Good Fire: Clearing for What Comes Next

Like the wisdom of the ancients using sacred, cultural burning. Human guardians partnering with the forest, stewarding good fire to make way for robust new life.

The New Year arrives with lots of noise.

New goals and plans. New hopes and promises. We’ll finally do better, be better. Become better versions of ourselves.

Yet beneath the resolutions and fresh calendars, we are still really the same folks, same humans.

With the same nervous systems.

The same patterns that maybe once kept us safe. The same strengths that sometimes worked, maybe worked too well, required too much effort.

Maybe some of those things have now outlived their usefulness?

This is where the Intentional Growth System begins.

Here, you are not reinventing. You seek and then begin practicing awareness.

Before changing anything, we pause to notice all the richness and wildness and potential right here, that’s always with us.

Winter helps. It strips away excess and tells the truth.

What remains when things slow down is not a problem to fix. That observation brings valuable information. Awareness, practiced gently, becomes your foundation for meaningful change.

Then from that awareness comes your choice. Not dramatic, life-altering declarations but quieter, I’d say, braver decisions.

When I start over, and I’ve been fortunate to have been able to do that often, I do not ever consider the beginning a failure. I’m learning, growing, changing and building on hard-won skills crafted from experience.

There is that moment when you recognize a familiar pattern and say, “Ah, yes. You again.”

Instead of judging yourself in that moment, “Oh, how’d I get here again,” this time choose differently. Maybe imperceptibly, slightly adjusting but with intention. Growth is so often simply revisiting the same terrain you’ve traveled but this time around with better tools, more compassion for yourself and others, hopefully.

Calendar flipping does not change our biology.

The Intentional Growth System doesn’t ask you to override your glorious humanity.

It asks you to integrate that humanity deeply into your life.

Those ingrained habits and “absolutes” that once served you?

Your reactions that once made so much sense?

Maybe this time, look again. Question, kick the tires.

Nothing in you needs to be eliminated in order for you to grow. What is needed is your understanding, so the change you seek can stick.

Our growth, the best kind, is rarely linear. Wisdom does not come from an assembly line or a template or step-by-step “how to” guide. If gaining the growth that comes from insight and wisdom came with that approach, most of us would be “done” by now.

Instead, growth undulates and spirals, twists and twines, often wildly, unexpectedly. We find ourselves returning to familiar challenges and perhaps this time learning profoundly, not because we’re failing, but because learning deepens through repetition. The same questions show up, but we meet them with more capacity. The effect? It’s deep adaptation integrating into our living motion and experience..

Along the way, something else becomes clear: not everything needs to be carried forward.

Living organisms grow with pruning and clearing. There is great wisdom there. Like the wisdom of the ancients using sacred, cultural burning. Human guardians partnering with the forest, stewarding good fire to make way for robust new life. Not because something is wrong, but because space is required for what comes next.

Intentional growth often looks less like reinvention and more like a refresh. You begin doing less, more clearly. Releasing what once helped, with gratitude.

And you return.

Practice isn’t staying perfectly aligned to your intention.
Practice is noticing when you drift and then coming back to your center.
Again. And again. With compassion. Without self-criticism.

This is why we call it, One Intention Coaching.
Your growth doesn’t happen in flawless execution.
It happens in the return to your grounded intention.

The Intentional Growth System doesn’t promise overnight transformation. We offer something way more sustainable: a way to grow that respects how living systems actually change. Through awareness. Through choice. Through practice. Through return.

New year.
Same human.
Deeper intention.

Let’s be better.