find on consulting the evidence that we’d done most of what we planned to do. It became impossible not to notice these sorts of gaps between perception and reality—stories we’d used to motivate ourselves, then been trapped by, and hardly realized we were still telling.
The calls gave us a chance to set different starting premises and actually reflect on the results. What is it like if I give myself just half an hour to write this proposal I’d normally spend all day on? What if I go for a walk whenever my head feels buzzy instead of continuing to work—do I still get enough done? How is a day different if I read something I like first thing in the morning? If I don’t set any intentions at all for the next week, what do I actually end up doing? There’s nothing earth-shattering about this approach, but it’s one thing to know that testing and reflecting is a good idea and to try to implement it in the middle of life’s fumbling welter, and another to have a system and a person who can help you design an experiment, elicit reflection, and hold some of the pieces while you look for insights into what worked. Even a mediocre version of this is likely to be more effective than what you can do on your own.
It’s free
Life coaches do similar work and charge lots of money for it. This costs no money and you get to develop those inquiry skills yourself.
It’s good for the friendship
B. and I became friends in college, and then we lived together for years with some other close friends. Now he lives in Austin and I live in Brooklyn. Maintaining closeness across such distances is famously hard, and I think we were only surface-level managing it before we started this thing. Now I’m more caught up with him than with most of my nearby friends, and we’re able to have richer conversations when we do get together, because we just pick up where we left off. We talked when I was going through a breakup and deciding whether to leave grad school; we talked when he and his siblings were choosing rehab facilities for his mom. We know the contours of each other’s minds in a different way for having mutually handled personally significant plans. Even if I learned somehow that our process had been useless for the goals I was bringing to it—which would be surprising—I would still be glad for the conversations, which have often felt like their own kind of art form.
I dunno, it’s just real man
At this point I guess I’m just trying to tell you why it’s cool to have friends and talk to them about the things you care about and do every day. Isn’t intention-mapping just a natural part of friendship, one of the many things we want friends for? Yes, only it’s remarkably easy never to really do it in a deliberate way.
And I think that’s the bigger thrust of what I’m recommending here. Even really good friendships very often bottom out in superficial updates, information sharing, transactional storytelling: you let me talk about myself, then I’ll let you talk about yourself. The polite and heartbreaking agreement of most relationships in this world is that both parties will modulate the connection such that neither will be deeply changed by whatever happens.
Intention-mapping with a friend is a good basic mode of practice, for those who want to mitigate those modulations and massage more meaning into things.
If you’re enjoying this newsletter, please consider sharing it with >= 1 person.