June 13, 2023 – Repertoire Magazine recently sat down with Eileen O’Grady to discuss her idea of intentional change. O’Grady is a nurse practitioner and life coach, who helps people disrupt their own self-defeating behavior. In both the clinical and professional setting, she uses the idea of “intentional change” to help people find healthy growth paths to improve their lives.
O’Grady’s concept of intentional change is just about as straightforward as it sounds. It’s the idea that we can identify something that needs to change in our lives and take the active steps required to intentionally make that change. This concept is accessible to anyone who is willing to look inward and find ways they can improve themselves.
“People will come to me and say, ‘I’m overweight.’ And I’ll ask why. They’ll just say, ‘Well, I eat too much.’ And that’s often not the situation. It’s one or two very specific behaviors,” O’Grady explained. “Intentional change is this idea that each human being could have their own growth edge. Every problem has a solution, even if it means accepting the problem. That’s an intentional change.”
That intentionality is perhaps the most challenging part – it requires action that might be uncomfortable, especially if we are surrounded by things that will cause us to chase certain behaviors or habits. O’Grady said, “In order to be healthy and well in this society, we have to be super intentional. Just going out in the world, there are so many toxins that we get exposed to.”
O’Grady argues that we are heavily influenced by what we surround ourselves with, which can make any intentional change much harder. Essentially, the very thing that might be holding us back from our greatest potential is our surrounding environment.
Read more in the latest issue of Repertoire Magazine.