Setting intentions: one sentence before your first call

Setting an intention means deciding how you'll act today and writing it as one sentence you control, which you read before your first call. "I ask one more question before I quote" is an intention. "I close two deals" is a goal, because the buyer gets a vote. Before you log off you check the sentence, then keep it or change it for tomorrow.

Meditation teachers treat an intention as a feeling or a value to live by, which works on a yoga mat because nothing there argues back. A selling day argues back all the time. Prospects don't pick up, a deal you counted on slips a month and a quote has sat on "seen" for days. On a day like that a target can only tell you that you're behind, while an intention still tells you what to do with the next ten minutes.

So keep the wellness idea and give it a job. Make it one sentence about your own behaviour, tied to a moment in the day you can name.

Three different things get called an intention, and you'll use all three in a selling week.

The third column has the most research behind it. Peter Gollwitzer, a psychologist, named it an implementation intention in a 1999 paper in American Psychologist. You pick a moment you know is coming and decide now what you'll do in it, so when it arrives you act instead of weighing it up. With Paschal Sheeran he later pooled 94 independent tests of the idea and found that if-then plans had a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals.

Think of the daily intention as the wide version and the if-then plan as the narrow one. Write the intention first, then add an if-then for the moment it's most likely to slip. If you tie that moment to something you already do, you're habit stacking. If you're not sure how many calls a week the goal needs, goals vs systems works it back from the number.

Do this the evening before, or before the first call.

1. Start from the week. Open your pipeline and your calendar and find the one place it's going wrong: quotes nobody chased, a calling block you keep moving, a lead who went quiet after a good first meeting.
2. Pick how you want to act in that spot. Patient, direct, prepared or curious: choose the word that would fix it, and leave the result out of it.
3. Write one sentence in the present tense, about something you do, in words you'd say out loud, such as "I follow up with something useful before I ask for anything."
4. Add the moment where it'll slip and turn it into an if-then: "When I open a quiet chat, I lead with the useful bit."
5. Put it where you'll see it at 2pm, such as the top of today's call list, a sticky note on the monitor or the first line of your phone notes, because a sentence you read once at 8am is gone by lunch.

The last part comes before you log off, when you check the sentence against the day. It takes two minutes, and it's how you find out which wording works for you.

If you'd rather not rely on remembering step 5, make the morning read a routine. In ActivityTracker you type a routine in one line, such as "Read my intention weekdays at 8:45am", and it's set for weekdays at 8:45, with a streak for each morning you tick it off.

Most intentions that fail were worded badly, and more effort won't rescue them. Put each one through three questions before you keep it.

1. Do you control it? You decide who you call and what you ask, and the buyer decides whether to buy.
2. Does it fit in one breath? If it needs a paragraph it's a plan, so cut it until you can say it in one go.
3. Can you mark it before you log off as yes, partly or no? If you can't tell whether you did it, you can't learn anything from it.

Then point it at something to move toward. A team from Stockholm University's psychology department followed 1,066 people's New Year resolutions for a year and published the results in PLOS ONE in 2020. Among people who set approach goals, doing more of something, 58.9% called themselves successful after a year, against 47.1% of the people who set avoidance goals such as stopping or cutting something out.

Each line on the left hangs on a result, a fear or a hope, while you could finish anything on the right today.

Find the row for the part of your week that's slipping and use its sentence tomorrow, changed to fit you.

When you're stuck, use the fill-in line below. The first blank is the action, and the second is the reason you'll lean on when the day gets hard.

Try "Today I intend to call back every missed call before 5pm so that nobody waits until tomorrow." At 6pm you'll know whether you did it. Change the words until it sounds like you, because a sentence you'd never say out loud won't last the week.

Writing the intention takes a minute, and keeping it is the real work. A selling day has three points where it slips:

• Before the call block. Read the sentence and then start. If you time the block, start a Calling session in ActivityTracker's focus timer right after you read it.
• After the hardest call, when one rude reply quietly turns the plan into "get through the list". Read the sentence again before the next dial.
• Before you log off, when you hold the day up against the sentence. Most people skip this one.

The evening check takes two minutes:

1. Read the sentence out loud, once.
2. Look at what you actually did: the calls in your log, the follow-ups you sent and the chats you answered.
3. Mark the day yes, partly or no against the sentence.
4. Write one line on what to keep or change, and then tomorrow's sentence.

Use the record for step 2 rather than your memory, which hands you the two good calls and forgets the three you skipped. A week of marks tells you which wording works for you, and the weekly reflection template turns them into one change for next week.

You'll drift, and when you do, start again at the next call. A missed morning doesn't cancel the afternoon.

A resolution is a goal with a start date, usually 1 January, while an intention is how you'll act on a given day. They fit together well, because the resolution names what should change this year, and the daily intention is how it changes day to day.

You don't need to wait for January to start. Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis called this the fresh start effect in a 2014 paper in Management Science. In three studies, Google searches for "diet", gym visits and commitments to pursue goals all went up just after a landmark on the calendar: a new week, month or year, a birthday or a holiday. A seller gets one of those every Monday and a bigger one every quarter. Set the week's intention on Monday morning, and look at the quarter's goal on its first working day.

The Swedish study above also shows what helps a resolution last. Of its three groups, the people who named one person to support them and got a short check-in every month did best. A third group got the same support plus extra material and exercises on setting goals, and it did worse than the group with the supporter alone. For a seller, that means telling your manager or one colleague your intention for the month and asking them to check in once, while the goal-setting workbook stays on the shelf.

To turn a resolution into an intention, ask what you'd do differently if it were already true:

Intentions go wrong when they become one more thing to fail at, and five habits stop that from happening:

• Hold one at a time, because two intentions turn into a to-do list within days.
• Keep it for a week. A new sentence every morning means you never find out which wording works.
• Change it when it goes dead. If you read it and feel nothing, write a new one.
• Shrink it after a bad day instead of punishing yourself with a longer list. "I make the first call before I check anything" is enough.
• Keep the tone kind. "I stay patient with slow buyers" lasts longer than "I must never snap at a prospect".

Then there's manifesting. Writing an intention won't bring a deal to you on its own. What it does is decide where your attention goes when two tasks compete, and your attention decides which calls get made. If you like the word, keep it, and write the sentence like any other intention: present tense, about something you'll do today. A sentence that asks the buyer to change is a wish, and one that asks you to act is an intention.

Ask each rep for one intention at the start of the week and write it down without grading it. At the next 1 on 1, ask how it went and what they'd keep.

Watch for two patterns. A rep who sets the target as the intention ("I close three this week") hasn't split the result from the behaviour yet, so help them find the action underneath it. A rep who writes a new intention every day and never checks the last one is collecting sentences instead of learning from them, so ask to see last week's yes, partly and no before you ask for a new one.

Open tomorrow's call list and write one sentence at the top about how you'll act at the moment your day usually goes wrong, with an if-then for that moment. Tomorrow, read it before the first call and again after the hardest one. Before you log off, mark it yes, partly or no and write the next one. After five working days, keep the sentence that got the most yeses.

• PLOS ONE, Oscarsson, Carlbring, Andersson and Rozental, A large-scale experiment on New Year's resolutions: Approach-oriented goals are more successful than avoidance-oriented goals, 2020, read 28 October 2026
• APA PsycNet, Gollwitzer, Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans, American Psychologist, 1999, read 28 October 2026
• Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Gollwitzer and Sheeran, Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes, 2006, read 28 October 2026
• Management Science, Dai, Milkman and Riis, The fresh start effect: Temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behavior, 2014, read 28 October 2026