The Direction of Intention

206.

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

Shortly after meeting Patti I bought a black and red hardcover notebook in an attempt to contain my thoughts and notes from our conversations. My usual system of Post-it notes, index cards and loose college rule three hole punch pages proved inadequate for the task of capturing the idea cascade of our exchanges. Sticky yellow post-its overran my desk and spilled onto to the floor. It was too much for the old system to handle and there was no sign of our idea-flood drying up so I took the leap and bought a real notebook with heft and presence. It was the first of many.

Taped into the first page of the first black and red notebook is a Xerox copy of the Vicious and Virtuous Circles (we now call them “circumstance-driven” and “intention-driven”). We created them one morning, very early in our collaboration, sitting at Patti’s dining room table in North Carolina. The Circles spilled out amidst a mad volleyball-banter of concepts sparked by the likes of Parker Palmer, Charles Hampden-Turner and a few others I can’t remember. We were attempting to give coherence, direction and shape to the flood. We were trying to answer questions like, “How do you address the real issues inherent in organizations and communities without placing any of the participants in an untenable position? What are the conversations we as a community and as a culture are avoiding? What conversations are we incapable of having around issues of difference or diversity? How do you facilitate change in a system when change will upset the power structures and alter the essential identity of the system?” The Circles grounded our thinking and gave us direction and coherence and more importantly clarified a single guiding intention for our work together: to facilitate the journey from the Vicious Circle to the Virtuous Circle. The creation of the Circles helped us to ask better questions, “How can we, all of us, live expansively together and support each other in fulfilling our potential? How can race or age or gender become a horizon, something to step toward, instead of a barrier, something to move against?”

On the page facing the Xeroxed Circles I scribbled two notes. The first is derived from a book by Robert Fritz called The Path of Least Resistance; in blue ink I wrote: It is impossible to change behavior until you change the underlying structure, the path water (behavior) takes is always determined by the structure of the land. I underlined the words “behavior” and “structure.” I wrote the second note in black ink, it reads: Mastery is concerned with process not product. Master the process and the product takes care of itself.

We’ve yet to meet a person, a company, or an organization that isn’t running around on a Vicious Circle (a circle of reduction, driven by circumstance). Walking the path between the Circles – walking the path to becoming truly powerful – requires two things: 1) A willingness to look beyond behavior and see the underlying structures, and 2) A desire for mastery; focus on the process and let the outcomes take care of themselves.

Said simply, it is this: are you moving toward what you want to create or are you running from what you fear? It’s a choice.

Filed under: The Direction of Intention, Truly Powerful People |