October | 2011 | The Direction of Intention

Truly Powerful People (224)

Posted on October 21, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

224.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Tamara wrote to me today a meditation about edges. She is a brilliant songwriter and has learned to stand in the fullness of life (instead of running through it or away from it). She inspires me.

She had an experience on the coast of Oregon that stirred the birth of a new song and for her a new process in music making. A potent experience generating a potent creative process, unknown and vital and necessary, a texture of living and artistry that is only available if you feel life and feel it deeply; all of it.

She must have known that I was on an edge in my life (she somehow knows these things), because her amazing words came to me at just the right moment, just as I was facing what will be yet looking over my shoulder at what once was. Here is just a bit of the timely meditation that she shared:

“That’s the thing about edges, isn’t it?? We are balanced there, right in the moment between either offering up the white flag and retreating back to where we feel more ‘safe’, or just leaping out into the waves. And sometimes we leap out to another amazing unexplored place where we create and become and breathe, and sometimes we back up to the grassy area, where the ocean looks like a lake instead of crashing waves, and we see a different kind of beauty from there.”
There is beauty and new perspective either way. And with her wise words I know that mine to do this time is to leap, the beauty I seek is in the “amazing unexplored place.”

Mostly, I can’t wait to hear her new song and to share my new creation. What could be better than that?!

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Truly Powerful People (223)

Posted on October 20, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

223.
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 12 years old and I am watching my grandfather slowly take apart a lawn mower. He is methodically removing pieces and lining the pieces on a towel according to the order of removal. His garage is a wonderland of tools and workbenches. His business is sewing machine repair and he seems to know how to do everything.

He asks me what I’m doing and I tell him I’m watching because I don’t have the slightest idea how to fix a lawn mower. He laughs and tells me that he doesn’t know how to do it either. I’m confused because he looks like he knows what he is doing. I tell him that and he laughs again. He sets down his screwdriver and asks me to sit next to him.

He tells stories about his first car. When he bought it there were very few service stations in the world. “If your car broke down you had to fix it,” he says. “No one knew how to fix a car and everyone had to do their own fixing. So, you figured it out.” He told me that’s what he was doing with the lawn mower – he was figuring it out. “But, here’s the key,” he said, “you can’t be in a hurry. If you give yourself time, you can figure anything out. It’s trying to do it fast that makes people believe they can’t do things.”

Forty years later I’m setting up a new website, new databases, ecommerce, for a new business and my grandfather has been with me in spirit all week. “Go slow,” I say to myself. “Give yourself time and you can figure anything out.” It is good advice for lawnmowers, new technology, and becoming power-full. It’s trying to do it fast that makes people believe they can’t do things.

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Truly Powerful People (222)

Posted on October 19, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

222.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Today in class Alan asked a great question about the intersection of oneness and differentiation. He simply asked, “How do you understand these energies?”

At first glance these two words seem like opposite ends of a spectrum when, in fact, they play together in ways that are as necessary as two related words, doing and being. Can you ever “do” without “being?” Can you ever “be” without “doing?” Can your intellect be in opposition to your intuition if you don’t pit them against each other?

The distinctions are artificial yet we’ve built an entire system of belief based on the notion opposition – and so we experience our lives in terms of opposition.

The same is true with oneness and differentiation. They are more points-of-view than ends of a spectrum. By now you’ve likely watched neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk or read her book in which she recounts her experience of having a stroke. Her encounter during the stroke of shifting from the differentiation of her left hemisphere to the unity and oneness of her right; recognizing the necessity of both working together in concert to create what we know as perception. Unity without differentiation is as useless as individual without community.

There is a sweet spot, a place where both come together. As Alan asked today, “Why not be in both at the same time?” That is where the power happens.

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Truly Powerful People (221)

Posted on October 18, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

221.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Clare said, “I wouldn’t be a good teacher,” and I challenged her about that. She was taking an encaustic painting class and one of her classmates was very needy of attention. “If you don’t respond to her story she’ll tell it again and again until you do and it drives me nuts!” Clare declared.

“That should drive you nuts so why wouldn’t you be a good teacher?” I asked.

“A teacher has to put up with that or pretend that stuff is okay.” She huffed. “I couldn’t do it.”

“What makes you think a teacher has to be an enabler of neediness? Isn’t a teacher’s job to support students to fulfill their potential? It isn’t a matter of putting up with it or not putting up with it – it’s not a fixed condition, inevitable, or a character flaw. It is someone who doesn’t yet see them self as powerful.” Clare looked at me like I was a Martian. “You might be a great teacher because it drives you nuts. You just need a different idea of what makes a great teacher.”

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Truly Powerful People (220)

Posted on October 17, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

220.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Keith Johnstone was one of the early pioneer’s of what we call Improvisation. He was a playwright and interested in developing better ways of writing dialogue. Much of what we now know as Improvisation was a result of a eureka moment he had one day with the actors in the studio. They realized that every relationship – every relationship – is a status negotiation. When his actors became conscious of taking high or low status, or flipping status, their work became dynamic and interesting. The path to better dialogue was through status. And, often the status negotiations were screamingly funny. So they experimented and played and laughed and discovered. And now we have this thing called Improv.

The word “status” is loaded and is often mistaken for “power over” others. That can be the case but is not necessarily so. Every time I introduce status games to a group of non-theatre folk they bristle at the word largely because no one wants their true status to be revealed. It is not nice to admit that you want status over others; everyone wants to be royalty or a superhero or a movie star. Who doesn’t want to go to the 20th high school reunion and show everyone just how well you’ve done and rub certain noses in your success? But, I don’t want to be seen as doing it.

If we are constantly in status negotiations (and we are) then we are also constantly in alliance negotiations. Within status and alliance there is choice. If your negotiation is a tug of war attempting to get others to see and agree with you (to be right) then you are negating power in others – playing for power over. If you are trying to control what others see/think/feel then you are negating power in yourself. This is an outcome focus.

There is another option. If your negotiation is oriented toward what you bring to the commons instead of what you get from it, if you are invested in creating instead of being right, generating instead of controlling, then you are quite literally creating power with others. Keith Johnstone also recognized that there was one simple rule that made the whole thing work: “Say, Yes, and….” In other words, embrace and work with what comes at you. Make and accept strong offers and something magic will emerge. It is a process dedicated to creating something bigger than any single participant is capable of creating alone. It is a field of possibilities in which negation, enabling, control, or being ‘right’ have no place. And it is rich with status!

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Truly Powerful People (219)

Posted on October 16, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

219.
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’ve been thinking about the term “domestication” because I love it for this meditation on power. We come into the world as a wild-child, without any framing, and like a puppy, we are trained. We pick up language and to a certain extent the structure of our language frames our perceptions of the world: does your language emphasize nouns (things) or verbs (actions)?

We learn how to get our needs fulfilled and how to get attention. It is in this process that we are oriented to value sets, we begin to inherit/develop our “communication styles,” we separate and have the distinct impression that we are separate from all others. For a while we are unique and precious in our own eyes.

Our body is our first border. We know ourselves through our body. We form beliefs (Identity) about our bodies– things like “your nature is good,” or “your nature is corrupt” – these beliefs are body beliefs and inform our relationship not only with our selves but also with how we understand our relationship to the world. It is the epicenter of our understanding of “goodness” or “place.” It is our direct link to ancestry, hopes and dreams, pleasures and pains. It is the foundation stone to the-story-you-tell-yourself-about-yourself.

The underlying assumption is that you relate to others based on your relationship to your Self. It is impossible to talk about the relationship to other (which defines your relationship to power) until you surface the point of view from which you are relating.

So, making the unconscious conscious, a treasure hunt of awareness for your values, your stories about how they came to you, your capacity to see and be seen, discovering and uncovering the geography of your domestication, understanding the self as a “body revelation” is necessary to get to the place where you can understand why power with others generates power and why power over negates power in yourself and others.

If your way is learned (as opposed to “true”) then that must be the case for all other people. And it makes other ways of being possible.

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Truly Powerful People (218)

Posted on October 15, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

218.
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 found these notes in my archives. They are from a conversation I had with Joe about a model for business people – a common trap in business practice: pretending that complex challenges are simple (or merely complicated). I’m not sure where Joes thinking begins and mine ends. That’s what I love about my conversations with Joe; we enter conversations together and populate a field with possibilities:

OLD WORLD THINKING (outcome):
1. Articulate a vision.
2. Write a plan.
3. Execute.
Guess what? The world moves too fast now. If you follow this strategy you’re likely to be out of business before you get the plan written. And if you do get underway, you’ll play catch-up and put out fires from day one.

NEW WORLD THINKING (process):
1. Populate your “field of possibilities” and keep it always in view.
2. Show up with passionate presence.
3. Engage and evolve in constant dialog with opportunity.
The result: you create something you could never have envisioned or planned. It fits, it’s grows organically, it leverages unforeseen opportunities, and it integrates into the structure the fluid dynamics of pace and change; two aspects that define our present world.

These notions apply to individuals as well as business practices. It is another way of asking, “Are you focusing on process or product?”

The old formula for creating success was built on a computer-like model of the mind. Program the end result, push the first domino and that’s what’s supposed to happen. Real life – contemporary life – doesn’t work that way anymore. The event horizon is too close.

The new model of the mind is a dynamic system in constant, implicit, mutual engagement and co-creation with reality (how’s that for a string of words!). The word to notice is “engagement.” The more you engage, the clearer and more compelling your desire becomes, evolving in concert with pace and context (reality), becoming an ever-more powerful expression of who you are becoming and what you are creating. You are free of attachment to outcome, open to the dance, powerful in innovation, new forms of collaboration and flourishing passions.

We live in a fast moving river – rushing faster than at any other time in human history. The old systems are getting creamed (have you noticed?). People are getting creamed, too. It is a complexity that requires engagement in a dynamic dance, not a simplicity pretending a recipe is good enough.

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Truly Powerful People (217)

Posted on October 14, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

217.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Lately, I’ve been paying attention to how people describe their day to me. What I hear are discrete chunks of time compartmentalized into little outcome boxes. It sounds like this: “I was crazy busy this morning because my alarm didn’t go off. It was nuts getting the kids ready and out the door but once we were out the door I tried to slow down, to use the commute to catch my breath, commute as meditation, right? When I got to work I put my game face on because we had a meeting right away and I needed to at least look present. The rest of the day was a grind, same-old-same-old, no lunch again, but I cut out early because I wanted to hit the gym before I had to be home for the kids. My workout was so-so because….”

It’s become a fascination for me.

I write a lot about focus placement and focus placement is perhaps the most abstract, least translate-able idea in my canon (so I’m told). What does it mean to place your focus? Why does it matter? Simply this: most people I know feel fragmented or somehow separate from the greater experience/meaning/power of their lives. If what you choose to see every day is a series of compartments, little contained outcomes not necessarily connected to each other (work, home, laundry, gym,…), each with it’s own peculiar standard or judgment attached (that comes with seeing outcomes or products), what you will experience in life is fragmentation, reactivity, and most likely you will wonder were you left your wholeness. You see fragments because you focus on the fragments and you measure the fragments.

If you desire wholeness, you have to place your focus on the whole and not the parts. I know that sounds too simple but shifting your focus onto process unifies your focus and allows you to see the meaning in your day – or at least to make meaning that isn’t based in “life as a product” thinking. Meaning is always found in the relationships, the connective tissue, how the textures of your day play with each other. There is a Native American term that I like, “the long body,” which means to see the whole of your life, the entire arc, and not the pieces.

It is true that, if you grew up in the western world, you’ve probably been reinforced in the fragmentation, but you can choose to practice another focus placement. If you do, it might surprise you to know that your mind, body and spirit are already connected, as are your head and your heart, those compartments, like all the other compartments, are constructs and do not exist outside of your seeing. You simply have to shine your light on the river of your life in order to see it.

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Truly Powerful People (216)

Posted on October 13, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

216.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

For the first 46 years of my life I got out of bed and reviewed my list of things I needed to do. Life was about checking things off of the list.
“Getting-through-the-list” thinking is rampant in our world, a useful frame of reference if you are a machine but not so much if you are corporeal and have a soul. I realized somewhere on this path that my frame of reference was the limiting factor in my quality of life. I’d mistakenly placed efficiency too high on my list of priorities. I’m good at checking things off of lists, quantity of outcome, doing stuff, is no problem. What about greater experience, deeper meaning, full spectrum of experience, what about quality of life?

For the past 5 years or so, I’ve been trying different strategies of entering the day. Now, I get up and ask myself, “What do I want to bring to this day?” You will not be surprised to know that my answer is never something quantifiable; I never say “more efficiency!” or “faster pace!” or “multi-tasking!” My answer is usually something like, “curiosity,” or “full presence,” “quiet” or “I want to bring the best of me (try quantifying that!).”

It also won’t surprise you to know that what I intend to bring is usually what I actually bring. It also won’t surprise you to know that my answer is never “fear” or “angst” or “self-doubt” or “anger” or “not enough time.” Those aspects occasionally show up but I have the perfect response: I ask myself, “Is this what I want to bring in to this moment?” If the answer is “no,” I bring something else.

It is not a small question when I ask you, “What do you bring?” Ask it of yourself for a while and you might just discover that you stop asking questions like, “Where’s the meaning in my life?”

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Truly Powerful People (215)

Posted on October 12, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

215.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Elana couldn’t wait to speak about her experience of the exercise. I couldn’t see her because the class is conducted over the phone but her excitement was palpable. Somewhere in the world she exclaimed, “Oh, oh! I can’t believe it!”

“What did you discover?” I asked.

“I’m never separate from my potential. There is no future potential that I can’t inhabit right now! Actually, all I’ve ever been and all I will ever be is available to me, now!” And then she said, “It is so simple.”

This was not a strange class on time travel. It was a coaching class and our exploration was on bridging separation. Each of us carries a set of assumptions, we see the world through a frame of reference and it is through this frame that we make meaning. Alan calls this our “conditioned awareness.” You engage the world based on the context that you impose on your experiences. Most of your life you are dealing with what you think is there, responding to your narration of events, not what is actually there. That is the separation.

The separation not only applies to what is immediately in front of you, it also applies to your future. For instance, when you think, “someday I will be happy/fulfilled/successful/healthy…you separate yourself from happiness/fulfillment/success/health simply by how you construct the thought. “Someday I will be…,” “When I have enough money I will be…,” “I will be whole when…;” it is a meditation on separation: the fragmentation of self from self.

Elana imagined her future self standing before her, healthy, happy, whole, potential fully realized, and she discovered this: she only need claim it, own it and be it – and it is hers already.

Happiness/fulfillment/success/health is a process that you create, not an outcome that you chase.

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