March | 2012 | The Direction of Intention

Truly Powerful People (377)

Posted on March 21, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

377.
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 is fiercely cold. The wind is howling out of the north. “Gusts of up to 55 miles an hour!” warned the weather woman. I was amused imagining her to be Chicken Little, squawking at the camera “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” I wear multiple layers of clothes and coats to keep me warm.

I live on a peninsula and I walk the point almost everyday. The difference in temperature can be dramatic from the north to the south side. As I round the point I wonder whether I should have mocked the weather woman; the wind has no respect for my multiple layers and I begin to shiver. I bet that she is inside her bunker nice and warm.

And then I see the divers. Wading into the already cold waters of The Puget Sound a hearty school of newbie divers join together in neck deep water and await the instructions from their dive master. The water is choppy with the wind and beats the divers like a schoolyard bully. They stand together against the thrumming and on a cue I do not see, disappear beneath the surface.

I am thunderstruck at the marvel of the human impulse “to know.” I am a diver and I remember my first dive (in the very warm tropical waters of the Indian Ocean). What is under the water? What does it feel like to dive? What is over the next hill? What will happen if I try this spice with that vegetable? How many people threw themselves over a cliff to test their flying machine before Orville and Wilbur found an answer to their question? And, although we occupy a good deal of our thought space with stories of obstacles, we wade into the cold water on a freezing day anyway. Just because we want to know.

Yesterday in a workshop, one of the professors re-imagining education asked, “How can we motivate students to learn?” I thought to myself, “How could we stop them if we learned to get out of the way?”

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Truly Powerful People (376)

Posted on March 20, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

376.
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 often say to people, “We are living in extraordinary times.” I said it again today as if for the first time. I spent the day with a group of amazing university educators. They are asking themselves enormous questions like, “How do we reinvent the university for the 21st century?” or “What is the role of the university in the 21st century?” The internet is changing everything. What is the function of a degree if most of us will have 7 careers before we retire? What is the role of a teacher? A campus? What does it mean to learn? What is our responsibility as educators in a political climate that is dedicated to stifling learning tamping down systems change?

I heard terms like “social learning” and “collaborative learning” and we oldsters shared a laugh when we recognized that in our college years sharing your work was considered cheating. I heard deep yearning; despite the recent blame-game assault on teachers you will not find people more dedicated and passionate. They want their students to follow their bliss and fulfill their potential. Teachers deal in possibility and revelation. Teachers deal in challenge, reaching beyond the known, discovery in the geography of thought. They want their students to be intrinsically motivated and not driven by abstractions (like tests).

All around the room we taped images to large 4 x 8 pieces of paper. Our images were our conversation. We diverged into “What if….” We dreamed and let go our attachments and assumptions. We pried open our fingers and released our notions of “what should be” so that “what might be” had space to breathe and show itself. And what might be was breathtaking in its scope.

This conversation has been bubbling under ground for years. The pain is finally too great and the bubbles are at last finding their way through the resistant surface. The new narrative showed its face today and I stand in awe of the amazing, gifted, dreamers who brought me to utter, “We are living in extraordinary times.” And we are living it with extraordinary people. Just take a look around.

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Truly Powerful People (375)

Posted on March 19, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

375.
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 Bisbee, Arizona the library board holds a fundraiser on the Saturday before Valentines Day. It is an event that could have been designed just for me and I am still stunned at my good fortune to 1) have been in Bisbee, Arizona on the exact date of the fundraiser and 2) have a life partner (Lora) that arranged in advance for tickets. My knees went week when she told me what was in store for me in Bisbee.

Here’s how it works: Many of the town’s residents make their favorite chocolate concoction: chocolate nut clusters, chocolate chip cookies, chocolate coconut crunch monster bars, chocolate fudge, Mexican chocolate pudding, chocolate cakes and breads, chocolate truffles, chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate; dozens of choices. In the old library they set up long tables with chocolate choices; there is one station upstairs and one downstairs. $10 gets you in the door and six tickets; each ticket is traded for one selection of chocolate. You have to choose six! Out of the hundreds of possibilities, the amazing chocolate opportunities, you have to choose! No hording, no mouth and pocket stuffing, no tipping the tables contents into your pie hole. Delicious torture of the paths not taken with local granny’s to keep everyone on good behavior.

There are pots of coffee and tea strategically located near sitting areas. It is a commons, a place for people to meet and share their choices and discuss strategy. One older man with a miner forty-niner beard used his tickets as a divining rod; he let the tickets tell him what where the best choices. The lovely chatter was a high note dancing over the baseline of groans and moans of satisfaction, “What did you get? Oh, where did that come from! I didn’t see that one! Please, just a taste!”

In chocolate, everyone is a local. All are included in the community bonded in chocolate lust and the stories it invokes. I’m in some serious training to get ready for next year; I hit saturation far too soon and had to save some of my choices for later. Bisbee, 2013. I’ll meet you there.

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Truly Powerful People (374)

Posted on March 18, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

374.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Judy asked, “Where is the faith? Where does belief fit in to it all?” My favorite part about her question was that she did not expect a single answer. She was not looking for an absolute or a doctrine. She did not seek something she lacked. She was looking for a story.

Judy has spent a good deal of her life in nature. Her orthodoxy lives in the tide pools; her canon is told in the buds that are issuing forth from the trees. When Judy asks about faith she is more likely to seek an insight from the vibrations in her harp (she plays beautifully) or in the crayon drawing of her seven year old neighbor, Poppy than in a book – unless, of course, the book is poetry.

We talked story all afternoon and occasionally she would clap her hands and say, “There it is! That’s where faith comes in!”

Judy met me at the ferry terminal. It was raining and she was in her car playing with the color app on her phone. Her first words to me in greeting: “I’ve just created the most extraordinary color!” And then she hugged me as if I had something to do with it.

That’s where the faith comes in. That is life creating itself. “I have so many questions!” Judy laughed in mid hug. “I’ve named my color ‘farm’ though it’s not quite right yet.” Who needs belief in the face of such enormity?

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Truly Powerful People (373)

Posted on March 17, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

373.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Carlos sat in my office. He sat with his mother and kept his eyes glued to the floor. He’d just been released from prison and his mother was doing all the talking. He wiggled the leg that sported an ankle bracelet. His mother told me that he was a good kid and that he only needed to learn a little respect.

Respect is one of those words that are misused as a bargain: I’ll respect you if you respect me. Bargains like these too often become cockfights. Respect in a power-over world requires a police force and a court of law. It becomes very complicated with lines of respect being drawn, reinforced and redrawn. Gangs everywhere kill each other each day in the name of respect. Carlos belonged to that world.

Carlos and I had many conversations after that day. He talked a lot about respect. To gain respect from his peers, he needed to be dead or in prison by age 20. To gain the respect of his rivals he had to vanquish them. To be dead seemed to be a goal and the highest achievement in his culture. I wondered how many generations of lost boys were required to create such a warped aspiration. Lacking purpose, belonging or any real respect from the community, the picture twists.

We talked about other ideas of respect, respect that was not a form of dominance hiding behind a party mask. He could not imagine respecting someone and having no need to control them. For him, respect meant to make them see your way. He understood the paradox: you want them to respect what you see but you refuse to respect what they see.

We talked of how true respect is most often found in stillness and he’d never known any inner stillness. We talked of how stillness – and true respect for others is only possible after you first offer it to yourself. Stillness comes from self-love. He hated me for that because he cried. “Imagine,” I said, “to respect and to own your point of view, your ideas, your gifts, and your thoughts enough not to hide them or force them or have to shoot to prove to anyone that you have worth.”

“I can’t imagine it,” he said.

Disrespect is loud – inside your head and on the outside, too. Disrespect needs to be heard. Power-over has confused disrespect with respect. Respect is not available upon demand. Respect has little to do with territory or possessions. Imagination is among the first casualties when there is so much noise.

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Truly Powerful People (372)

Posted on March 16, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

372.
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 writing the workbook for my next class – a class I’m calling the Open Story. It is the sequel to the first class: The Ground Truth. Together they constitute what I’m calling the Bring Power To Life series. The Ground Truth is concerned with drawing distinctions within six relationships – for instance learning to draw a line between what you can control and what you can’t control defines your relationship with Control. The relationship with control is a baseline to relationships with things like Choice and Intention. There are six relationships and six distinctions to draw. If the Ground Truth is about inner gazing and pattern breaking, the Open Story is about outer looking and pattern making; it is an invitation to six related aspects like Creativity, Opportunity and Ease. Today I’m noodling through the chapter on Flow. Here’s the beginning:

What is the quality of movement in your life? Many years ago I trained to be a massage therapist and I learned that health in the body’s systems was the result of unimpeded flow: anywhere there is blockage there is disease. When I began doing organizational work I learned the same lesson: a healthy corporate body is the result of unimpeded flow of communication; where there is blockage there is dis-ease. Working with artists was where I first encountered the lesson: dynamic art in all its forms is the unimpeded flow of expression; where there is blockage there is disconnect and dis-ease. Kink the garden hose and pressure builds. Block the artery and heart will seize. Stilt the communication and dysfunction and power games will bloom. Inhibit your expression and you become just like the garden hose: pressure builds and your inner life jams. Vitality in life is unimpeded flow.

The phrase “Open Story” comes from a Balian, a man many years ago who told me there was nothing physically wrong with me. What ailed me was, in his words, my story was closed. He tapped me on the right shoulder and said, “Open your story.” He didn’t offer any hints as to how I was to open my story but I understood that I already had within me the capacity to figure it out. I also understood that there was no end to the process of opening a story. It can always open more. And, of course, an open story is a story of flow; the long body, a story both distinct and universal, intimately connected to the flow of life.

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Truly Powerful People (371)

Posted on March 15, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

371.
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 is a day of amazing quotes. The first came to me this morning from Beth and is by author Jonah Lehrer; I clapped my flippers when I read it. The second is from Martin Prechtel; read what this amazing man is writing – all of it! This is from his new book, The Unlikely Peace at Chuchumaquic.

“We now know enough to know that we will never know everything. This is why we need art: it teaches us how to live with mystery. Only the artist can explore the ineffable without offering us an answer, for sometimes there is no answer. John Keats called this romantic impulse ‘negative capability.’ He said that certain poets, like Shakespeare, had ‘the ability to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ Keats realized that just because something can’t be solved, or reduced into the laws of physics, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art.” Jonah Lehrer

“For the Indigenous Souls of all people who can still remember how to be real cultures, life is a race to be elegantly run, not a race to be competitively won. It cannot be won; it is the gift of the world’s diverse beautiful motion that must be maintained. Because human life has been given the gift of elegant motion, whether we limp, roll, crawl, stroll, or fly, it is an obligation to engender that elegance of motion in our daily lives in service to maintaining life by moving and living as beautifully as we can.” Martin Prechtel

I was reading Martin when Jonah arrived in my email; images inflected to tell a third story. These are images shared from opposite sides of the circle but both are looking to the center.

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Truly Powerful People (370)

Posted on March 14, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

370.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

There are those wonderful rare weeks that the dials of my mind turn a notch or two, the penny drops, the door of the safe opens, the apple hits my head, and something that I have been wrangling with for years becomes crystal clear. I always know the insight is worthy if it seems too simple. As I learned in school and experience in life, a complexity is never changed with another complexity; systems always change through local simplicities. I am living in one of those zones. The apples are raining on me everyday. Over the weekend I saw with absolute clarity how to create structures within organizations so that they might function as fluid, dynamic, self-organizing systems: systems for our times and not the 1860’s. It’s so simple! And, of course, it requires the creation of power-with-others – no managers necessary.

I learn something new everyday and ironically most of my new learning comes from those that I teach or coach. Today, another penny was dropped on my noggin by a brilliant class and this time it wasn’t a revelation about something new, it was an explanation of something old, a piece of a puzzle that I didn’t even know was missing. Here’s the reader’s digest version (or for those of you under 40, the blog version):

Master coach, teacher and author, Alan Seale, developed a simple but profound model he calls The Four Levels of Engagement. This model is extraordinarily useful for personal and/or organizational change – it’s the same thing.

According to the model we plug into life, into our conversations, into our thoughts at one of these 4 levels:
1) Drama – (to blame)
2) Situation – (to fix or to solve – to try to contain a complexity)
3) Choice
4) Opportunity

The rule is to get the third level as fast as possible: learn that you are always in choice. Always. Our actions will reflect which level we inhabit. Most of us run our lives from levels 1 & 2: driven by circumstance, reactive, blaming, problem solving, defending and justifying. If you doubt me, listen to yourself for 24 hours or pay attention to the conversations happening around you for a day; most will be blame stories, a few will be tales of fixing problems, occasionally you’ll hear someone in choice.

Here’s the apple that hit my head today: when teaching the 4 Levels most people will report that Choice and Opportunity feel powerful, but Drama and Situation are more comfortable. I’ve always explained to myself that Choice and Opportunity require personal power and responsibility: when you recognize that you are in choice every minute of every day you of necessity must own your choices – and it feels good to be powerful but not always comfortable. But, that’s only part of the picture –and this is what occurred to me: Drama provides an illusion. We go into drama when we are feeling powerless; blaming (Drama) provides the illusion of control/power. That’s where the comfort comes from: the illusion of power to soothe feelings of powerlessness. The same is true for the Situation: when you don’t know what to do, fix something. We enter fix-it mode when we feel helpless; the illusion of competence is most comfortable in the face of helplessness. This is the business world’s Achilles Heel. In the face of complexity (so we don’t know what to do), we reduce everything to a problem and pretend it can be solved, tested and fixed. Voila! Competence.

Living in choice is not always comfortable. Moving into power often requires releasing the security blanket of knowing. Growth, in all its forms is a step into not-knowing and that can be many things but rarely is it comfortable.

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Truly Powerful People (369)

Posted on March 13, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

369.
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 have the sense that happiness and wholeness are trying really hard to catch me. All I need do is stop for a moment, open my arms, and receive them.

In the midst of my running, Catherine reminds me to be still. She reminds me to stop and open my arms. She reminds me to know what I already know.

I know to be still and yet I find myself running and running. What is this gap between what I know and what I practice? What is my story of needing to run?

Story functions as a kind of structure. It is the medium through which we construct our version of reality. My story structure necessitates running. I cycle around and around and around this story of running saying to myself, “Be still.”

Scott told me of Hawking Radiation. In his description, two molecules are locked in single motion on opposite sides of a black hole. They orbit a black hole and serve to hold each other in place. If one of the molecules breaks, moves out of sync, a delicate balance is broken. One molecule flies off into space, untethered. The other is sucked into the black hole and with that motion, the hole collapses. All evidence, all history, all story of the hole is gone as if it never existed. A new story is possible.

One molecule moves out of sync and the story structure collapses. What two molecules hold my story in place? What molecule do I need to jigger out of sync? What history do I need to collapse to be still, as I know, and receive happiness and wholeness?

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Truly Powerful People (368)

Posted on March 12, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

368.
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 had a conversation today with Sylvia and many bulbs lit above my noggin. Things I have been chewing on for a few years came into clarity. We were talking about teams, particularly training people to work as more effective teams.

I have been saying to no audience in particular that “Time is money” is an antiquated industrial era notion; today relationship is money. That is not some woo-woo notion. Read any business magazine and count the number of times you see the word “nimble” or “responsive” or “flexible” or “fast pace of change.” These are the words and phrase used to describe the characteristics of a successful business; these are the words used to describe the business needs of the day.

In the old world the structure of a business was the management hierarchy, business as control. Control models slow you down, they restrict energy and innovation because that is what they were designed to do. Nimble is anathema to the culture of control.

What I realized today, what has been right in front of my face for ages, is that the structure of a nimble business exists within the relationships of a team. The structure of a team is concrete, it is in the agreements they make and hold and cultivate together. Nimble is a team that knows what they serve and why they serve it (they are oriented according to what they bring). Nimble is a team that can adjust and respond to rapid change; it is a form of flocking behavior: simple relationships that are capable of complex movement. Nimble is possible when the team holds itself responsible, when the individuals that make up the team hold themselves responsible, when accountability (one of my least favorite business terms) is personal and does not require any form of accountability police (otherwise known as management) to hold the line.

Relationship, carefully created around specific agreements, is the structure of contemporary business. Nimble is possible when powerful people empower people.

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