The Direction of Intention

261.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Dear Horatio,

I want to respond to your question and it will take a few posts. First, to let everyone into the conversation: you asked me to give examples or anecdotes of the relationship between control and power and how to break the cycle. You told me that you recognized how this dynamic works in your life but that it is also an abstraction. I responded, telling you that my fascination with this topic (power) comes from the ubiquitous paradox within your question: how can you know how this works in your life but also experience it as an abstraction? That experience is true for almost everyone; when you are in it, you know it in your bones and it is almost impossible to wrap your fingers around it. So, to begin:

I know that it sounds too simplistic but the picture changes when people recognize that 1) They have choice in where they place their focus and 2) They have choice in how they interpret their experiences. These are among the most powerful and transformational recognitions that people can have. It’s easy to say and hard to do when you are convinced that what you see is truth.

Seeing is never passive, no one is ever an objective observer – despite what the past 300 years of science has asked us to believe – it’s now telling us something different. Recently I read Brain Rules by John Medina and in the chapter on seeing he describes what happens in your brain – literally – when you see something. It is akin to an image dispersal and reassembly process. The glue of the reassembly is past experiences: we make meaning of our seeing based on where we’ve been and what we believe about our past. If your life story is one of fear you will most likely see fearful things everywhere. If your life story is filled with adventure you will see opportunities for adventure.

Because seeing is not passive – because you are telling yourself the story of yourself at every moment of your life – you have the capacity to change your story. To see is to interpret and we interpret according to patterns of our lives and how we group things: “this is like that.” You first have to become aware and then detaching from patterns is possible.

For many years fear was my focus so fear was my creation. Living in fear is the equivalent of living full time in resistance and so my story was a story of resistance of the future. I am a dedicated edge leaper so leaping was my first idea about how to get out of fear. If I just kept leaping, if I just kept seeking I was certain I’d find “it.” And then I lost all that I held dear and this is what I saw (finally): It is not in the leaping (the action); it is in the seeing (the story I tell). The shift was immediate. I was a dedicated vampire and suddenly I was practicing something I’d been preaching for years: I was creating power-with. And I know you know what I mean.

[to be continued]

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257.
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 sat with Stephen and his mother in my office. They came in once a week so I could review Stephen’s schoolwork and together we’d set goals and identify assignments for the next week. Stephen had Asperger’s, a form of autism. I’d worked with him for many years. He’d been in several of my plays and recently I’d taken a job in an independent learning center so I was his teacher overseeing his studies. He was a senior and the last time we met he wanted to talk about what he might pursue after high school. He told his mom and me that he wanted to be a disc jockey! He loved music and his enthusiasm was palpable so we set him up with an internship at the local radio station.

Now, as we sat in my office, Stephen was upset. He’d been surprised that the duties of his internship were something other than hosting his own radio show. He thought he was going to go to the station and launch The Stephen Show and was surprised when he was only able to assist the people in the station to produce a radio show. His mother tried to explain that no one hosted a show on day one. I listened as she explained again to him the need to learn the equipment, the roles and responsibilities of all the people involved, of how to record and edit.

Stephen listened patiently and then said, ‘I know all that. I just want to jump to the end.” We laughed heartily.

I think of that conversation often when I work with people – that would be most of us – who just want to jump to the end without moving through the beginning and middle; we want to be “there” at the expense of missing “here.” To be in such a hurry to achieve the goal and never fully comprehend that this goal is not an end but the beginning of the new goal. The riches are here, no matter where you are in the arc toward your idea of fulfillment. “There” will someday come and I’ll wager you, like all the wise old souls I am privileged to know, will reminisce about the times that you missed speeding to get somewhere that didn’t exist.

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251.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Each week in class we do a review of peer calls – coaches coaching each other – and we talk about what they learned from each other. One of the coaches was unable to connect with her peer but came to class very excited to tell us of her experiences in life during the past week. She said, “I think I’m more conscious!” Her excitement was palpable.

What do you mean by that,” I asked.

“I’m connecting with people in a different way.”

“How do you know? What feels different?”

She paused for a moment and offered, “I am less guarded – no, I am not guarded at all. I don’t feel the need to protect myself all of the time. I am much more available. And, here’s the thing, I am listening to people at a much deeper level. What people say is not always what they are saying.” And then she added, “It feels like life is an invitation.”

Extend an invitation to the world, and the world will extend an invitation to you. It is how things work. It’s the same notion as empowered people empower others simply because they step into the world as truly powerful.

I’ve suspected all along that life is really as simple as a Beatles lyric: The love you take is equal to the love you make.

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236.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

236 days ago I started this meditation on power (for myself). I was certain that I would run out of things to say in less than 30 days so I set my expectation to write for at least that long which, at the time, felt like standing at the base of Mt Everest. I couldn’t imagine it. What I have learned in this meditation is that I have too much to say about power. And, it can be reduced into a few simple ideas, mainly that power isn’t power unless it is connective tissue, unless the focus in on the creation of power and not on the negation of power. That has always been for me the hallmark of things to which I need to pay attention; simplicities within complexities always signal deeper waters. In fact, in writing these posts I’ve come to realize that this meditation on power is central to everything I do. As Alan would say, “This is my soul mission.”

Last night I launched a new website, http://www.trulypowerful.com, and sent out a newsletter announcing the site. If you want to join me in this community and didn’t get the notice, go to the site and join the mailing list (and am pretending I don’t have a Facebook page yet because I hate what the designers have done…stay tuned). In January I will launch the blog Truly Powerful People, a more formal meditation on power – fuller explorations of what I’m writing here. This blog will remain my back room, the place where I will rant, where we can play cards, throw peanut shells on the floor and say things that could get us expelled from school.

And, as serendipity would have it, the jewel that dropped in my lap today is about being seen and the connection between vulnerability and power. It comes from a discussion in class today, master coaches talking shop. Most of us steel ourselves against the world; we protect ourselves from the perceptions of others in case they don’t like what they see. And then, we get frustrated because we feel we’re not being seen as we are. To be seen as you are you must drop the steel. To be seen as you are, to be powerful, you must introduce yourself to vulnerability. It is your choice. Steel usually leads to negation of yourself and others. Dropping the steel affords the possibility of collaboration and creation; therein lives the power.

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229.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

[continued from 228]

There is a direct relationship between healthy boundaries and power. Drawing boundaries is different than controlling. Taking on the responsibility for other people’s choices or investing in the idea that you can protect anyone from feeling the consequences of their actions is a study in weak boundaries; a weak boundary is a bunk buddy to controlling behavior. When there is a breach of boundaries, manipulation games abound. It creates energy blocks, confusion, and dependency; it zaps power.

Power creation often begins with healthy boundaries. Empowering yourself requires you to empower others because you clarify the boundary: what is yours vs. what is not yours. When you own and feel the effects of your choices, you grow. When you get out of the business of owning other people’s choices, they have the same opportunity; they grow.

Growth and power often begins with learning to draw a line. Learn to recognize the power of proper boundaries and you’ll see how quickly edges can become horizons – for everyone.

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219.
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’ve been thinking about the term “domestication” because I love it for this meditation on power. We come into the world as a wild-child, without any framing, and like a puppy, we are trained. We pick up language and to a certain extent the structure of our language frames our perceptions of the world: does your language emphasize nouns (things) or verbs (actions)?

We learn how to get our needs fulfilled and how to get attention. It is in this process that we are oriented to value sets, we begin to inherit/develop our “communication styles,” we separate and have the distinct impression that we are separate from all others. For a while we are unique and precious in our own eyes.

Our body is our first border. We know ourselves through our body. We form beliefs (Identity) about our bodies– things like “your nature is good,” or “your nature is corrupt” – these beliefs are body beliefs and inform our relationship not only with our selves but also with how we understand our relationship to the world. It is the epicenter of our understanding of “goodness” or “place.” It is our direct link to ancestry, hopes and dreams, pleasures and pains. It is the foundation stone to the-story-you-tell-yourself-about-yourself.

The underlying assumption is that you relate to others based on your relationship to your Self. It is impossible to talk about the relationship to other (which defines your relationship to power) until you surface the point of view from which you are relating.

So, making the unconscious conscious, a treasure hunt of awareness for your values, your stories about how they came to you, your capacity to see and be seen, discovering and uncovering the geography of your domestication, understanding the self as a “body revelation” is necessary to get to the place where you can understand why power with others generates power and why power over negates power in yourself and others.

If your way is learned (as opposed to “true”) then that must be the case for all other people. And it makes other ways of being possible.

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217.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Lately, I’ve been paying attention to how people describe their day to me. What I hear are discrete chunks of time compartmentalized into little outcome boxes. It sounds like this: “I was crazy busy this morning because my alarm didn’t go off. It was nuts getting the kids ready and out the door but once we were out the door I tried to slow down, to use the commute to catch my breath, commute as meditation, right? When I got to work I put my game face on because we had a meeting right away and I needed to at least look present. The rest of the day was a grind, same-old-same-old, no lunch again, but I cut out early because I wanted to hit the gym before I had to be home for the kids. My workout was so-so because….”

It’s become a fascination for me.

I write a lot about focus placement and focus placement is perhaps the most abstract, least translate-able idea in my canon (so I’m told). What does it mean to place your focus? Why does it matter? Simply this: most people I know feel fragmented or somehow separate from the greater experience/meaning/power of their lives. If what you choose to see every day is a series of compartments, little contained outcomes not necessarily connected to each other (work, home, laundry, gym,…), each with it’s own peculiar standard or judgment attached (that comes with seeing outcomes or products), what you will experience in life is fragmentation, reactivity, and most likely you will wonder were you left your wholeness. You see fragments because you focus on the fragments and you measure the fragments.

If you desire wholeness, you have to place your focus on the whole and not the parts. I know that sounds too simple but shifting your focus onto process unifies your focus and allows you to see the meaning in your day – or at least to make meaning that isn’t based in “life as a product” thinking. Meaning is always found in the relationships, the connective tissue, how the textures of your day play with each other. There is a Native American term that I like, “the long body,” which means to see the whole of your life, the entire arc, and not the pieces.

It is true that, if you grew up in the western world, you’ve probably been reinforced in the fragmentation, but you can choose to practice another focus placement. If you do, it might surprise you to know that your mind, body and spirit are already connected, as are your head and your heart, those compartments, like all the other compartments, are constructs and do not exist outside of your seeing. You simply have to shine your light on the river of your life in order to see it.

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216.
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 the first 46 years of my life I got out of bed and reviewed my list of things I needed to do. Life was about checking things off of the list.
“Getting-through-the-list” thinking is rampant in our world, a useful frame of reference if you are a machine but not so much if you are corporeal and have a soul. I realized somewhere on this path that my frame of reference was the limiting factor in my quality of life. I’d mistakenly placed efficiency too high on my list of priorities. I’m good at checking things off of lists, quantity of outcome, doing stuff, is no problem. What about greater experience, deeper meaning, full spectrum of experience, what about quality of life?

For the past 5 years or so, I’ve been trying different strategies of entering the day. Now, I get up and ask myself, “What do I want to bring to this day?” You will not be surprised to know that my answer is never something quantifiable; I never say “more efficiency!” or “faster pace!” or “multi-tasking!” My answer is usually something like, “curiosity,” or “full presence,” “quiet” or “I want to bring the best of me (try quantifying that!).”

It also won’t surprise you to know that what I intend to bring is usually what I actually bring. It also won’t surprise you to know that my answer is never “fear” or “angst” or “self-doubt” or “anger” or “not enough time.” Those aspects occasionally show up but I have the perfect response: I ask myself, “Is this what I want to bring in to this moment?” If the answer is “no,” I bring something else.

It is not a small question when I ask you, “What do you bring?” Ask it of yourself for a while and you might just discover that you stop asking questions like, “Where’s the meaning in my life?”

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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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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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