December | 2011 | The Direction of Intention

Truly Powerful People (275)

Posted on December 11, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

275.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Every Saturday morning for the past month I get up early, drive to Capitol Hill, park outside of the studio where my class is held and walk to one of the six coffee houses on the block (this is Seattle). I have coffee and watch the sun rise – or to be more accurate, I watch the dark grey become several shades lighter. And then I go to class and study Tai Chi.

This morning the master talked to us about different kinds of movement, specifically movement that comes from relaxation instead of movement initiated from stress. You’d think that would be an easy thing to do: move from a state of availability and relaxation. It’s not. I challenge you to sit in a chair and relax. Not just pretend relaxation but in-your-body-available-to-the-moment relaxation. Relax your thinking, relax your emotions, and relax your body. Just be present. Watching my classmates attempt to move from a state of relaxation made me wonder if we are capable of complete relaxation even when we sleep. There’s so much to do. I think we carry our grasping and resistance in our bodies. And all of this doing, doing, doing requires force, pushing, manipulation, competition, achieving, racing, struggle, strain, no-pain-no-gain,…right? We have to attempt to relax. We have to go on vacation to relax. Relaxation has become something to do.

And then, a beautiful thing happened that reinforced my belief in power-with-others as true power. Slowly (it is Tai Chi, after all) for a few precious moments the group gave over and our movement became singular, people moving as one body, and I felt it, the surrender to presence and for a breath or two we moved from relaxation. We were stillness in motion. We were powerful together, more powerful than all the pushing and pulling and struggle would ever achieve. We weren’t trying to do anything; we were being. Available and present and singular together. It is a paradox.

The more I meditate on this thing called power, the more convinced I become that the only real power and truth lives in the paradoxes. When I stop trying to make it all make sense, when I stop trying to make it do what I want it to do, when I relax, suspend the story I tell myself and breathe deep, I join Life.

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Truly Powerful People (274)

Posted on December 10, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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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.

Our lives are busy. Especially this time of year.

We move through life but rarely live in the present moment. When caught in this fast moving river we rarely allow ourselves the spaciousness necessary to see why we do what we do and why we think what we think. We belief that our thoughts – our narrative – define who we are and our thoughts are most often out of control. We don’t recognize the story we live as the story we choose to live. We are moving too fast to see the patterns and habits and are too used to seeking our answers in others. We convince ourselves that something “out there” will fill the gap we fill inside.

When we begin paying attention to the story we tell ourselves, when we begin to see how we locate ourselves, the roles we play, the ways in which we negate our selves and others, we have the capacity to tell a different story; we create the opportunity to unblock our impulses and become present in our lives. We place our focus on the cultivation of relationship in the present moment and it is in the relationships that we rediscover the essential meaning of our lives. We begin to tell a different story.

We have the capacity to harness the force of our attention and focus it on our participation – on what we bring to the immediate moment. We have the capacity to become present and attentive. We have the opportunity to know ourselves as distinct from our circumstance and to release what is holding us back, which is most often our own stories about ourselves, stories we – and only we – have the capacity to change. We have the opportunity to step out of the river and breathe.

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Truly Powerful People (273)

Posted on December 9, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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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.

The day started early. I took a walk to watch the sunrise and found myself captivated by the ducks diving for food in the Sound just at the end of my street. It was one of those rare moments when the water of the Sound is glassy and quiet. I stopped at the water’s edge because it was so quiet. No gulls, no crows, no ducks, no waves, no wind; I could hear my breath and my heartbeat. The water was steel grey and cold as polished iron. Suddenly, like popcorn, a dozen ducks bobbed to the surface. And, as if on a single breath, they disappeared again, diving for whatever breakfast snack was found beneath the water.

It was like watching a ballet. When they next appeared they came in shifts. 3 popped up, then 2 more, then 4 disappeared as 5 appeared. The sun decided to enter the dance: as the sky grew pink and hot orange the iron grey shimmered, purpled, and played chase with the ducks. I was dizzy with wonderment when the gulls sang their part and the crows strutted to and fro in comic approval.

Of course, I was the only one who knew this morning ritual was really a dance. But, after the final curtain as I walked away I wondered what eyes are sometimes looking at us in our morning rituals, thinking, “This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen!”

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Truly Powerful People (272)

Posted on December 8, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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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’m writing the workbook chapter for my class and today I’m working on The Relationship with Intention. I revisited and brewed together two older posts: they’re intimately related and belong together: The Hero/Anti-Hero with Split Intentions. Here’s an excerpt from the workbook:

Harald 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 self-criticism and judgment. It plagued him and the more he resisted the Anti-Hero the stronger it became. One day, exhausted by his inner turmoil he had an epiphany. 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 power of the Anti-Hero and what was left was…human. Beautiful, flawed, funny and messy, Harald was a human no longer at war with himself.

Internal warfare was the result of a split intention. As Harald discovered, trying to be the Hero in the eyes of everyone else split him into two pieces: the unreal expectation (Hero) and an ever-vigilant judge (Anti-Hero). Harald was attempting to control what he could not control: the expectations and responses of other people. His happiness was contingent upon the happy responses of others so he was constantly measuring his actions for success: The actor and the measurer. The internal warfare was inevitable, the expectation untenable.

The mistake of the young actor on the stage is rooted in trying to control what he or she cannot control; trying to control the wrong thing will split you every time. The work of controlling what you can control begins with rooting out the victim stories and owning your choices. The next step is healing the splits so you can call a truce in the internal warfare.

There is a dynamic between control and power. Power with others becomes available when you surrender the need to attempt to control others – which is to attempt to have power over them. The role of Hero is in practice an attempt to control others: in order to feel powerful heroes need someone to save. To surrender the Hero you have to surrender your need to control the thoughts, feelings, and expectations of others. You will be capable of dropping your internal measuring stick when you set aside your unrealistic expectations and allow yourself to be fully human.

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Truly Powerful People (271)

Posted on December 7, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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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.

Here’s an interesting phrase that came up twice today: soul searching. This is not a new phrase. In fact, I’ve heard it a lot. I use it myself sometimes. I heard it anew today because I had two conversations and the phrase was used in two remarkably different ways (I have permission to share this with you):

• “I have a soul and I am searching within myself for my truth.”

• “I have lost my soul and I’m looking for it.”

The first usage is healthy. The second is tragic. What is it to feel as if you’ve lost your soul? I am not asking a religious question. I am asking something fundamental and practical that applies to us all.

Here is the context from the person who feels as if they have lost their soul (I’m generalizing a much bigger conversation): In business (and government) there is often an invisible scale – like the scale of justice – in one tray is the word “values” and in the other tray is the word “interests.” How often have you heard someone in a position of authority say, “We had to weigh our interests against our values,” as a way of justifying the action that betrayed the stated values? My conversation was with a man in authority who recognized that he makes that statement a lot. Today is the day he realized what he was really saying. He said it this way: “I have no values that matter. The bottom line, what we’ve been calling interests are in practice, in truth, what we really value; interests trump values every time. I’ve been making excuses, pretending that I’m serving a set of values. I’m not. It’s a lie.” Strong words! That’s when he used the phrase “soul searching.” Today, he is my hero. I do not underestimate the power of his revelation and the bind that he now faces.

I think his dilemma is the dilemma of our times. There is not greater expression of values lost in service to interests (there was no weighing) than a government that collaborated with its financial institutions to rape its people and bring down the world economy. And the people (that’s us) are not innocent either: shoppers stampeding and pepper spraying each other to get a bargain are certainly in service to their interests and completely void of any greater value set.

The question posed by my hero-of-the-day is this: aren’t our interests supposed to be in service to our values and not the other way around? We could all use a bit of soul searching.

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Truly Powerful People (270)

Posted on December 6, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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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.

In every vital creative process the first creation is safety.

In the theatre there is a mantra: control your control-ables and let the rest go. Most people with creative blocks are trying to control what they cannot control, like other people’s opinions, and not controlling what they can control, like their own thoughts and opinions. Another uncontrollable that people always try to control is the quality of an outcome; they will sacrifice their health and happiness for the product or the appearance. Mastery comes when the focus is placed on the only thing that truly can be controlled: the quality of the process. Great process will always lead to expansive creativity. So, the two things you CAN control:

• Your thoughts, opinions and perceptions.

• The creation of a quality process.

The two things you CAN’T control:

• Other people’s thoughts, opinions, and perceptions.

• An outcome or result.

Creating safe space begins with controlling your control-ables and letting the rest go. Ultimately this is a process of 1) drawing boundaries and learning to hold them, and 2) choosing where to place your focus and energy. Valuing your opinion over the opinions of others and learning to create a process as opposed to push for a result is core to a generative creative process and how you establish safety within yourself.

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Truly Powerful People (269)

Posted on December 5, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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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.

Once you recognize that you have the capacity to choose your story, once you realize that you have choice in where you place your focus, you can begin to unlearn some of the limiting patterns that come with an outcome focus and hyper-investments in control.

We live in a culture that generally values intellect and shuns intuition. We’ve buried our dreaming beneath the safety of data. Play this game: place your focus on outcomes and witness what happens to the voices in head. Shift your focus to the “space between” (the relationships), focus on creating a quality process and witness what happens within your body and your inner monologue.

Your intellect feeds on the illusion of control. The intellect likes the idea of outcomes, the satisfaction and safety of the delusion that the train will pull into the station and you will live happily forever after. No mess. Check the box and move on to the next thing on the list. Your intellect will have you believe that you are one thing, a single identity. Stray from the safety of the prescription and the inner judge will pound you back into the box and have you coloring between the lines.

The intuition does not think its way into limitation; it feels its way into freedom. Intuition likes to wander over the next hill to see what is there. Intuition engages with what is there, not what you think is there. In a healthy creative process, when your focus is on the process, the intellect is in service to intuition. Focusing an impulse is a radically different action than controlling an impulse. Intellect wants to control, intuition wants to create. Learn to distinguish between focus and control and you will be on the road to becoming truly powerful.

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Truly Powerful People (268)

Posted on December 4, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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Where are you? On what mountain are you standing? From what point of view are you asking questions about your life, power, and creativity?

If you believe that you are standing on a mountain of deficiency, your fulfillment will look like a distant meadow. It is some other place. Every question you ask will be asked from a place of deficiency and reinforce the idea that what you want is some other place outside of you. What you see is separation. The story structure that you buttress holds the notion that there is an arrival place, another mountain or meadow – some other place called creative or happy or fulfilled. In this story your focus is on an outcome or result that resides somewhere out there in the future.

It can be scary to step out of an outcome focus and into a process focus because control is the sole aim of an outcome focus. To show up and be seen you must first relinquish your illusion of control. Letting go of control feels a lot like stepping into the unknown. It is. Creativity is nothing more than your capacity to step into uncertainty. Creativity is the blossom of a process focus. Power is possible when you stop controlling and start collaborating.

Every story is told from a specific point of view. Choose your story.

Where are you standing? What is the mountain of assumptions upon which you stand and relate with the world?

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Truly Powerful People (267)

Posted on December 3, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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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.

All creative limits or blocks originate from some form of separation: you have cleaved a part of yourself and locked it away in the closet. Or, you have put manacles on your impulses and fear what might happen if you release the restraints; what will people think of you if you give full voice to your thoughts, ideas, perceptions, dreams and desires. What part of you fears annihilation if you show up as you are? What part of you fears being seen?

Fear has a lot to do with the need to control and control has a lot to do with your access to power (your creative impulse). Fulfilling your creative potential begins with allowing yourself to be seen – not as you think you ought to be but as you are.

Spend a week gathering information about the story you tell yourself and mining your assumptions. Recognizing where you are, identifying the mountain of belief upon which you stand is a necessary first step to bridging the separation. Watch out! Separations are slippery and express as false comparisons (with whom do you compare yourself? Why?), false expectations (do you need to be perfect? Do you have to do everything yourself? Why?), and false investments in stories (what achievement will make you valid, valuable, or whole? Why?). What stick do you use for self-measurement? Just gather information, without judgment, and see what you discover.

Is there a gap between the life you live and the life you think you live? That’s the first separation to bridge.

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Truly Powerful People (266)

Posted on December 2, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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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.

Fulfilling your power and your creativity is essentially the same process. Power and creativity are, in my mind, actually the same thing; two roads up the same mountain.

The road to expansive creativity begins with unlearning the idea that creativity is an outcome or a divine gift for a select few. The road to fulfilling your power begins when you stop believing other people are the source of your power. Both are questions of source.

Where are you standing when you look at these aspects of yourself called creativity and power? What are your assumptions? What is your point of view? What is your relationship to your creative impulse? What is your relationship to your self as power-full? Are you riding the brakes? Have you divorced yourself from your creative impulse? Have you given away your power?

No one is powerful alone. No one is fully creative in a vacuum. No one has your power or is more or less creative than are you.

Locate where you are in your creative geography, put to rest the idea that creativity is something you do or that power is something that you get. Recover the most potent, powerful, creative source available to you: your self.

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