davidrobinsoncreative

Truly Powerful People (213)

Posted on October 10, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

213.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Sam and I talked often during the months that he prepared for his interactive workshop. He was both nervous and excited; this presentation represented a risk, a step into his desire. It was a conscious choice to step toward vulnerability and the unknown. He was presenting to a conference of life and business coaches. He wanted to introduce to them the notion that coaches need mentors; mastery is an ongoing ever-growing process and that requires wise-eyes. Sam is a master coach and walks his talk. He is always learning, always growing, always seeking wise-eyes and asking, “What do you see?”.

His workshop was very successful and as he described to me his experiences in presenting, I could see that he’d had a significant revelation that day.

“What did you learn?” I asked.

He was quiet for a moment and then said, “It was very humbling. I think I learned to stand in what I know and make an offer without needing an outcome or expecting a response. I didn’t offer any answers or pretend that there are 5 bullet points to achieve artistry or something like that; I asked questions. I asked big questions.” And then he said, “I was powerful in a way that I have never been before, not power over the group but powerful with the group. We all became more powerful. I was present.”

Step toward the unknown. Stand in what you know and make your offer. Seek better questions. Let go of outcome and focus on process. That’s a recipe for power-with and a step toward mastery.

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Truly Powerful People (211)

Posted on October 9, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

212.

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 Tom was a young man he became a teacher because he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. Becoming a teacher, to Tom, looked like a default, a door opened and he stepped through it because no other doors were opening. Everyone who knew Tom knew he was born to be a teacher. They saw the door opening as the natural opportunity that comes along when the candidate is ready to step through the threshold and meet their destiny. They saw it as his life path.

Destiny often feels like a default until you get down the road a ways and can look backwards. A little distance is useful for meaning making.

Tom had a long career as an educator, much of it looked like a theatre program and in the last phase he wore an administrator’s mantel. When he looks back he doesn’t much think about the administration or the theatre as the most significant moments – though everyone who knows him would say those seemed to be the most impactful years of his working life, a fulfillment of his destiny. To Tom, they were good years full of great work – yet his destiny was something he might have lived but might not have found.

When he is alone and thinks of his great work he revisits a class of 4^th graders during the early years of his career. He would tell you that he didn’t know what he was doing so they went on adventures, real and imagined. He talks about the shrunken head he pulled out of his desk one day and told the kids of being taken hostage by a tribe of people in the rainforest. They spent the next several weeks retracing the steps of the ill-fated expedition: maps were made, supplies were considered, tribes were discovered and described – and that’s how the students learned about the rainforest; they had meaningful discussions about culture, geography, survival, destiny and fate. I was with Tom when, 40 years later, a student from that class, now a teacher herself, recounted in vivid detail the tale of the shrunken head and the journey that followed.

Tom told me that he was never more powerful than in those years when he believed that he did not know what he was doing. In the absence of knowing he was forced to engage; relationship was his only other option. And, as it turned out, that was a great lesson: relationship is the center of true power; knowledge is often the center of power-over-others. A happy accident or destiny? I’m not sure I know the difference anymore.

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Truly Powerful People (211)

Posted on October 8, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

211.

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 circle comes back around in this meditation on power. It begins with a very simple idea: truly powerful people are dedicated to inspiring true power in others. And, like all simple ideas, it is harder to do than it is to talk about doing. Abstractions are always easier to entertain than the actual daily practice of doing something; it is the integration into your being that takes the effort.

It goes like this: empowered people empower others, not as something on the “to-do” list, not as a nice intention like going to church on Sunday so you can say, “I did it,” on Monday – empowered people empower others because that is how they’ve decide to orient into the world. It is who they are, not something they do.

Is it “pie in the sky?” A utopian ideal? Maybe. Maybe not. That depends on how you choose to look at it. Think about this: how powerful must you become to free yourself of the need to diminish others? Who might you become if you no longer needed to reduce others to elevate your self?

Power and worth and connected at the hip, they are the Siamese twins of potential. You’ll recognize someone struggling with their worth because they have the need to diminish others (assert power over others). Just so, you’ll recognize someone who is not questioning their worth or value because they bring power to life – in themselves and in others. They bring it to life. They are not wrestling with the perception of power or trying to attain power; they are power-full.

Power-over is a dramatically different thing than power-with; power-over negates power, power-with creates power.

This equation is like a mirror that reflects both ways. If your game is to reduce others you might stop and consider how much thought-time you spend reducing or editing yourself. Do you carry in your bag of beliefs the stone that says, “You are not worthy?” How much time do you spend comparing yourself, hiding or tempering yourself?

What if your worth was no longer in question? What if your value was no longer an issue? What would you do with all of that newfound time and energy that previously was dedicated to bullying yourself or reducing others? You’d empower others simply by how you were showing up in the world.

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Truly Powerful People (210)

Posted on October 7, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

210.
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 spent a good deal of my life running away from the idea that I was powerful. Or, running toward it but like all good mirages it was never quite where I thought I’d find it. Like many of the people I now work with, I had been taught that my power and my answers were lurking “out there” somewhere if I could only find them. Inner truth, intuition, feeling, and heart took the back seat to intellect, reason, and the idea that truth was another one of those things located “out there” somewhere and I’d know it if I could capture and measure it. But, to capture it, I’d have to kill or compromise a part of myself, that part that feels or intuits. That part called soul. I might have a hole in my psyche but I’d have personal power. If it wasn’t measurable, it wasn’t important.

How do you measure love? What about friendship? Who has a tape measure that can accurately quantify passion or community? Is there a standardized test anywhere that can determine the depth of character or size the creative spirit? Who has a rubric for the quality of life?

I don’t know about you but this world has never made much sense to me. It’s always seemed to be upside down or riddled with false oppositions: is it really necessary to pit the head against the heart, the intellect against the intuition, the soul against the ego, and to demonize one of the poles? What a great recipe for internal warfare! There is nothing better to create and then have to control those combating inner voices; driving with one foot on the gas and the other on the brakes. Divide yourself against yourself and you are bound to develop a healthy case of self-loathing. As within, so without: the internal will find an outer expression for one very simple reason: if the story-you-are-telling-yourself-about-yourself (your inner monologue) is one of separation and disunion, the story you live, the story you see and practice in the world will be one of separation and disunion. The meaning you make will be one of division and usually the thing you will be divided from is any sense of meaning.

There are more potent forms of personal power than “power over” but you have to put down your ruler to see them. When you call a cease-fire to the inner warfare you quickly lose interest and need for power-as-dominance. You see it for what it is: like a drowning man only the powerless need to push others down to get to the top. Drowning others to save your self is a litmus test for low self-esteem. Think about it: if you can only experience a high by bringing others low, you are utterly dependent on how others see you. Instead of relying on others for your power, why not be powerful?

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Truly Powerful People (209)

Posted on October 6, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

209.

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

Grief is a funny thing. It scrambles all the stories, flips all of the perspectives, upends all of the beliefs, drains the batteries, and leaves you wondering who you are. It is the belly of the whale. You know you will be spit out at some point and you also know that you won’t be the same person when you are; you survive and die all in the same action. It is always dark in the belly of the whale. Loss invites loss and loss incites change.

Grief is like being scrubbed with a coarse brush in a hot bath. You leave a lot of skin behind, it hurts, and you are somehow clean when it is all over. There are new clothes and too much sun so you step into the day and say to yourself, “Now what.”

And then comes the moment when you let go of holding on to the past, of trying to keep the memory alive, the relationship from fading in your memory. In that moment the world looks new, simple, and clear. You see the energy. You are no longer attached to the story.

I remind myself today that growing is always a matter of working with the energy and not with the story. The feelings are nothing more than energy trying to move in a direction. The story prolongs the grasping and the gasping and the drowning. Today is a day for letting go. It is autumn after all.

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Truly Powerful People (208)

Posted on October 5, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

208.

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

For years I resisted the label of “life/business coach” because through my graduate work and new career exploration I visited many coach training academies. I generally left the experiences feeling that the relationships were constructed upside-down. They were transactional and often built upon the notion that the coach was responsible for making sure the client achieved their goals; coach as the accountability police. Yikes! So, in essence, the coach held the power in the relationship, the responsibility for forward movement, and was the keeper of accountability. In such a construct when the coaching relationship ends, the coach walks away with all of the learning. The client may or may not have achieved their goals but has certainly been thoroughly reinforced in a pattern of powerlessness.

Consequently, I didn’t have a label for my practice. I only knew that I wasn’t…that. There were many default phrases mostly dancing around the notion of connecting to creativity.

And then I met Sam and later Alan. Both call themselves coaches and their work is transformational, intuitive, and client-centered. In their practices (as in mine) the relationship is created so that the client is responsible for their actions, accountable to and for themselves, the emphasis is on their becoming more powerful, more capable, and more intentional. Clients learn to seek their answers from within instead of perpetually looking for how others do it. The work is as much in the “being” as in the “doing.” There is alignment between those two words (being and doing); they were never meant to be divorced or thought of as separate things; how can you be separate from what you do, how can your doing be anything other than an expression of your being?

It is all in where we place the emphasis. I can help you meet a goal and reinforce your powerlessness. Or, I can help you fulfill your potential, a process of emphasizing your power because you are personally accountable, as intuitive as intellectual, and take responsibility for your actions and choices (this is a great definition for creativity, too).

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Truly Powerful People (207)

Posted on October 4, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

207.

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

“Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Our ‘Age of Anxiety’ is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools – with yesterday’s concepts.”

Along with Quentin Fiore, Marshall McLuhan published that thought in 1966. He had some idea of what was coming down the pike for us but I wonder if he could imagine the world we inhabit today. It is the hallmark of our time that we are always in a period of great technological change; we are nothing if not a culture perpetually defined by transition: transition is at the center of this experiment that we call democracy and the United States of America. The idea that we are static, fixed, and that our destiny is manifest is a rusty old tool that’s been outdated for a century or more.

Yesterday’s tools are corporate and tribal. Yesterday’s tools assume opposition – in fact they thrive on opposition. They assume access to knowledge is the province of the few, they assume people will sit passively in front of their television sets as banks make record profits while they lose their homes. They assume that communication has borders. Yesterday’s tools are failing all around us; our education system, our political process, our media, our ideas of who we are and our place in this world. Yesterday’s tools bank on the idea that the red states and the blue states will continue fighting over foggy notions and won’t notice what’s going on in the state of our national being.

“Power over” is a tool from another time. Its shadow reaches into our day (thus the anxiety) but “power with” is on the rise; have you ever known a time when people were more capable of immediate and potent connection (Egypt was not an accident). The pace of technological change is not going to stop anytime soon; neither will our culture of transition. Our tools are changing. Our modes of communication are changing, our way of being in the world is changing and one of those ways is how we view power – power in ourselves and in everyone around us.

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Truly Powerful People (206)

Posted on October 3, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

206.

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

Shortly after meeting Patti I bought a black and red hardcover notebook in an attempt to contain my thoughts and notes from our conversations. My usual system of Post-it notes, index cards and loose college rule three hole punch pages proved inadequate for the task of capturing the idea cascade of our exchanges. Sticky yellow post-its overran my desk and spilled onto to the floor. It was too much for the old system to handle and there was no sign of our idea-flood drying up so I took the leap and bought a real notebook with heft and presence. It was the first of many.

Taped into the first page of the first black and red notebook is a Xerox copy of the Vicious and Virtuous Circles (we now call them “circumstance-driven” and “intention-driven”). We created them one morning, very early in our collaboration, sitting at Patti’s dining room table in North Carolina. The Circles spilled out amidst a mad volleyball-banter of concepts sparked by the likes of Parker Palmer, Charles Hampden-Turner and a few others I can’t remember. We were attempting to give coherence, direction and shape to the flood. We were trying to answer questions like, “How do you address the real issues inherent in organizations and communities without placing any of the participants in an untenable position? What are the conversations we as a community and as a culture are avoiding? What conversations are we incapable of having around issues of difference or diversity? How do you facilitate change in a system when change will upset the power structures and alter the essential identity of the system?” The Circles grounded our thinking and gave us direction and coherence and more importantly clarified a single guiding intention for our work together: to facilitate the journey from the Vicious Circle to the Virtuous Circle. The creation of the Circles helped us to ask better questions, “How can we, all of us, live expansively together and support each other in fulfilling our potential? How can race or age or gender become a horizon, something to step toward, instead of a barrier, something to move against?”

On the page facing the Xeroxed Circles I scribbled two notes. The first is derived from a book by Robert Fritz called The Path of Least Resistance; in blue ink I wrote: It is impossible to change behavior until you change the underlying structure, the path water (behavior) takes is always determined by the structure of the land. I underlined the words “behavior” and “structure.” I wrote the second note in black ink, it reads: Mastery is concerned with process not product. Master the process and the product takes care of itself.

We’ve yet to meet a person, a company, or an organization that isn’t running around on a Vicious Circle (a circle of reduction, driven by circumstance). Walking the path between the Circles – walking the path to becoming truly powerful – requires two things: 1) A willingness to look beyond behavior and see the underlying structures, and 2) A desire for mastery; focus on the process and let the outcomes take care of themselves.

Said simply, it is this: are you moving toward what you want to create or are you running from what you fear? It’s a choice.

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Truly Powerful People (205)

Posted on October 2, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

205.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Most stories are about changing from one way of being to another way of being. Sometimes the change is forced upon you before you think you are ready. Sometimes you seek it. The process is generally messy and the outcome is rarely what you’d imagined when the story began; usually, it is better than you’d imagined.
In 1998, I left the work that I’d created for myself, work that was secure, creative, challenging and I’d assumed mine to my death. I ran a theatre company during the summer months and a communications academy in the winter. Both were odd-ball programs imbedded within a school district. Despite the endless hoops and regulation-manipulations necessary to keep peace within a hopelessly broken education system, I could do what I wanted to do, create what I believed to be helpful for students and myself, and explore new territory. The theatre and the academy were magical places; students transformed, teachers took risks, daydreaming was valued because it always led to, “what if…?”
One August day while writing the final report for the summer theatre, I found myself concluding the report with a letter of resignation. I was seized with the need to go; I could not stay another day. I had no plan and meager savings. It was not the first leap I’d taken and would not be the last but at the time it felt like madness, like I was leaping for the sake of leaping (my inner monologue screamed, “Don’t do it! Take this year and make a plan. Make a plan! Don’t be foolish!”).
I have never been good at ignoring inner imperatives. My inner Virgil is an impatient man and deeply values the hidden treasure in, “What if…?” It is true that sometimes I chastise myself for believing in “What if…?” but mostly I say to myself, “Why not? If we can create this why can’t we create that?”

This week I worked with teachers who are routinely abused for asking, “What if…?” I feel as if I just landed from the leap I took so many years ago. It just occurred to me that my work in this world is to marry these phrases, “What if…?” and “Why not?”

What if you loosened the nozzle that shuts down the flow of your dreams? Why not open the cage and see what is possible beyond the bars?

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Truly Powerful People (204)

Posted on October 1, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

204.
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 young couple pulled up in their battered white Ford truck. They were coming to pick up an old table that Lora sold though Craig’s List. We loaded the table into the bed of the truck and then Clay, the young husband and I, stood in the street and talked for an hour.

He talked of his love of remaking things and restoring old furniture. He told me his ability to restore stuff was life giving and I could see it in his eyes when he said it; he literally meant “life-giving.”

He told me he’d just been through a rough patch and struggled because he lost a bunch of work – he was a private contractor – and didn’t want to go back to being a cop. The thought was killing him. He told me the crucial moment came when he stopped entertaining the notion that he had to go back. He realized he didn’t have to do anything. He would choose to go back or he would choose not to go back – either way, it was a choice. His choice. And, he realized that he’d already made it. So he “stayed the course” and some work came his way.

He said, “A man with a plan can get through anything.”

I asked, “What’s your plan, now?”

He said, “To restore this table! It’ll be life-giving and there is no better plan than that!”

Do what gives you life! There is no better plan than that.

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