The Direction of Intention

44.

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 Conor Grennan was 29 years old he quit his job and decided to travel the world for a year. He was restless and looking for…something.

For reasons that he can’t quite explain, he began his trip by going to Nepal to volunteer for a few months in an orphanage. He didn’t really like kids. He’d never volunteered anywhere. Why was he doing this? He couldn’t explain it to his friends because he couldn’t explain it to himself. He decided that he was doing it because it would make a good story, useful for impressing women, if he could say he’d volunteered in a Nepalese orphanage.

His time at the Little Princes Children’s Home changed the arc of his life. What he found there both shocked him to his core and opened his life to depths of meaning and love that he might have never otherwise known. The children in the home were rambunctious and vibrant. And, he discovered, most were not orphans. There was a civil war in Nepal and the children had been taken from their parents, from their remote villages, unwitting victims of child traffickers. For an enormous fee, the traffickers promised to protect and educate the children only to dump them in the city to die.

Conor’s good pick-up line has become a life-long commitment to reunite the children with their parents. In a country blasted by civil war, desperate in its poverty, he is finding a way to reunite the children with their families. It is dangerous work.

Sometimes your purpose finds you.

His story could be one of insurmountable obstacles. He could have left and never returned, pretended not to know what was going on there. His story is messy and gritty and sometimes tragic. It is a story of great love, resilient spirits, perseverance and a testament to what one person can do when their purpose rises to greet them – and they have the will to rise and meet it.

You can read more about Conor Grennan and his work in his book Little Princes.

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43.

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

Truly powerful people know that creativity is nothing more than your capacity to step into uncertainty. Truly powerful people know that every person has this capacity – it is not a divine gift bestowed on the few – it is a divine gift given to us all. It comes standard with every model.

So what happens? Most people by age 30 will tell you that they aren’t very creative. Most children by age 10 will be timid to try something that they don’t already know how to do; they will perform the “right answer” but will avoid the deeper waters of “not knowing.”

It is a matter of orientation, of where you choose to place your focus. If you are oriented to the product (as are we all) or the outcome or the answer (all things measurable), you will come to believe that to be creative is a to make stuff and some people make stuff called art. If you are oriented toward the process, your focus is on the relationships, on the quality of the engagement – there may be stuff called art but it is a by-product of a way of being. The art is in the engagement (and we are nothing if not an ongoing relationship).

The most creative thing you do – and you do it every moment of every day – is tell yourself the story of yourself. Every story has a point of view. Yours can be on the things you produce, the things you achieve. You can tell a story of separation and stuff (some of it called art). Or, yours can be on the safari, the adventure of your life as you engage with the wild unknowable experiences that await unseen just round the bend.

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42.

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

Here’s a quote from Buckminster Fuller, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Amen. How many times in my life have I burned down the house thinking it would lead to change only to rebuild a new house that was a replica of the old one. Yikes!

There are a few simple rules for change and building a new model rather than fighting the old is one of those simple rules – it applies to big complex systems like education or insurance reform, to smaller complex systems like relationships and even smaller complex systems like individual people who want to change something in their lives: fighting the old thing never brings about the change you seek.

The word to notice is complexity; a characteristic that is present whenever people are involved. Creating something new requires a step into uncertainty and imagination. It takes something as complex as a human being to invest time and energy railing against what they don’t want. Resistance is often a strategy to avoid stepping into the unknown, a tactic of steering clear of ‘what might be possible.’ Think of it this way: resistance requires no responsibility.

Truly powerful people ask these questions: Are you moving toward what you want to create or are you living in resistance of what you don’t want? Are you invested in what you get out of life or are you paying attention to what you bring to it?

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41.

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

Truly powerful people look at the gap between what they say they want to create and what they are actually practicing in their lives.

Most of us say we want a slower pace or to be more mindful or to be present (fill in the blank with your desire). These things are not something you seek; they do not exist outside of you. They are things you practice.

What are you practicing in your day-to-day life? Are you practicing being to busy? Are you practicing multi-tasking (meaning you are never present with anyone or anything)? Are you practicing moving through your life instead of being in it?

What you do each day is what you practice. What are your practices? Are they what you want to practice? Closing the gap means to practice being what and how you want to be.

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40.

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 my habit to look beneath behavior to the underlying “structures of the land” (from Robert Fritz, behavior like water follows the path of least resistance – behavior will change when you change the structure of the land). I’ve coached hundreds of people and the process of fulfilling potential or expanding thinking usually entails reaching beyond the realms of behavior.

The other day Ana Noriega, coach extraordinaire, dropped a thought-bomb on me (she always does) that went something like this: if you want to change your belief, change your justification of the belief. It had never occurred to me to think of belief in the same way I’ve come to think of behavior.

I was about to say, “What!?” but she was already filling in the idea – Ana is like a kid with a new coloring book and a purple crayon. She is usually 3 steps ahead of me and said, “Think about it. If you believe you are not worthy or something like that, there is always a justification beneath the belief. You justify the belief. I’m not worthy because….” Beneath every belief there is a justification: a reason you use to hold onto the belief.”

Justification is a form of story. Most of us are attached to our stories – why we can or cannot do something; why the world is this way or that way. Usually our justifications have to do with maintaining comfort – making sure we don’t stray into lands that challenge our beliefs (that would require a peak into our justifications).

Take a look at the things you want to change in your life. What are your beliefs about it? What are you justifying?

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39.

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

If I wore shirts with buttons they would be a’poppin’ today with my great pride and pleasure for the brilliant Megan. She will not believe me when I say that she has become one of my teachers. But it is true.

In short order she sorted out and let go the pursuit of THE ANSWER – something I claimed to have. Megan knows me well enough to know that I can’t find my shoes so it is unlikely that I have an answer to anything. But she played along;-) Here is what she posted on Facebook (used here without her permission because I delight in the face she will make and the trouble I’ll be in):

“Megan…has decided that having the answer is severely overrated, and that in fact the pursuit of the answer often results in the need to cleverly (and consistently) prove that you have the answer, thus compromising the purity of said answer as well as inhibiting your ability to hear what you should have been looking for in the first place: the question. Sheesh David Robinson. Obviously ;)”

She said more in that brief post than I have said in 39. She said more in that post than sages have said in their thick books and long sermons.

From now on Megan will be writing this blog and I will be looking for my popped buttons (and my shoes).

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38.

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 I walked with my partner Lora in the MS Walk. Lora is my

S-hero. Several years ago she was diagnosed with MS and amidst the pain, discomfort, the assault on her mind, the tidal wave of depression that comes with the disease, the loss of mobility and her capacity to work and travel in the ways that she has always done, amidst all of this, she laughs. She walks as far as her feet will let her and today, in spite of her pain, she walked the full 4 miles. Her humor and heart are immense.

Before the walk she wandered through a stadium full of people taking photos and came upon the booth for Shared Solutions – the nurses who teach people diagnosed with MS how to do their injections; nurses who are available 24 hours a day to help with any question, any emergency. Lora went straight to the booth and told the nurses how much she appreciates them and how they have made her life better.

For Lora, that is not unusual. That is how she walks through life. She looks for opportunities for gratitude. She follows complete strangers holding her umbrella above their heads to keep them from the rain. She taught me to make 3 “peace offerings” everyday – to look for the little things that make other people’s lives better. She makes people laugh. If you wait on her table she will know your name and your life story before the end of the meal. People feel better after bumping into her on the street or standing beside her in the checkout line at the store.

How would we be together if we were more like her? I aspire to be a truly powerful person like Lora.

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37.

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 sit at his kitchen table holding my head in my hands. I have successfully melted down my life, ruined everything, destroyed my relationships, my job, and run away from everything and everyone. I ran hoping – believing – that I would find some air and be able to breathe. I’ve only just discovered that the thing that suffocates me… is me. He is laughing the laugh of knowing. He had this same moment when he was decades younger – when he was my age.

The last vestiges of my former life are the hundreds of paintings I carried with me when I ran. For weeks I’ve known that I need to be rid of them. I have this unbearable urge to burn them but how can I burn my own paintings? Serendipity brought me to this island and this man that was once a famous artist, a rising star in the New York art scene. He loved the art making and hated the art scene. The society and selling revolted him yet he was succeeding. His work was selling. He had collectors who wanted his paintings, not for the beauty of the art but for the investment; art as real estate. Art as part of a diverse portfolio – like stocks. He couldn’t breathe and one day without really knowing why he burned all of his paintings, locked his studio door and walked away. He walked for 15 years.

I was not seeking this man. I didn’t know his story until I was sitting at this kitchen table. He eventually stopped walking. He began painting again but he does not sell his work. He trades it for services or scrap for sculpture. Mostly he gives his pieces for pleasure. His life scares me because I know that I must take a similar leap. I know that my 15 year walk is only beginning. That is why I hold my head in my hands and that is why he laughs; he knows I have already made my choice and that I am standing on the edge, all that remains is to light a match and leap.

I look at him and ask, “When does the leaping stop?” He roars with laughter, his eyes fill with mirth-tears. He tells me what I already know the answer. “For you, never! The leaping just gets easier because you know that you must leap. Eventually you will stop fighting it so hard.”  He stares at me for a moment and adds, “Besides, after a few leaps you will learn that every leap is really an opportunity. You are scared because you are holding on to what you know when every fiber in your body is calling you toward uncertainty. What are you holding on to? Leap and don’t forget to breathe!”

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36.

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

Change starts internally. It is not possible to initiate external change if you don’t begin inside. The change begins in asking some form of this question: what is the story-you-tell-yourself-about-yourself and the world?

Truly powerful people are aware of the story they tell. First, they are aware that it is a story – an interpretation, not a fact. They are aware that they cast themselves in the story they tell (one person can and does play many roles in a single day!). The real potency comes when they realize (and own) that they are the teller of their story. Of course, the obvious next question is, as the teller of my own story, what story do I want to tell? That question marks the place where transformation begins.

Think of it this way: when you recognize that you are the teller of your story, you also recognize that the same is true for every one else. You stop enabling. You stop trying to manipulate what others see or don’t see. Imagine what you could do in the world with all of the time and energy you to spend on trying to be ‘right!’

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35.

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

Ask Doug if art is necessary.

Once upon a time he was a young a soldier on his way to Vietnam. He was going to fight in a war before he could legally drink a beer. He was in an airport returning from a leave home between boot camp and his tour and for reasons he still does not understand, he went into the airport bookstore and bought a paperback book of poetry: The World’s 100 Greatest Poets.

Doug was not a reader. He was an angry young man who valued bar fights and chasing girls (he managed to find ways to drink despite his tender age…). He was drafted and going to war. And suddenly, unexpectedly, he was stuffing a book of namby-pamby poetry into his duffle bag.

Each day for a year in Vietnam his job was to walk point. He was the guy that was the easy target; he was bait. If he was killed the rest of his platoon had the opportunity to take cover. Each night, he’d take out his book of poetry and read poems. At first, the guys teased him. He read poems because his mates gave him grief. Soon, they were asking him to read poems – to help take their minds off of their fear and grief. Toward the end of his tour the guys in his platoon were making requests for their favorite poems and he was able to recite many from memory. He understood them; they were in his body, that place of meaning beyond words.

In a single year Doug was introduced to the full spectrum of what people are capable of doing: the greatest horror and the highest art. For a while he was pulled between the two poles: the horror and self- annihilation in a tug-of-war with love and compassion. He could have tipped either way.

Ask Doug if art is necessary. Ask Doug what is point of music or dance or poetry or painting. Ask Doug which pole has more power.

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