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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.
Recently, Will was at a dinner party and told the gathering about an amazing study he’d just read. Apparently, the conscious decision (the thought) to move actually follows an action that the brain has already initiated. In other words, when you think, “I want to lift that flower pot,” you’re brain fired the muscles before the thought was launched. Thought follows action, not the other way around. I will find this research for another post on another day but let’s suppose for a moment that it is the latest brain science. This discovery is on the magnitude of the discovery that the sun does not, in fact, rotate around the earth but the other way around.
What do you think the other dinner guests did? Will said that there were several moments of silence and then they changed the subject. It was as if he’d never spoken. I imagine Copernicus sitting around the table with some friends, having just completed his nightly sky gazing, bouncing up and down with enthusiasm, and whispering to them what he’d just discovered (he had to whisper as the punishment for heresy was painful). They looked at their pal Copernicus for a long moment and then pretended that he hadn’t spoken. “Pass the wine!” calls Vincenzo. “Any more stew?” asks Ghilberti.
When we do not understand it, we ignore it and move on. I’ve seen that look on the faces of many school board members when I’ve said, “Teaching is about relationship” or “Art can save children’s lives.” Stunned silence. “On to other business!” chimes the board president. All breathe a sigh of relief as if one of their pistols accidently fired and no one was hurt.
The hand with the gavel is supposed to keep the conversation safely within the norms and will pound the table if the conversation strays beyond the bounds. There is an inner judge with the same job. The question that Will has introduced is this: does the inner judge pound the gavel because movement has begun or does the judge pound the gavel mightily and movement is the response.
Filed under: Truly Powerful People |
The Direction of Intention 
well it certainly seems true if I was to punch someone in the nose, I have had some rants around here absent thought (and even at City Hall where thought might have even been absent)
or when pulling a child out of the traffic or in our house rescuing an animal from the death chamber, never thinking how they might maul me over while I am sitting at the computer writing.
Is this the JUST DO IT ????? even better I love your characterization of how we sometimes deal with a thought or research or a conversation that doesn’t seem to fit, I have had that experience too.
I was curious about this and had the opportunity at dinner, with a group of new and old friends who were meeting for the first time that night, to slide this research into the conversation. It is a testament to the community with whom I was dining–one man jumped right in and excitedly shared a similar article HE had just read about the same topic and the entire group spent a good thirty minutes batting around these beautiful ideas, playing with them, building connections to other ideas.