The Direction of Intention

25.

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

This one is from Peter Block’s amazing book, The Answer To How Is Yes:

“Nelson Mandela, the recipient of worldwide admiration, has stated that the moment you treat a man as a god, you have invited the devil into existence.

The devil, in this instance, is not the behavior of the boss or politician; the devil is the denial of our own power and the expectation that someone else will lead us to a better tomorrow.

The belief that the power lies “up there” is a way of ensuring our own helplessness, all for the relief of an imagined moment of safety.”

To whom are you giving your power? Whose responsibility is it to create the life you imagine?

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24.

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

Conventional wisdom would have you believe that behavior is driven by self-interest. That, “what do I get?” is the driving question at the core of your being. Really?

Scratch the surface a bit – people seeking meaning and greater depth of experience (that would be all of us) are not looking for personal gain, we are reaching for greater connectivity and richer experiences. Perhaps you have so reduced yourself as to believe that your highest purpose lies in what you can get; how lonely you must be. How empty you must feel. Perhaps you should spend an afternoon with a few elders and ask them what in their lives held value and meaning?

It may be a necessity of consumer mind to believe that you are a bundle of unfulfilled self interests; perhaps it is an economists dream to imagine that people can buy their way into fulfillment (we’re certainly reinforced in this thinking), the person with the most toys, wins?

You can choose to diminish yourself and believe conventional wisdom, you can abdicate your responsibility and give away your power. Or not. Conventional wisdom is learned, it is a construct born from an agenda, it is not natural. Conventional wisdom needs you to believe that you are, well, conventional: can you truly find your happiness in aisle 7?

Truly powerful people define themselves, not by what they lack, but by what they bring? Who might you be if you remembered (and believed) that your gifts were innate, unique, and essential?

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23.

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

To truly powerful people seeing is not passive, it is a creative act.

A truly powerful person knows that you are not merely the receiver of visual information, you are also the interpreter of it. You are the giver of meaning to everything you see. You are the giver of meaning to everything that you experience.

As the giver of meaning you also become the guardian of your personal stories. Personal stories can be like territory: you stake a claim in how you identify your self and you lock in the bank the stories that justify your claim. Every vault requires a dragon.

Stories resist containment. Stories thrive when they are shared. When locked in a vault they fight to get out. They become too much energy in too small a space and it takes more and more effort to deny that there is something of value locked in the vault. The dragon has to work harder.

What stories are locked in the vault? What roles do you justify? Who might you become if you opened the vault and let your stories – your claims, all of them, see the light of day? What assumptions might drop away? What new job would you give your dragon if it no longer had to protect what you’ve  locked away in the cave?

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22.

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

Once you have a word for something you stop seeing it. A tree becomes a concept. You see the word. You see a category. But you rarely see what is right in front of you. You see what you think is there but you don’t see the tree.

To see the tree you have to slow down. Then, you have to challenge the assumption that you know what it is. Seeing has less to do with they eyes and the mind than it does with the capacity to be present.

To see the tree you probably have to stop the internal chatter, the interpretation, the to-do list, you have to challenge the idea that the tree is a resource, a consumable object. You have to challenge the idea that this “thing” is a category, one of many of the same thing. It is not. It is only fits into a category in the abstract.

Only then, after all of that “putting down” are you capable of engaging with what is there. Only then can you see.

Consider for a moment, if it is this hard to get beyond yourself to see a tree, how difficult must it be to see another human being – especially a human being that you’ve placed in the category “not like me.” How hard must it be for them to see you?

Imagine what might be possible if we took the time to see. What might change if we acted according to the unique and splendid instead of the generic and the abstract?

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21.

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

He stood at the door and gave us each a yellow #2 pencil as we entered the room. This was my first day of college, my first day in art school: basic drawing. I’d yearned for this moment for years!

When we were assembled and quiet he held up his yellow #2 pencil and asked us what color it was. I, like the rest of my peers, thought, “What the hell! This is college! Why is he asking us such a stupid question?” One particularly disgruntled student toned, “Why, it is yellow.” We laughed.

He said, “Look again.”

Begrudgingly, we looked. “Yep, still yellow,” the disgruntled student mocked, rolling his eyes.

“Anyone else?” the professor asked. We were silent. “Look again,” he said, “really look.” Slowly we brought our pencils back to eye level and looked. “Look beyond what you think,” he said. “You only think it is yellow because you’ve stopped seeing. What color is it?”

My yellow #2 pencil transformed before my eyes; suddenly I saw shades of green and purple, undertones of  red and highlights of blue that hurt my eyes. It was alive with color! Guessing by the gasps of my classmates, they saw it, too.

The professor said, “That is the only thing I will teach you this semester. I will teach it to you again and again: how to see beyond what you think is there; how your thinking dulls the magnificent world that is right in front of you all of the time. If only you would choose to see it!

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20.

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

Karola swam out of the mists of time. At least that is how I think of the moment I met her. I was swimming laps  in the outdoor pool at the YMCA early one winter morning in Santa Maria. Steam billowed off the heated water into the cold morning air; I could hear the quiet strokes of other swimmers but I could not see beyond my lane.

I had a kink in my neck and stopped to work it out. “Can I help you?” she said in her thick German accent as she emerged from the fog. She looked like a jolly She-Yoda and laughed heartily at my gaping stare.

Her hands went right to the spot – as if they knew where the pain was and I gave myself over completely to her careful massage. In just a few moments the knot released, I sighed, and Karola introduced herself.

We stood in the pool and talked about the kinds of things that old friends talk about; I was so taken by her that I completely forgot about swimming my laps. When I realized I was late for work  I jumped out of the pool and only then did she say in her She-Yoda German accent, “You know this expression, ‘a glass half full or half empty? You are exhausted with trying to keep the glass half full – that is why you have this knot. Relax. Stop pretending to be things that you are not. You will never experience a full glass until you first let yourself go completely empty and discover who you really are.”

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19.

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

Language is an amazing and tricky business!

If you are one year old or older, you will most likely be in the process of acquiring language – a miracle of complexity that no one really understands.

Along with language you will also acquire the habit of talking to yourself, stringing words together to describe and interpret your experiences. You will become an expert teller of stories and because they are your stories you will assume that they are true.

And, finally, along with acquiring language, becoming an expert storyteller, assuming your version of every experience is truth, you will fall into your stories, you will become them! You will tell some of them so fast and so repetitively that you will spend most of your life wrapped in a monologue about your past or your future or of how you assume other people think or might or might not see you. You will miss your present moment altogether.

How can you possibly see anything through so much analyzing, interpreting, investing, attaching, fearing, and resisting? What might you see if you remembered that language is a tricky, sticky business and that what you narrate might not be truth but just narration? What might you see if for a moment you stopped talking to yourself?

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18.

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

Empowered people empower others because they are not trying to control things that they cannot control. In fact, they have a different relationship with the word, “control.”

It is like this: are you invested in the idea that you can control what others think, see, or feel? You can’t. You can never determine what others think, see, or feel – that is theirs to control, not yours. Neither can they control what you think see or feel; even if you want others to be responsible for what you feel, they can’t. That is yours.

What you think is yours to think (it is a choice – a subject for another day). What you feel is yours to feel. What you see is yours to interpret. Empowered people empower others because they own what is theirs and are clear about what is not theirs to own. They have no need to seek their value in other people’s responses so they have no need to control other people’s perceptions. They know their worth so they have no need to prove it or defend it. Their worth cannot be taken.

Imagine what might happen in your life and relationships when you no longer invest in the idea that others are responsible for your feelings. What will you do with all of your thoughts and time when you give up the notion that you can control what others see or think or feel!

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17.

Truly powerful people inspire power in others.

In simple terms it is a matter of directionality: are you moving toward something or are you moving away from something. Are you defining yourself through what you imagine, through what you desire to create or do you know yourself through what you resist?

Imagine the impact of either direction on your life and relationships. Are you engaging with the people in your life as a creator of what you want or through resistance?

Resistance is not a bad thing, it is sometimes a necessary step in order to see what you want to create. It is a step. However, placing your focus too long on what you don’t want blinds you to the possibilities. It binds you to the impossibilities: too much resistance evokes the victim within you.

What are your possibilities? What are you yearning to create?

What if no one else had your answers? What if your happiness was already in your pocket and not in the thoughts or actions of others? What if there was nothing to control, nothing to resist, only choices to be made? Which direction would you choose?

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16.

His white postal service truck is parked beneath a tree across from the tide pools. He parks in this spot every day to have his lunch; I imagine it is the midway point in Dado’s daily mail delivery route. Today is the first day in weeks that it is not raining and many of the neighborhood’s residents are out walking.

Dado is like the ice-cream truck for adults. People can’t wait to see him, they rush his truck, waving with both arms and smiling. It is not the mail that they are excited about; it is Dado. He is a cherub with a full-body grin. He is as excited to see you, as you are to see him. He knows your name, he knows your story, and he is never in a hurry (paradox alert! Dado delivers the mail like clockwork – everyday – yet every time I see him he is having a pleasant conversation with someone in the neighborhood! I am guilty of having regular 20-minute conversations with him…).

From a distance I watch people take turns talking to him. They laugh. Their faces soften. Their stories and gestures are enthusiastic. I watch their posture change as they see him and cross the street to say, ‘hello.’ It is as if, for just a moment, they stop hiding; they come out from behind their dull screen and shine.

Dado sees people and people like being seen. It is not complicated; when you talk with Dado there is nothing more important to do, there is no place he would rather be than talking with you.

Presence feels good. That’s what Dado knows and that is what Dado brings.

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