The Direction of Intention

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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 am flipping through old notebooks, the small kind that fit in a coat pocket. I carry them all the time because I do my best thinking when I am walking. I can struggle at the computer all day, take a break to walk a few blocks and by the time I am at the end of my street I am scribbling notes.

In a small notebook with a red cover I find a drawing. The image is horizontal on the page. On the far left I wrote the word “Hero” and scribbled a circle around it. On the far right I wrote, “Anti-Hero” and also scribbled a circle around it. Between the two there is a line. I must have been explaining this to someone, I can tell by how emphatically I scribbled the circles.

The Hero and The Anti Hero was a revelation that Harald shared with me a few years ago. Harald’s first language is German so his use of the term Anti Hero instead of villain or devil or “big dog yapping in my brain” is actually more appropriate than any term I might have used.

He told me that he’d spent much of his life trying to rid himself of his inner Anti Hero. It had consumed much of his life, this powerful inner voice of criticism and judgment. It plagued him and the more he resisted it the stronger it became. One day, exhausted by his inner turmoil he realized that the way to rid himself of this Anti Hero was to stop expecting himself to be a Hero. In fact, his expectation of being a savior, being perfect, being everything to everybody was the very thing that fueled the Anti Hero. Letting go of the Hero dissipated the Anti Hero and what was left was…human. Beautiful and flawed and funny and messy: a human no longer at war with himself.

This is a great description of the path to becoming the truly powerful. Power is not something you attain; it is something you reveal when you let go of the clever parts, release the tug-of-war, and let the human part show up full.

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