The Direction of Intention

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When I think about focus placement I return again and again to Declan Donnellan’s book, The Actor and the Target. It’s about the actor’s process but the concepts in the book apply to life beyond the stage.

The first of the six rules of the target is deceptively simple: There is always a target. He writes, “You can never know what you are doing until you first know what you are doing it to.”

I like this rule because it eliminates separation and it accents connectivity. No one lives in a vacuum. We are, all of us, agents of action. We want. We desire. We pursue. And every action, to be known, must have a focus. Every verb needs an object. Your actions matter. They have impact on something or someone. Always.

When we are lost, when we are convinced that we don’t know what we are doing, we focus on the “I” or the “not knowing.” A focus on the “I” is a focus on what we are trying to get. With a shift of focus from the “I” to the target there also comes a shift of intention for getting something to what we bring to IT. Considering the target places the focus outside of us – and provides a bigger picture that includes others – and that’s when knowing what you are doing becomes possible.

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