September | 2012 | The Direction of Intention

String The Bow

Posted on September 20, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Robert Fritz writes that between “What is” and “What you want” is a tension and this tension is the energy necessary to propel you toward your vision. This tension is not manufactured, it is not imaginary; it is specific, dynamic, and real. The common mistake we make is to try and relieve the tension by telling a story of “not so bad” or “this is good enough” or “I’m not ready yet.” The arrow cannot fly if there is no tension in the string. The arrow will never reach the target if there is weak tension in the string.

This does not mean that “what is” needs to be miserable. If you are alive you are on a quest; human beings are seekers. We are always engaged with what might be. We are creators. A yearning heart is an alive heart; desire is the spice of living.

In one of the versions of the Prometheus saga, Zeus created people so he’d have someone to worship him. Apparently, gods need us as much as we need them. Zeus assigned the task of human creation to Prometheus and gave him explicit instructions: make these humans crude and ugly and stupid. Zeus didn’t want people to be god-like. He wanted worshippers, not competition. Prometheus sculpted his human couple beneath a tree so Zeus couldn’t see them. Prometheus, like us, couldn’t bear to minimize his creation: he started with lumps of clay (what is) and sculpted beautiful beings (what he imagined might be). He knew Zeus would never approve so he stole the fire of life to ignite the hearts of his humans. Zeus could have squashed the new creatures but instead decided to punish Prometheus by infusing his creation (us) with doubt and contradiction; he gave us the capacity to make music and war.

Our hearts are alive with gods fire. We are more like Prometheus than Zeus. If our lives are our greatest creations we can, like Zeus, aim for ugly or follow the example of Prometheus and make something threatening in it’s beauty. String the bow, use the tension and let fly a whole quiver of possibilities!

Filed under: Metaphor, Possibility, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

Choose Love

Posted on September 19, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

559. 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 a recent coaching forum call, Alan said, “Choose love. No need to ask how or fret about it. Just choose it.” We were doing an imagination exercise, working with taking radical steps. The possibility of choosing love without a qualifier was revolutionary for many people on the call. No need to modify or justify your choice. Just choose it. Choosing love, as it turned out, was a radical step.

To many people on the call, choosing love as the organizing principle, as the baseline for all other action seemed so far out of reach as to be impossible. Choosing love was an abstraction, like walking on the moon is an abstraction, something that is imaginable but certainly not doable.

What is love? Is it an achievement? Like a moon shot, does it take complex mathematics and the latest technology? Is it something we find? Is it something we manufacture? There are entire industries built upon the search for love and the inevitable disappointment. Hearts are opened and hearts are broken so the choice of love must always come with strings attached, right? The strings are certainly untenable. Is this love?

Think about the implications in the lyric, “Looking for love in all the wrong places….” Yikes! Love cannot be something you choose if you believe it is something you seek. To choose it, you must already have it. How can it be that we imagine ourselves separate and distant from love?

As Ana-the-Wise tells me, “Love is neutral.” Making bargains is not love; trading pieces of yourself in exchange for attention or affection is not love. If you are giving a part of yourself away, suppressing yourself, editing yourself you are engaged in something but it is definitely not love.

Here’s my theory: to choose love is to choose yourself. This choice will move you to the top of the list. It will require you to be seen, to embrace your greatness, to stop minimizing yourself, and most importantly to drop the illusion that anyone can fill you up or tell you how it is to be done. You must love yourself to choose love and that choice has no back door; to love yourself means you give up all escape fantasies and must own your power. Can you imagine it?

Filed under: Love, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: choice | Leave a comment »

Put Ego Against The Wall

Posted on September 18, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Ana-the-Wise and I had a conversation this morning about ego. We were talking about a wide range of things: “cleaning house,” ridding ourselves of limiting patterns, when people think they are operating out of love but in reality are reinforcing limits (co-dependence), when she spoke this terrific phrase, she said, “That’s the moment you put the ego against the wall!” I loved the image: my ego with his back against the wall; my ego having to face the truth of the moment instead of the horrible fear story.

I asked her to talk more about that. She said, “Ego likes to make things look bigger than they are. For instance, if your ego can convince you that approaching a gallery to sell your paintings is very scary, you will delay the action. Ego likes to make things look too big so you will avoid taking action.” It’s so simple. How many times have I talked myself out of doing something because I feared the response or assumed I knew the answer; a recent client said it best when she said, “I fear the “no.”

When I coach people I often ask questions like, “What do you get if you don’t act?” The answer is inevitably something like “safety” or “comfort” or “I get to be invisible.” This is what Ana is talking about. Ego will have you create stagnation and call it safety. Ego will have you bar the door against non-existent wolves. Ego will keep your light safely under the bushel; after all, who are you to shine? Don’t you know that your light hurts other people’s eyes; tone it down! Keep your voice to yourself. Sit in your desk and raise your hand; don’t you know how to stand in line? And so on.

Often the mountain we need to climb is never as steep as it seems. I’ve found that when I put down my ego-fear-story (…is my work really not good enough, do I really not deserve it, etc.?) there is no mountain, just me stepping toward what I want.

Filed under: Awakening, Edges, Truly Powerful People | 4 Comments »

Put Down Your Book

Posted on September 17, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Years ago Johnny stood on the edge of his life and made a very brave choice. He’d spent years pouring through self-help books trying to correct what was broken, adjust what needed to be fixed, find the piece that was missing (insert the analogy that applies to you). Standing in the middle of his nest of books he had a revelation: each time he read a new self-help book he was reinforcing the idea that he needed help. He poured his life energy into fixing himself instead of pursuing his dream. He decided, in that moment, to place his focus on what he wanted to create.

This may not sound like a bold choice. This may seem like a very easy thing to do but consider for a moment all that you need to surrender when you are no longer willing to tell yourself the story that you are broken and need to be fixed. Who do you become when no one else on the entire planet has your answer or is responsible for your happiness? Consider for a moment all that you need to embrace when you decide to operate from an understanding of wholeness.

Johnny said, “I could wallow in a pool of self-help books forever. They’re kind of addictive; they keep your eyes off of what scares you the most. I decided, instead of reading about action, I might as well take action. I might as well make a practice of walking toward what scares me and no book can tell me how to do that.”

Because of his brave choice and new focus placement, Johnny creates each day the life he desires. When you make it your practice to walk toward life because it scares you, monsters and gremlins lose their potency; close up they’re never as big as they seem.

Filed under: Education, Emergence, Perspective, The Direction of Intention, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

Who Would You Like To Be?

Posted on September 16, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Declan Donnellan wrote an amazing book, The Actor and the Target, intended for actors but I return to it again and again as the lessons are as applicable to life as they are to the stage. Here’s the bit I read today:

“’Who am I?’ is often the first question asked in creating a character but it can be unhelpful. Trying to answer ‘Who am I?’ is a lifetime’s work for an individual, and indeed the more we discover ourselves, the more we realize that we don’t know ourselves at all. If, then, we cannot properly answer the question about ourselves, how can we possibly answer it about someone else? ‘Who am I?’ is an Everest of a question….”

He continues:

“’Who would I like to be?’ is more useful because it is implies an answer that moves. ‘Who would I like to be?’ is even more useful when asked with a near opposite such as: ‘Who am I afraid I might be?’”

The question, “Who am I?” implies that you are singular, that you are one containable, knowable being. It reduces you to an outcome; static and immovable. I love Declan Donnellan’s insight into the better question: “Who would I like to be?” He writes that it’s more useful because it moves. It is an exploration, a question. It assumes a creation, a fluid changeable dynamic process of discovery. There is no outcome. Nothing is absolute.

When feeling lost, we say, “I don’t know who I am.” Yes. Exactly. How powerful might we become if we assumed that life was not about defining ourselves as fixed, as this or that, but discovering each day the infinite fluid possibilities of an unknowable being. The next time you feel lost, instead of trying to be found, engage in the playful creation of “Who would I like to be today?”

Filed under: Identity, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

Dance With “What if?”

Posted on September 15, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

David just started his new job. He is now a professor of acting and directing at a university. He just finished his first week of classes after moving to a new city a few short weeks ago; he’s the new member of an old faculty; everything is strange. He has no comfortable patterns yet, the grocery store is unknown, the walk to and from work is more a discovery than a ritual. Creating a new life is never easy precisely because of the unknowns. And, what I most love about David is that he is the consummate teacher, a gifted artist that uses his experiences as fodder for class; he studies his life and uses what he finds as material for his work.

Our conversation was about his students, about how dreadfully reinforced they are in the notion that they must “know” before they commit to an action. He laughed and told me, “I was the same way! I had to work through this debilitating idea that I needed to know what I was doing before I made a choice. Consequently, I had a hard time making choices!”

I’ve yet to meet a dynamic, potent artist or businessperson who really knows what they are doing. Artists become potent when they stop thinking that they need to know. What they need do is try, experiment, offer, wreck, scribble, tear, sculpt; play. They need to make a strong choice and follow it. They dance in the fields of “what if…?” By the way, this is also known as good scientific method: state a hypothesis and test it. Dance with the unknown.

As David and I discussed, needing to “know what you are doing” is a certain sign of feeling like a fraud. All of us have at one time or another ducked behind a mask of certainty to hide our fear of inauthenticity – and we felt inauthentic because we invested in the tragic notion that we needed to know before we acted. Putting down your need to know is a passage ritual, it is the threshold to vitality and self-actualization.

Life is never found in the knowing. It is always found in the questioning. It is made vital by the freedom to experience without masking or hiding behind the castle wall of knowing. The sweet secret to bold artistry is the same sweet secret to vital living; whisper it to yourself as it seems to be a dirty little secret: nobody knows what they are doing regardless of what they pretend. So, dance.

Filed under: Awakening, Education, Truly Powerful People | 2 Comments »

Glow

Posted on September 14, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Sometimes in the early morning, before the sun rises over the ridge, the osprey will soar high, higher than the ridge, catching the sun light before we land dwellers can see it, and burst into orange fire. The markings of an osprey look Egyptian to me, a pharaoh’s bird, so when they catch fire with the sun, not only am I dumbstruck with their beauty but feel as though I am witness to the appearance of a god or goddess, Thoth maybe, or Isis. And then the osprey dips beneath the ridge line and the glow extinguishes; they are once again gorgeous in their mortality, mere birds of prey. But, I caught a glimpse into their true identity, their godhood.

I feel that way about people everyday. We walk on this earth beneath the ridge line, beautiful in our mortality and every so often we rise above ourselves, we show up even for a moment, and the fire reveals itself.

During intake sessions for new coaching clients I like to ask, “What is yours to do? What is the thing that drives you?” I’ve been asking this question for years, it has become an experiment of sorts. You might be surprised to know that 100% of the time my clients respond, “I want to help people.” The form of helping varies but the impulse to serve others is universal. People seek my services because they feel they have not fulfilled their potential and fulfilling their potential always means helping other people.

It’s a paradox unique to a society that celebrates individual achievement over communal health and well being: we place our focus on personal achievement and feel vacant, unfulfilled if our work has no impact on others. We focus on the gold medals and miss the moments that truly matter. Artists who paint but do not show their work soon stop painting; there is no point without the other.

Dado delivers my mail everyday. Ron fixes things in my apartment when they break. What would I do without them? The good folks at Alki Auto fix my flat tires and don’t charge me. Jen checks me out of the Metropolitan Market; she knows my name and always asks where I’ve recently traveled. Someone I don’t even know stocks the shelves at the grocery store, someone I will never meet grew, nurtured and tended the peach that I just ate: it was so flavorful that it made me moan.

The osprey does not know when it flies above the ridge line; it does not know it is glowing with sun fire. Perhaps we would recognize the godhood in each other and ourselves if we sought our fulfillment, not in an abstract outcome like “potential” and instead took stock of the little generosities and service that we offer each other every single day.

Filed under: Awakening, Gratitude, Perspective, Seeing, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

Know Your Neighbor

Posted on September 13, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

My inner sociologist awoke with a start. He is a sleepy fellow and enjoys his nap more than most folks. I was crossing the courtyard of the apartment complex next door; it has been my shortcut to the other side of the peninsula for more than a decade, a shortcut that I have taken 5 times a week, every week, for 10 years. I am on a first name basis with the caretaker of the property. Today, as I crossed the courtyard I passed a man on talking on a cell phone. He was angry and shouting at the person on the other end. As I passed he snapped shut his phone and called out to me, “Hey! Do you live here?” I stopped and told him I lived in the apartments next door. He responded, “You’re walking on our sidewalk!” That was the moment my inner sociologist woke up and rubbed his eyes, “Huh? Wha…?” His hair was a mess; nap head.

“These are our sidewalks!” the angry man sneered, “I live here. We have to protect our privacy.”

My inner sociologist rolled his eyes and said, “Why are test cases always so predictable.” I cautioned him to watch, to make no assumptions. I said to the angry man, “My name’s David. I’m your neighbor. I pass this way everyday.” My inner sociologist took out his notepad and a blunt pencil, grudgingly poised to write notes about the encounter.

The angry man opened his phone. He did not dial a number so my inner sociologist wrote, “Avoids eye contact.” While staring at his phone, Angry Man said, “We’ve had a rash of vandalism and have to know who’s on our property.”

I said, “Well, I’ll keep my eyes open for any suspicious characters.” My inner sociologist rolled his eyes and called me a manipulator, taking a note about my less-than-subtle status game.

Still staring at his phone, Angry Man repeated emphatically, “These are our sidewalks,” and turned his back and quickly walked away, disappearing around a corner.

My inner sociologist snapped closed his notepad and sighed with disgust, “You woke me up for this? Another angry person finding things to fear is not worthy of my study! You interrupted my nap for a game of guard-the-sidewalk!”

“It justifies his anger.” I said. “Guarding the sidewalk gives him a sense of power and purpose. Plus, didn’t you see how he used his phone as a place to disappear?” I asked. Isn’t that interesting to you?”

“Old News!” shouted my inner sociologist! “Blame and disappear, blame and disappear! Claiming territory that does not matter – it’s an old song and it bores me. Besides, who’s not hiding inside their technology these days?” he seethed, crawling back onto his couch, adjusting his pillow. “I find it depressing,” he sighed, closing his eyes.

“Well, I thought it was interesting precisely because it is so normal.” I said. “Isn’t his need to mark territory and defend it against his neighbor, me, a possible ally, a potential friend, isn’t that worth studying? Isn’t it worth talking about?” He was already snoring – or making snoring noises so I’d leave him alone. “Well, I think it’s interesting.” I said, slightly wounded, suddenly more aware of the sidewalk than I had been before meeting the Angry Man.

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Find Joe

Posted on September 12, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

552. 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 surrounded by amazing people. No one in the past decade has been more influential on my thinking, more loyal in friendship, more dedicated to my growth than Joe Shirley.

A few days ago I sang the song of Sean Smith and later that day I talked on the phone with Joe. He moved away a few years ago and I miss our weekly coffee dates. Like Sean, Joe is in dogged pursuit of his dream but unlike almost anyone I know, Joe’s dream began as a nightmare. His story is the stuff of great art, an intentional passage through the belly of the whale, a film ready to be made.

Joe was bipolar (emphasis on “was”). Because he has an amazing scientific mind he was unwilling to take the brain numbing drugs that his doctor’s prescribed. He suffered great darkness and had to find another way. He had to find a way to navigate life; he knew there must be a way to “cure” himself, to address the cause instead resigning himself to merely blunting the impact of his dis-ease. What he discovered, almost by accident, started a decades long pursuit of his personal liberation and now he is applying what he learned to the liberation of the human spirit.

He was his own best test subject and over several years of intense work he came to understand what he calls the “feeling mind” that is highly structured and infinitely knowable. Learning its “architecture” avails a kind of freedom and power to anyone seeking greater well being. He’s developed and mastered a process that anyone can use to be free of anxiety, blocks, limiting patterns and beliefs. His process is concrete, accessible and designed to be self-directed. He introduced the work to me a decade ago while we were in graduate school and it has provided a tool of transformation that I use with my clients and with myself.

He calls his work Enteleos (“the completion within”). Find Joe. Of this you can be certain: you will never see the world the same way again.

Filed under: Gratitude, Heroes | Tagged: emotion, feelings | Leave a comment »

Write A Taxonomy

Posted on September 11, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

551. 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 working on a project design team and after a terrific discussion on schema, scaffolding and multiple dimensions – there is so much poetry in these words! – our fearless leader asked me to write a taxonomy of intention. Roll that phrase around in your mouth and mind: a taxonomy of intention. Delicious!

Here is my short list:

Intention is the organizing principle. It leads and defines action. It is impossible to take an action without having an intention.

Intention has a direction. You can move toward what you want to create or you can run from what you don’t want. Both directions are intentional and both lead to specific paths and choices.

Depending upon your direction of intention, you will either split your intention – running away from what you don’t want splits your intention; or clarify it – moving toward what you want focuses your intention.

• Moving toward what we want to create brings clarity; our actions align with our intention. This is sometimes called “flow.”

• When pushing against what we don’t want, our actions are by definition conflicted and out of directional alignment; we become reactive. Our intention splits. This is sometimes called “stuck” or “blocked.”

• The question always comes down to this: Are you defining yourself (your actions) through what you imagine, through what you desire to create; do you recognize yourself as bringing your desire/passion to life. Or, do you know yourself through what you resist; do you believe that life is happening to you? It is merely a matter of the direction you give to your intention.

Intention IS the direction we give to our choices. We orient according to what we want to create or we orient according to what we resist and don’t want. One direction brings clarity of choice and the other direction splits us, bringing confusion and reactivity.

This distinction becomes vital when you realize that you are making meaning, not looking for it. So, intention is central to meaning making.

The purpose of a clear intention is dynamic, energized relationships (the space between two actors is made dynamic with clear intention, made muddy with a split intention. This principle holds in business, science, and life as well as art).

Great art is an expression of a clear intention especially when the intention is to get out of your own way, get your foot off the brakes, and let your big, potent, natural voice come through.

You will learn a lot about your intention when you recognize that you choose where you place your focus: a focus on the crap, on what’s wrong, is a good sign of resistance. A focus on potential, opportunity, choice or “what’s right” is a sign of walking toward what you want to create

Filed under: The Direction of Intention, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

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