The Direction of Intention

30.

Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

At one point in his life Norrie believed that he had to decide between his bliss and his responsibilities. His bliss was playing the drums; he was a drummer for a jazz band. And, because he framed his question as an opposition (I can have my bliss OR I can be responsible), he took his drum kit apart, moved the pieces into the attic, and locked the door. I met him 30 years later and his bliss was still a prisoner in his attic.

He didn’t throw the drums away. He didn’t sell them. He kept them close by, locked in a safe place, dusty and unused, surrounded by boxes of books and clothes and the things of life that we want to keep without really knowing why; reminders of things past.

He told me about his drums because he wanted me to know that he had, at one point in his life, a passion. He wanted me to know that he was once an artist like me and that we had common ground. And, like him, it was inevitable that I lock my bliss away. Sooner or later, a man must dump his desires to take on responsibilities.

The way you frame the question determines the possibilities you see or don’t see. I’ve often wondered what Norrie’s life would have been had he not framed his bliss in opposition to his responsibilities. What if fulfilling his bliss was his responsibility?

What if being a responsible father/mother, husband/wife, boss/employee means that you have a responsibility to bring all of you, your best game, not just fragments, edited bits and pieces? What would you bring?

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29.

Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Truly powerful people develop an uncanny relationship with uncertainty. They embrace it. They step toward it. They expect it. They learn to surf uncertainty. Truly powerful people understand (and do not deny) that uncertainty is the most ordinary thing in the world. If you follow your curiosity, fall into your imagination, create a new story, do it “just to see what happens,”… then you are dancing with uncertainty. Learning, by definition, requires a step into the unknown.

Children know this. They have not yet confused safety with certainty.

Somewhere along the line we stumble into the muck of believing that we need to know. Having the right answer is safe, not having it is dangerous, revealing. Safety and certainty blend together and become the same thing.

When people feel uncertain (unsafe) they create certainty (safety). It is so uncomfortable to be uncertain that the usual first line of defense is to judge. Judgment creates the illusion of certainty. Put it to the test: The next time you find yourself judging yourself or others, push pause, suspend the judgment so you can peak beneath it; why are you placing this label on this experience?

“I’m an idiot,” “I’m not good enough,” and all of the other forms of self-diminishment give you a certainty, they provide a location. It is safer to be certain that you are not-good-enough than it is to be undefined. Try this: go to a cocktail party, meet new people and when they ask you, “What do you do,” respond, “At present, I’m talking with you.” Or, tell them that you do many things. Or tell them that you are a writer, a painter, a dancer, a musician, an archeologist…own the thing you hide in the closet. Tell them you are a dreamer, a creator of stories (it is the truth). Reframe their question and tell them what you love.

The mechanism works both ways: “They are idiots,” “They are ruining our neighborhood,” etc., also provides a certainty, a location: a sense of moral or intellectual superiority; safety comes in all forms. It is easier to assume that “you know” than stepping into the discomfort of “getting to know.” It is easier to denigrate the Muslims next door than it is to knock on their door and introduce yourself. Better still, invite “them” in to your home and let them get to know you.

How is your dance with uncertainty?

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28.

Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

I work with organizations, in schools, and with incredible people everywhere. I travel a lot. I coach, I teach, I facilitate, I collaborate. And one day while working with a corporate diversity team, I had this thought: it is really all the same thing.

What is great leadership?

Empowered people empowering people.

What is great management?

Empowered people empowering people.

What is great teamwork?

Empowered people empowering people.

What is the true work of diversity and inclusion?

Empowered people empowering people.

What is great teaching?

Empowered people empowering people.

What is a great community?

Empowered people empowering people.

I could go on. I’m not being glib. I believe in the power of narrative and am certain that the stories-we-tell-ourselves-about-ourselves are not passive things, they are more powerful than we realize. We “tell” ourselves into existence. We see, not what is there, but what we story (what we expect to be there) and at the center of every story is an intention. I hear too many media stories of diminishment. I hear too many adversarial stories – us against them – told primarily because fear is an easy sell. People are easy to manipulate when they feel unsafe.

The us-against-them story stands in stark contrast to my experiences. The vast majority of people I encountered are generous and kind. Their initial impulse is to help. I’ve yet to meet a person who doesn’t have a great gift to give and a great desire to give it (sometimes you have to scratch the surface a bit but the original impulse is always potent and just beneath the mask).

This is the story I see when people feel powerful: people who desire to fulfill their potential by helping others fulfill their potential.

This is the story I see when people feel fearful or diminished: disempowered people discouraging the power in others.

What is the story you want to tell?

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27.

Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

A memory: I am deeply invested in my pain. I am in my early thirties and I’m certain the world thinks I am a loser. I am not walking a path that others recognize and I have not yet learned that the only person who needs to recognize my path is me.

Quinn can see through the mask that I wear. He is older and wiser and recognizes the predicament in which I have placed myself. He has no patience with my attachment to pain and laughs – he is an excellent trickster.

One day while in downtown San Francisco he takes me by the arm and guides me into the financial district. He points to the top of the Transamerica building and asks me if I can see the top floor. I do. He tells me that the person occupying the top floor, amidst all of his or her status and success, does not know what they are doing, either. They are making it up just like me. Everyone does. He tells me that everyone is as clueless about life as I am, we are all pretending “to know.”

He has penetrated my mask and I am embarrassed. He laughs (again) and tells me that there are over 6 billion people on the planet and I am the only one that really cares about what I think – particularly about myself. He tells me that, like me, everyone is so consumed with angst over their assumptions about how they appear to others that no one has the time or energy to truly think about anyone else.  He asks me to consider the possibility that my opinion of myself might be vastly more important than anyone else’s opinion of me – and suggests that it might be worth my time to ponder why I think it is necessary to value other people’s views of me over my own.

He was right. It was worth my time.

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26.

Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Sometimes it is useful to take a walk into a stereotype. This one reads like a joke: Why don’t men like asking for directions when they are lost? Why is it easier for a guy to drive around and ‘figure it out’ rather than pull over and ask for directions? Punchline: He believes he is supposed to know. He has learned through years of well-intentioned schooling that not knowing is not safe – it is a big status drop. He’ll be held back one full grade level if he  doesn’t pass this version of the standardized test. He has been reinforced in the idea that life is a perpetual test, that someone has the answer (not him) and that he will be happy if only he can find it – or hide the discovery that he doesn’t know it. Experience has taught him that heaps-of-shame come to those that don’t know.

And, it’s not just men. This joke knows no gender. Take a peak beneath the stereotype and you will see the absolute necessity to control, the imperative for predictability. You will see the dulling of possibility, the blunting of human potential. When you consider that life’s real value is found, not in the knowing, but in the questioning, you recognize that the real juice is in the uncertainty (bliss, dream, passion, desire, yearning, imagination,…are words meant to take you off the path and into the dark woods).  All of this measurement! It is enough to make you weep.

The real loss in life-as-a-test, in having the right answer or-else (so: control the perceptions of those around you – don’t you dare let them see that you don’t really know…),  is that you buy into the idea that getting there efficiently (without incident) is more important than the quality of the journey.

The riches are in the incident. Too much emphasis on efficiency and knowing will scrub your life of meaning. Does it really matter if you ask for directions or drive around for a while not knowing where you are? Both open you to uncertainties.

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25.

Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

This one is from Peter Block’s amazing book, The Answer To How Is Yes:

“Nelson Mandela, the recipient of worldwide admiration, has stated that the moment you treat a man as a god, you have invited the devil into existence.

The devil, in this instance, is not the behavior of the boss or politician; the devil is the denial of our own power and the expectation that someone else will lead us to a better tomorrow.

The belief that the power lies “up there” is a way of ensuring our own helplessness, all for the relief of an imagined moment of safety.”

To whom are you giving your power? Whose responsibility is it to create the life you imagine?

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24.

Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Conventional wisdom would have you believe that behavior is driven by self-interest. That, “what do I get?” is the driving question at the core of your being. Really?

Scratch the surface a bit – people seeking meaning and greater depth of experience (that would be all of us) are not looking for personal gain, we are reaching for greater connectivity and richer experiences. Perhaps you have so reduced yourself as to believe that your highest purpose lies in what you can get; how lonely you must be. How empty you must feel. Perhaps you should spend an afternoon with a few elders and ask them what in their lives held value and meaning?

It may be a necessity of consumer mind to believe that you are a bundle of unfulfilled self interests; perhaps it is an economists dream to imagine that people can buy their way into fulfillment (we’re certainly reinforced in this thinking), the person with the most toys, wins?

You can choose to diminish yourself and believe conventional wisdom, you can abdicate your responsibility and give away your power. Or not. Conventional wisdom is learned, it is a construct born from an agenda, it is not natural. Conventional wisdom needs you to believe that you are, well, conventional: can you truly find your happiness in aisle 7?

Truly powerful people define themselves, not by what they lack, but by what they bring? Who might you be if you remembered (and believed) that your gifts were innate, unique, and essential?

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23.

Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

To truly powerful people seeing is not passive, it is a creative act.

A truly powerful person knows that you are not merely the receiver of visual information, you are also the interpreter of it. You are the giver of meaning to everything you see. You are the giver of meaning to everything that you experience.

As the giver of meaning you also become the guardian of your personal stories. Personal stories can be like territory: you stake a claim in how you identify your self and you lock in the bank the stories that justify your claim. Every vault requires a dragon.

Stories resist containment. Stories thrive when they are shared. When locked in a vault they fight to get out. They become too much energy in too small a space and it takes more and more effort to deny that there is something of value locked in the vault. The dragon has to work harder.

What stories are locked in the vault? What roles do you justify? Who might you become if you opened the vault and let your stories – your claims, all of them, see the light of day? What assumptions might drop away? What new job would you give your dragon if it no longer had to protect what you’ve  locked away in the cave?

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22.

Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Once you have a word for something you stop seeing it. A tree becomes a concept. You see the word. You see a category. But you rarely see what is right in front of you. You see what you think is there but you don’t see the tree.

To see the tree you have to slow down. Then, you have to challenge the assumption that you know what it is. Seeing has less to do with they eyes and the mind than it does with the capacity to be present.

To see the tree you probably have to stop the internal chatter, the interpretation, the to-do list, you have to challenge the idea that the tree is a resource, a consumable object. You have to challenge the idea that this “thing” is a category, one of many of the same thing. It is not. It is only fits into a category in the abstract.

Only then, after all of that “putting down” are you capable of engaging with what is there. Only then can you see.

Consider for a moment, if it is this hard to get beyond yourself to see a tree, how difficult must it be to see another human being – especially a human being that you’ve placed in the category “not like me.” How hard must it be for them to see you?

Imagine what might be possible if we took the time to see. What might change if we acted according to the unique and splendid instead of the generic and the abstract?

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21.

Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

He stood at the door and gave us each a yellow #2 pencil as we entered the room. This was my first day of college, my first day in art school: basic drawing. I’d yearned for this moment for years!

When we were assembled and quiet he held up his yellow #2 pencil and asked us what color it was. I, like the rest of my peers, thought, “What the hell! This is college! Why is he asking us such a stupid question?” One particularly disgruntled student toned, “Why, it is yellow.” We laughed.

He said, “Look again.”

Begrudgingly, we looked. “Yep, still yellow,” the disgruntled student mocked, rolling his eyes.

“Anyone else?” the professor asked. We were silent. “Look again,” he said, “really look.” Slowly we brought our pencils back to eye level and looked. “Look beyond what you think,” he said. “You only think it is yellow because you’ve stopped seeing. What color is it?”

My yellow #2 pencil transformed before my eyes; suddenly I saw shades of green and purple, undertones of  red and highlights of blue that hurt my eyes. It was alive with color! Guessing by the gasps of my classmates, they saw it, too.

The professor said, “That is the only thing I will teach you this semester. I will teach it to you again and again: how to see beyond what you think is there; how your thinking dulls the magnificent world that is right in front of you all of the time. If only you would choose to see it!

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