January | 2012 | The Direction of Intention

Posted on January 21, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

316.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.” Niels Bohr

The steps in organizational growth are the same steps necessary to take in personal growth. We wrap different language around the steps but the steps are the universal. Like Hollywood blockbusters we weave different details through them, the characters have different faces and names, but the story follows a well-known plot. This has been true for centuries! We like to tell the same story over and over again and there is a very good reason for that: our lives are mirrored in the adventure. We know what to do in our personal story because we identify with the heroine/hero in the story. Their journey of transformation is a guide to our journey of transformation. Their follies and foibles give coherence to our messy passage. Their death and rebirth is a map for our death and rebirth. Their story is a call for us to step more fully into our adventure.

If there is one thing we’ve learned in the past century it is that change is the only constant. And, the subsidiary lesson: the pace of change is escalating. Whether we realize it our not we are always in a process of change. The Dream Society, a book published over a decade ago by the market futurist Copenhagen Institute, suggested that this dramatic escalation of the pace of change has thrust us out of the age of information and into the age of story. Information and data can locate us in a moment, describe a point in time, but the point is of limited use because we are living so close to the event horizon. The point that the data describes is obsolete before we can translate it into meaningful action. The best we can do is to use the data to story ourselves into an unknown future. In this sense, it brings us around to something our ancestors understood with certainty: true stability is found in the story that we tell, not in the things we possess.

Of course, therein exists my favorite paradox: Our stories are both road maps for change and anchors of stability. We know who we are by the stories we tell. We know who we want to become through the stories we tell. We know what we want to create through the stories we entertain.

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Truly Powerful People (315)

Posted on January 20, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

315.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

When Bluetooth earpieces were new and business guys in suits ate their lunch, drank their martinis and posed on street corners with their power symbol literally stuck in their ears, Albert went on a rant. He is a keen observer, comfortable on the margins of society so he is less susceptible to gadget status. He does not chase after the next new thing. “Oh, please!” he raved as he imitated the strut of an imaginary broker, posing and prancing around our table answering faux calls. I am a good audience and the more I laughed the more outrageous his rant became. “You won’t catch me dead wearing one of those things!” he proclaimed as he sat down to finish his coffee. That was six years ago.

Today, Albert and I talked for the first time in months. He lives in Los Angeles so I see him rarely but we talk often. “You can’t believe what happened to me!” he exclaimed. “I was walking down the street wearing my new shades thinking I look pretty good for a 50 year old guy. My phone rang and I answered it. And then I realized – oh no! – I’ve become one of those guys! I had one of those things in my ear! And, I wear it all the time! Oh, nooooo!” he howled and laughed. “What’s become of us?” I could not see the imitation he did of himself strutting down the street but the narration of his inner monologue was priceless. “I don’t look so bad,” collided head-on with “I’ve become that guy!” Never say never.

I adore Albert. His capacity for keen observation extends as far inside himself as it does to the world around him. His capacity for laughter and humor is endless and he applies it to his own foibles as well as to the quirks of others. Mostly, he reminds me not to take any of this too seriously. When we were in college he’d say, “We’re just making this stuff up!” and then he’d lapse into thought, take a drag on his cigarette and say, “you’d think we’d want to make up something better.” And then he’d laugh.

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Truly Powerful People (314)

Posted on January 19, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

314.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

It is 1993 and I alone in my studio. It is night in Los Angeles. I am exhausted and tired of being afraid. My life is fueled by anger and fear and I can see no alternatives. I have made a mess of it all. I am convinced that my paintings are worthless – which means that I am convinced that I am worthless.

My studio has a 20-foot ceiling and great exposed beams that support a mini-loft area. I find an orange extension cord and throw it over the beam, securing one end and loop a noose in the other. I place my rickety old wooden chair beneath the noose, climb up and put the noose around my neck. And then, I play with the balance of the chair, slowly rocking the chair back onto two legs. Only then do I realize what I am doing. I am blessed with good balance and I hover on that edge, my life teetering on the back two legs of a rickety old wooden chair, uncertain which way I want to go. It is on this edge that I recognize, perhaps for the first moment in my life, that I have choice; that I am always making choices. Always. This revelation blows a hole through the center of my victim story and it collapses. I am disoriented and see that I am depending upon others to tell me that I am worthy. I wonder why I have given the measure of my worth into the opinions of others. I wonder why I am choosing so much pain.

I hear in my head the voice of my friend Roger. A few years before he told me that he’d never really understood why people commit suicide. He asked, “Why wouldn’t you just do something else? Why wouldn’t you just do anything else?”

“Yes.” I say to myself, “Do anything else.”

I make my choice and softly let the chair down onto all four legs. I take off the noose, I take off the victim story, and as I pull the orange cord off the beam I suddenly I see my life as precious, sacred, and wonder how I could have lived so long and not known it. I wonder what I was running away from. The revelation stuns me and I sit on the chair and laugh. I know the answer the moment I ask the question: the victim story dulls us; it is a murky lens that leeches the vitality of life and feeds on itself. It is an addiction. I was running from myself so afraid of making and owning my choices, terrified of being seen, of saying, “look, this is who I am.” For the rest of the night I sit in the chair letting my eyes grow accustom to brilliant colors of life without the lens.

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Truly Powerful People (313)

Posted on January 18, 2012 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.

Lora was on a ship that late one night ran aground in the Icy Straits of Alaska. They had to abandon ship. With several other passengers she was taken onto a fishing vessel. One of the passengers had a cell phone that had service so she left me a message (I was on the east coast sleeping in a comfy bed while she was having her adventure) telling me that she was fine, that all of the passengers where safe and that she’d call me when she was able. She wanted to call because she knew the news channels would tell a story of disaster instead of the story of safe competent response to an unfortunate accident.

Indeed, the next morning after receiving her message I turned on the news and saw the ship run aground. All around it were life bright orange rafts – in cold climates the life rafts are like tents – the news choppers couldn’t see inside so they were reporting that people were freezing in the rafts and that almost certainly there would be casualties. The rafts were deployed but no one was in them. All the passengers were transported to an Alaska State Ferry boat; while the news reported a tragedy the passengers were enjoying a warm breakfast and a good nap after a night of high adventure.

I remembered this experience today as I listened to the stories being told around the tragedy in Italy. People died. The captain most certainly abandoned his ship. And, within two hours, the crew safely evacuated over 4,000 people despite the limited ability to launch their lifeboats – a listing ship renders the boats dangerous to deploy. Someone did something right. And, it was certainly messy and panic-filled.

Yesterday I listened to economist Tyler Cowen’s TED talk in which he implored us to doubt our facility for story. I think he got it wrong – we are storytelling beings and our facility for story is what makes us human. It is the glue that binds community; it is how we make sense of the world. What we need to doubt is the intention behind the stories that we tell (and are told). We are in too much of a hurry to assign blame, too interested in whipping up disaster. Affixing blame also limits our capacity to see, to think, to act, it is easy, feels good (because we are not to blame), and makes victims of us all.

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Truly Powerful People (312)

Posted on January 17, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

312.
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 asking a lot of people a lot of questions about the work I do. I ask questions like, “What brought you to work with me?” or “What attracted you to this work?” or simply, “What do you see?” I’m asking because my business posse, my pals who know business better than I do, tells me that I’m supposed to have a “target audience.” “Who is your audience?” they ask. There is very little common ground shared by the people that stumble into my business. “Everyone,” I respond. So, I unpack the bag for them:

Everyday I have potent conversations with people about their power and empowerment. Everyday I’m reinforced in my assumption that the single quality that makes a person truly powerful is their capacity to empower others. It’s a conscious intention, not separate from the other work they do, it is a way of doing the work that they do.

The word “power” can be an obstacle for some. It is a word loaded with trash-potential. Some folks don’t want anything to do with power because they think power means to have supremacy. In some circles I suppose that is a definition of power. I’d call that control. The desire for supremacy is born of fear; the objective of supremacy is to control.

Power is not something that can be given or taken away. It is something that is invoked within someone and amplified in relationship with others. Empowerment is found in the intention to amplify. My best work should inspire your best. I cannot be fully powerful if you are not also powerful. Our best (or worst) is never isolated or separate from impact. It all matters and we get to choose what we create together.

“Who needs to step into their power and intend empowerment?” I ask my business posse (hoping that they will help me recognize my target). “Everyone,” they nod their heads in agreement. “So, what do you see?” I ask, looping back to the place I started. “Well,” they wrinkle their brows and say, “who’s your target?”

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Truly Powerful People (311)

Posted on January 16, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

311.
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 perpetually making lists. Well, to be more specific, I am making one list that has no end. It grows everyday. It is self-generating; when I check one thing off the list, I scribble three new things on the list. It is my “to-do” list. It is my attempt to remember my intentions, to contain the details that an intention inspires, to locate myself in time and space relative to my creation.

I am an “out-of-sight-out-of-mind kind of guy. If I turn the page on my list it no longer exists. If I turn the page my intention becomes untethered and like a hot air balloon floats up, catches the currents of air and disappears (beautifully) over the horizon of my mind. Without my list I lapse into the illusion that I have nothing to do and begin looking for things to create or projects to initiate. Turning the page can (and has) lead to serious over commitment and keystone cop-esque racing about. Newly headless chickens do what I do when I’ve made new projects and new lists and then turned back a page to find that I already had a list.

Since page turning defeats the purpose I’ve created a ritual in my list-making. My ritual has grown over time and now has more to do with aesthetics than it does with functionality. I simply do not turn the page until my list is unreadable. I do not turn the page until my list is visually beautiful. I add things to do in the between spaces. I stack to-do items on top of old things to do. I write vertically up the margins, I circle empty space and fill it in with reminders of things already on the page. Soon, the visual aspects of the list take over and I start to design. Checking things off the list provides visual counter balance. Check boxes move the eyes, different color pens are useful, and punctuation is a dynamite design element. Sometimes I pretend that the new note to myself is emphatic so I can use multiple exclamation points. Stars are good and I’ve found that there are different kinds of stars for different kinds of emphasis and effect. Jackson Pollock has nothing on my list. It is a visual record of my dance in this life.

When my list is absolutely unreadable and unbelievably beautiful and visually stimulating, I transfer the things that still need doing on to a new page. If I don’t remember stuff it probably didn’t need doing in the first place. It always feels so clean! There is so much space! There is nothing like open space to remind me of the infinite opportunities available each day of my life. I choose what goes on the list. And to think that I used to hate making lists!

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Truly Powerful People (310)

Posted on January 15, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

310.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Roger and I are sitting in the back of the theatre. The performance is over and the audience is slowly leaving. Roger sets down his pen and his note pad. Roger directed this production, Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen, and he took notes throughout the performance. He is quiet, clearly meditating on something and I ask what is on his mind. He says, “I work really hard at the details, at making the production and performances specific. I think that 97% of what I do is lost on the audience. They only get a little bit of it, maybe only 3 percent.” He lapses again into silence and I see a thought strike him, his head literally bobs at the impact.

“What?” I ask.

He smiles and responds, “It just occurred to me that it is not the same 3 percent.” He can see that I don’t understand so he continues, “Each person in the audience might only get 3 percent of what I intend, but it’s not the same 3 percent as the person sitting next to them. They see a different 3 percent. The work matters in a different way to different people.”

Another lapse of silence and then Roger stands and says, “Anyway, it doesn’t matter what they get. It only matters that I have done my best to give them my 100 percent. To offer my best work, that’s all I can do.”

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Truly Powerful People (309)

Posted on January 14, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

309.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

It is 1989 and I am showing Jim my paintings for the first time. I am shy about sharing my work because Jim is a great and accomplished artist. I admire him and am still in the phase of believing myself a fraud. I’d tried to discourage this moment but he insisted. Now, I pull out my paintings one-by-one and quietly reveal them –and myself.

He is kind and asks questions about the story behind each painting. He asks about process and impulse. We talk about who influences my work, painters and writers that I admire. Finally, as I am carefully returning the paintings to storage, he asks a question that puzzles me and stops me cold. “What are the spheres about?”

“Spheres? What do you mean?”

He smiled and said, “I thought as much. In each of your paintings, every single one, there are three spheres. You have no idea, do you?”

I began pulling the paintings, one-by-one, out of storage. Now I am seeing my paintings for the first time. It is just as he said: in each of my paintings are three distinct spheres. Each spheres exists as the point of a triangle. The paintings are stacked all around me. Jim laughs long and hard at the look of utter disbelief on my face. I’d painted them and I’d never seen them before!

He said, “You’re not nearly the fraud that you think you are.” I’m embarrassed. In addition to being confused and disoriented by the spheres, he has seen through my mask and I feel naked, exposed. He asked, “Why is it that an artist is the last to know that he or she is an artist?” He looked at me and said, “You’ll begin to see the spheres that you paint when you learn to see yourself for what you truly are. See yourself as you are, not as what you assume others want you to be.”

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Truly Powerful People (308)

Posted on January 13, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

308.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Like all good actors who are in the midst of a casting dry spell, Chris had a project in his back pocket, a one-man play called Dirt that he’d always wanted to do. He was saving it until the time was right. He’d been fortunate since arriving in New York after graduate school; he was cast regularly in plays and independent films and then, as most artist’s experience, for no apparent reason, the well went dry.

As a young actor in his native Austria he’d seen a production of Dirt and was deeply impacted by the play. It is a dark complex play. It is relevant to the world and a challenge for an actor to undertake. It is not too dramatic to say that the play grabbed Chris’s imagination; it held on to him and would not let go. It is a play well known in the German speaking world but had never had a production in English. With no work on the horizon and no casting agents calling, Chris recognized that the time was right. The play was calling.

It is a herculean task to produce a play in the best of circumstances. There is a theatre to rent, money to raise, technical staff to hire, designers to engage, props, lights, costumes, directors, and rehearsal space. When you are an unemployed actor the mountain to climb grows higher as you climb it. He produced it, rehearsed it, and performed it to rave reviews. The success of the first production led to a second and a third. Then a fourth production called. And 4 years later Chris is working with a screenwriter to create the film version.

I talked with Chris today and he told me that he has the feeling that he was supposed to do this play. He had to do the first production. He had to do it. It was always with him and would not let go of his imagination. Somehow,” he said, “I have become its steward. This play and its message is his to bring to the world. He has grown through its challenges. He said, “I think the play chose me.”

Isn’t it true, looking back on your life, that sometimes the story chooses you?

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Truly Powerful People (307)

Posted on January 12, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

307.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

She was deeply moved by the conversation. We were talking with a group about interconnectivity and the global impact of small actions – and the reverse, the impact on your life by the larger happenings in the world. She was moved because she recognized how easy it is to say, “This is how the events in the world are impacting my life;” it is much more difficult to accept that your choices and actions impact the world in a significant way. Someone in the group said, “I understand it in an abstract way but it is hard for me to believe that my small life has any impact on the world.”

We imagine ourselves so small.

For a moment the group was quiet and then she offered this story: she told us that many years ago she had a cat and periodically the cat suffered respiratory attacks. The vet diagnosed the cat with asthma but she wondered how could the asthma be periodic? What was triggering these attacks? They seemed random. The vet confirmed that the attacks were not allergies. One day, the answer struck her like a thunderbolt. She was the trigger of the cat’s asthma! The cat had the asthma attacks every time she was feeling anxious. She thought her anxiety was a result of the cat’s attacks but the opposite was true. She said, “It sounds like such a little thing but it opened my eyes; if my cat’s suffering was triggered by my anxiety, what else was I triggering?” She didn’t want her cat to suffer so she made changes in her life. And her life changed.

It is the little stories that send big ripples. The teacher that said to the student, “You can…,” or the parent that tells the child, “Follow your dream…,” or the friend who says, “Why not try….” Everything that’s moved the world forward started with one tiny moment of encouragement, one small choice not to carry the anxiety forward another day.

Who might you be if you recognized that your actions, especially the small actions, set into motion ripples that shake the world?

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