🧠 Mindset Mechanics: Bridging Intention and Action

Even before my daughter came along, I found it challenging to create alignment between my intentions and actions. That gap between ‘what I want to do’ and ‘what I actually do’ can often feel so vast that it becomes yet another reason to beat myself up for not living up to my own standards.

That, I think, is where a lot of folks (parents or otherwise) set themselves up to fail: by drawing a hard line in the sand they must cross in order to “achieve.” Now don’t get me wrong, that line has value. But where and how you draw it - that’s the real challenge.

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably someone who still wants to perform across all areas of life - work, health, parenting - and who hasn’t let go of a broader sense of ambition. We’re not here to quash that. But we are here to reengineer it.

Because once you become a parent, your context changes constantly. Your ability to cross that line in the sand is now shaped by sleep (or lack of it), tantrums, illness, school runs, childcare gaps, work deadlines, and a dozen other variables.

Whether you want to be a present parent, grow a career you love, or take care of your health, consistent, constructive habits are key. They’re how we compound effort into impact. But those habits need stability to take root - and stability is hard to come by as a parent.

That’s why I’m coming to believe that flexibility isn’t just a nice to have - it’s foundational. Because the only way to stay consistent over time is to adapt to your reality as it shifts. And learning to work with that variability - not against it - might just be one of the core skills of a high performance parent.

Why does bridging intention and action matter to performance?

🐌 It creates mental drag

When you regularly set intentions you don’t act on, it creates low level cognitive friction. You carry the mental tab of all the things you were meant to do - like the run you didn’t take, the boundary you didn’t hold, and the conversation you avoided. Psychologists call this the ‘Zeigarnik Effect’: the tendency for incomplete tasks to take up more mental space than completed ones.

That unfinished business clutters your working memory - the same system you rely on for focus, decision making, and emotional regulation. The more you accumulate, the harder it is to stay present and think clearly. Over time, this doesn't just weigh on your conscience, but it also slows you down.

🐢 It erodes motivation and momentum

Every time you don’t follow through, your brain registers a small failure. On its own, no big deal. But when it becomes a pattern, it quietly chips away at your belief that you can trust yourself to do what you said you would. That belief - called self-efficacy - is one of the strongest psychological predictors of sustained performance (Bandura, 1997).

Without it, you don’t just lose confidence - you lose momentum. You stop planning with energy and start hedging your bets. You default to what feels safest or easiest, not what serves your goals. And performance becomes reactive, not intentional.

🔥 It feeds frustration and burnout

When your intentions and actions are constantly misaligned, you end up living in a loop of unmet expectations. You want to be more present with your kids, more focused at work, more consistent with your habits - but the follow-through doesn’t come. And so you double down. You overcommit. You push harder.

That gap between the life you want to live and the one you’re actually living doesn’t just feel frustrating - it’s emotionally draining. Over time, it becomes one of the key contributors to burnout: not just doing too much, but doing it while feeling like you’re falling short.

Inspiration from Elite Performance

⛳️ Play it as it lies

If you’ve read the Pillars and Principles edition of this newsletter, the idea of “Play it as it Lies” will sound familiar. It’s borrowed from golf. For those unfamiliar, the rule is simple: wherever your shot lands, that’s where you must play from. If the ball is in long grass, stuck in sand, or tucked behind a tree - you play it from there (or take a penalty). For golfers, that means changing their club, rerouting their shot, or making peace with a bogey. Or as this clip shows, even some really drastic measures!

In golf, they have no other option but to take the shot and keep moving forward. They can’t just give up on the hole. They have to think about what makes the most sense for them there in that moment.

It’s an ideal mindset for being a parent. You can’t control where the ball lands. You only control how you respond. For parents, it means dropping the fantasy of perfect execution, and doing the best you can with the hand you’ve been dealt that day. And on the rare days when the ball does land neatly on the fairway? You go for it. You take the shot you’ve been waiting for.

🍔 The COM-B Model

You might be surprised to know that sticking to best laid plans isn’t totally absent in the world of elite performance. In fact, the challenge of getting athletes to stick to their strict nutrition regime is more common than you think!

For a 2021 study exploring why elite athletes struggle with this, researchers turned to a powerful behavioural science framework known as COM‑B - which is a model designed to unpack what really drives human behaviour (Michie et al., 2011).

The study focused on Olympic and Paralympic athletes who had access to expert advice, customised meal plans, and performance nutritionists, and yet still fell short of consistently following their routines. So what was going on? Researchers broke the problem down using COM‑B, which stands for:

• Capability (do they have the knowledge and skills?)

• Opportunity (does their environment support the behaviour?)

• Motivation (do they actually want to do it — and believe it matters?)

What they found was surprisingly normal and human:

• Some athletes didn’t have the practical skills to prep meals efficiently or lacked nutritional literacy (Capability).

• Others faced time pressure, inaccessible food options while travelling, or team settings where they had no control over what was served (Opportunity).

• And many simply didn’t believe the benefits of their plan would outweigh the effort required (Motivation).

In short: even the world’s most driven individuals fail to follow through when the system around them doesn’t support the behaviour. It’s a potent reminder as parents - that the problem isn’t that you’re not trying hard enough. The problem is that your system doesn’t support your desired behaviour - and that most plans don’t account for the fact that your internal and external world shifts daily!

The Intention / Action Model

As parents, there is little we can do about the variance in our context - but we do need to start accepting that variance is a feature, not a flaw. That means we stop designing for perfect conditions and start designing for real, variable ones - that give you permission to adapt without abandoning what really matters to you.

We also need to understand that intentions should be your compass, not your measuring stick. When you treat your intention as a compass, it guides your choices without shaming you for deviations. When you treat it as a measuring stick, you only ever fall short.

I’ve created a basic model for myself to test for the next month, which I believe can help me reconcile the above - by helping me clarify my intentions, define plans that consider variance, and incorporate a simple assessment to help guide my behaviour on any given day.

1. Intentions

To begin, we need to define our Intentions.

In this context, intentions are what we might call ‘thematic’ ideas that don’t prescribe a specific action, but provide scope for a range of different actions - for either every day or every week. They help capture the essence of a behaviour or outcome that really matters to us. Here are some contrasting examples of good and bad intentions to help:

We don’t want to overcommit ourselves here - we do want to ensure we’re being ruthless about what really matters - and so for now I’d suggest keeping your intentions between 3-5 in number.

2. Actions

With our intentions defined, next comes our Actions - which are your options for fulfilling your intentions that take into account variance in context. You want every intention to have three actions, on a sliding scale of “possibility” when considering variations in context:

• Plan A - Your most ideal plan of action, but should not be so wholly unrealistic that you never get to do it. If you get to do this once or twice a week it would be a great outcome.

• Plan B - Your most realistic plan of action, that should feel like even with some slight variance in context, can still be achieved.

• Plan C - Your absolute backup - that should still feel possible even when it feels like absolutely everything is against you that day.

You could also make these cumulative if you wish - start with Plan C and layer up if the day allows. Here’s what I’ve come up with for myself:

3. Assessment

Now we have our Intentions and Actions clarified, we need an Assessment that can help us decide which of our plans we’re able to pursue that day.

To be clear, I don’t see this being about doing ALL of Plan A vs B vs C - more of a pick and mix depending on what you see ahead of you. One intention may get Plan A, but that means compromising on another. And that’s ok!

Inspired by the COM-B model, I think the most important questions to be able to ask to understand our context are:

• What do I have the energy for today?

• What do I have the time and space for today?

• What feels important to me today?

This is simple enough to be memorable, whilst balancing both emotion and feeling with practicality. We want to start our day by asking ourselves these simple questions and making a call on which of our plans to proceed with accordingly. Now we’re not stupid enough to think the context might change again during the day, but at least now if it does we know we’ve got fallback options too.

At the core of all of this, I believe is the simple art of “showing up”. We all have an idea of how we want to show up - both for ourselves and for others - and when we do so it makes us feel good about ourselves. That’s a huge part of what I want for the High Performance Parent.

I want you as a parent to feel good about what you do and who you are! This may or may not feel significant to you - but I can assure you the intention/action gap is one that really matters.

I’d love to hear how you get on with this, so if you put it into action and have any thoughts or feedback, let me know! Till next time!

Carl