Education | The Direction of Intention

Choose To Be Powerful

Posted on October 15, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

585. 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 for 584]

This is what I wrote in my journal about strings to pluck when telling the students the Polar Bear King story. These were my 3 lessons about power as told through the story:

1. Power is something you can learn. And, because it is something you learn it is something anyone can create. Power is not something that happens to you; you choose it. You create it.

2. You can only create power with others. No one is powerful alone. Personal power comes from how you are with others. How are you within your circumstance?

3. It matters how you enter a space, just as it matters how you enter you life each day. You have the capacity to intend. How you come in, why you come in, determines what you do within the space. So, for instance, if you enter the classroom expecting the teacher to control you then you have already given away your power; you will wrangle for control all day and only feel the illusion of power when you think you have won control. The first confusion is to mistake control for power. Power is not control, control over others is not power. Enter the space in control of yourself. Decide to enter your day, each and every day, as a powerful person.

It’s so simple.

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Create A Receiving Space

Posted on October 14, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

A week ago I went to several classrooms and told the Polar Bear King story. I intended to do an experiment: tell the story but approach it from many different access points, perhaps tell it through movement, engage the kids in a poetry exploration, etc. I bailed on my intention and simply told the story – or in most cases, only told a part of the story. I left the kids hanging, wondering what would happen next. In the morning, prior to going into the schools, I sorted my thoughts; I wrote what was important and why I wanted to tell this particular story. Here’s what I wrote in my journal:

“Long ago people knew that things like reading and writing and arithmetic were important things to learn but they knew something that we’ve forgotten: if the next generation does not know how to be powerful (personally and collectively), if each child does not know the difference between power and control, then all the other stuff is meaningless.

People taught this, and other things, through stories. They knew that to tell a story was an act of power. They would not simply begin telling a story, they would first transform their space to a place where power might be given and received. Sometimes that meant going to a special place, sometimes it meant creating a central fire or rearranging the existing space.”

Before telling the story to the classes, I asked the students to create a space – and enter the space – so that they were ready to receive a story. They knew just what to do; it is in our dna. They moved desks and chairs, they created inclusive spaces, they got under desks and tables; they made themselves comfortable. And then they listened. They gave their attention so that they might receive the story.

Each time I enter a school I think, “This is madness.” It is a forced march to content delivery, a test factory. As John would say, “We are a penny wise and a pound foolish.” Yet, in the midst of all the madness, the kids know how to create a space to receive – and their first action, in each classroom, was to blow apart the rows, get on the floor, and challenge me to bring something real to them. [to be continued]

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Look To The Little Things

Posted on October 12, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Megan-the-Brilliant and I talked late one night about the little things in life; we both agreed that they are the most significant things, those little moments that we almost always miss. She told me of being stunned into silence by the yellow leaves falling in a perfect circle beneath a tree. No other tree in the park was shedding its leaves. This single tree was ringed by a brilliant yellow circle of it’s leaves and in the morning light, it was electric. The next morning, on our way to the airport, she took me to see it. I gave her an assignment: I asked her to go to the tree the following morning, take off her shoes, and walk in the circle of leaves. I am waiting for a full report.

Sometimes the small things surprise you: you discover the circle of leaves. Sometimes you create the small things: you drive to the circle in the early morning light, take off your shoes, and walk through the brilliant leaves. I am practicing moving though my life looking for the small surprises. It makes me move slower, to expect the surprises. I am never disappointed as each day, everywhere I look, I see the little miracles, the kindnesses, the generosities, the electric trees, the mesquite smell in the air.

I am also practicing creating the small memories. Last week I stepped into the river. I climbed a fallen eagle tree and peered into an abandoned nest. I threw bark in the water to make a splash. I ate slowly my chili and smelled a warm, freshly baked cinnamon roll. I splashed paint with a little blonde miracle. I sat before a fire late into the night, drank wine and talked of small things.

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Win Again

Posted on October 6, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

576. 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’s all good,” is a statement that you might find printed on a shirt and it also serves as shorthand for a way of seeing; some days everything I hear seems like a philosophical paradigm. Harry had me howling with laughter when he told me that, each morning when he opens his eyes to a new day, he thinks, “I win again!” The mere fact that he gets another day of life makes him a winner. Of course, I laughed because he speculated what it must feel like to open your eyes each day and think, “I win again,” when you believe that you are a “born loser.” The best you can do is neutral. It’s all in the expectation.

“Why does this always happen to me?” is a statement of philosophy I often hear. On planes I encounter statements like, “There’s never enough bag space,” and, “I hope this thing gets off the ground.” Lately, my personal favorite statement of philosophy is, “This is the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had.” Every single cup is the best. I just heard, “Buckle up, cowboy. It’s going to be a rough ride!” Now how’s that for a great statement!

I was recently allowed to work with a group of young teachers-in-training (side note: who in their right mind allowed me near a group of teachers in training?); they are constantly reinforced in the notion that they must “manage the classroom.” This is shorthand for the philosophy that “kids need to be controlled” which is itself shorthand for the philosophy that “kids are incapable of controlling themselves.” I asked the group if they liked being controlled when they were kids and you will not be surprised to learn that they did not like being controlled. What is the sense, I asked them, of learning how to control others if what they want as teachers is to empower others? Isn’t that what we want? To develop the most empowered, dynamic, pursuers of life possible? Powerful people are powerful because they are capable of controlling the only thing that they can control: themselves. Powerful people are not powerful because they are attempting to control others (that is by definition not power, that is control). Here’s a great ancient philosophy for teachers: “Teach them to fish,” or, said another way, “Curiosity may have killed the cat but it set the child free.” It is all in the expectation and the expectation reveals itself in the stuff we print on shirts.

Filed under: Education, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: philosphy | 1 Comment »

Take Your Seat

Posted on October 5, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Avery was upset. He plays clarinet in the middle school band. There is a hierarchy of placement when you play in a band: musicians occupy chairs according to a ranking, so, for instance, the first violin occupies the first chair and all other violinists compete to get to the first chair. Avery moved from fourth chair to the third; the person he displaced challenged him in an attempt to regain the third chair. It is a competition system – or, in the words of James Carse, a finite game. In a finite game someone must win and someone must lose. Finite games are worse than useless for an artist. Artistry is about mastery, not about winning.

Competition can support mastery and it takes an excellent teacher to facilitate this process. Avery was upset because he didn’t know why he was moved forward. After the challenge, when he was moved again to the fourth seat, he had no idea why. There was a challenge, they competed, someone won and someone lost. The band director offered no feedback. It seemed arbitrary and Avery was left wondering what he could “do” to “win” the next challenge. His focus was not on being a better player. His energy was not dedicated to learning his instrument or to making music with others. His band teacher was reinforcing separation through competition and not artistic collaboration through mastery. The arts are about joining and communal experience; artistic fulfillment cannot be reached through separation.

I shared with Avery a piece of advice that a great theatre teacher once shared with me. He told me that I had to master my craft so that I could be “director-proof.” What he meant by that was that there were many directors and teachers in the world who would work to pit me against my fellows as a way of getting a result. I might attain the result but it would cost me my artistry because I would now be focused on an outcome and not on a relationship. My teacher knew that to keep an artistic fire burning the artist must know within him or herself whether their work was good or not; any external measure was useless.

Great actors audition every day and only seldom get cast. Their artistry dies if they are playing a finite game, if they are playing to win or afraid of losing. Mastery is an infinite game that is meant to make the artist a better and better artist. A great community of artists knows how to push and support each other in mastery; there is no such thing as losing if your intention is to become better and better at playing.

Filed under: Art, Education, Truly Powerful People | 3 Comments »

What’s At The End Of The Tube?

Posted on October 4, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Louise was my seatmate on the flight from Lincoln to Denver. She was on her way to meet friends in Santa Fe and I was making the trek back home from working with my beloved Hastings friends. The plane was still at the gate when she looked at her watch and said, “We’ve only been talking for two minutes and we’re already into the deep stuff.” We laughed because we both knew our conversation would go deeper and deeper throughout our flight.

She was a nurse. During the first half of her career she worked at burn units and trauma centers. She told me it was time to move on when she began to feel more like a mechanic than a nurse. “One day,” she said, “I realized that I was adjusting heart monitors and manipulating multiple gadgets with nine tubes that just happened to have a human attached. It was all about assessment and paperwork.” She was quiet for a moment and then added, “Of course it was all about monitoring the person but over time our focus became more and more about the machines. I missed the eye contact, the human touch.”

I told her that teachers are experiencing the same thing. We have gone so assessment crazy and are so test driven that we’ve lost the center; the purpose is no longer to support the health, wellbeing and growth of our children: we routinely toss out the health and wellbeing part for a higher score. And, as hard as they try, our teachers are more and more required to monitor the machine which means they have less and less capacity to actually teach. It’s worth noting that teaching and learning are fundamentally relational. Assessment is mechanical. Our children are like the patient with hundreds of tubes attached; we’ve lost the essential human contact in our mania for monitoring and will be in an educational death spiral until we return to the human center.

The theme is so common that I can only believe that this assessment frenzy is an expression of culture. What is it that drives us to toss away a vital beating heart so we can put the communal body on life support? Marketers know my buying patterns. Google assesses and optimizes my searches, my preferences are logged, tracked and utilized; we are the most polled populace that has ever walked the earth. We know so much about ourselves and at the same time we know almost nothing. Do you know your neighbors? Is the world as divided and dangerous as the news would have us believe (according to the numbers, it is safer. Do you feel it?)? We are standing in a blizzard of information and as in all blizzards we’ve lost sight of what’s immediately in front of us.

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Burn Your Trash

Posted on September 29, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Tom’s grandpa, also named Tom – Pa Tom, owned a small country store in the little train stop town of Herald, California. Every Sunday morning when Tom was a boy he would make the trip to Herald and help Pa Tom burn the week’s trash. It was a great event each week, terrific fun for a small boy to burn stuff with his grandpa. When the fire was just right, not too hot, they’d whittle sticks and roast hot dogs for lunch.

Years later Tom and I rode through the countryside in his truck. He was telling me the family history and showing me the places where the stories happened. He showed me where Thomas Lewins was buried; the man who brought his family west in a covered wagon. The journey took seven years. He showed me where Frankie was buried; one of the many lost boys in the story: Frankie, for some reason, was buried in a cemetery away from the rest of the family. His aunts suffered greatly knowing that Frankie was resting all alone. He showed me the Herald store – it’s still there though now is more of a convenience mart than a country outpost.

As we drove he shared his concerns for what he would do with the ranch and this history of his family. There was no one to pass them on to; the city was fast encroaching on his land. I think he knew even then that his time was short; he could feel the dementia descending. He didn’t want to leave a mess.

He stared straight ahead when he told me that he learned a lot about life during those Sunday morning trash burnings. Chief among the lessons that Pa Tom taught him was to take responsibility for his trash; it was wrong to leave a mess for other people to clean. I knew what he was telling me so I said, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Tom nodded and looked away.

Pa Tom’s lesson was a credo and something we should all embrace: your trash is yours. Do not leave it for others to clean up. However, there is one very important caveat: make sure you know what is trash and what is treasure. Each of us spends our lives wrangling with our metaphoric trash bag – this wrangling provides the spine and substance of our story. And our story is our treasure. Deal with the trash; please do not discard the treasure.

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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.

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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.

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Raise Your Eyebrows

Posted on August 30, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Over a decade ago I did an interview for entrance into a graduate program. I wanted to study art beyond self-expression, intellectual statement or forms of commodity; I knew art was at the center of identity and transformation. I knew intuitively myth and communal narrative were key. Harold, the man conducting the interview, raised his eyebrows when I told him what I wanted. He said, “You understand this is an organizational systems degree don’t you? You recognize this is a Whole Systems Design degree?” I did. I understood completely. “What greater organizational system is there than a culture?” I responded. “What could be more whole than a culture operating from a cohesive narrative?” Harold raised his brows again and nodded, saying, “This should be interesting.” It was.

That day Harold offered me two tidbits to ponder. He told me these two notions were things that all people studying organizational systems came to realize. The first was this: I already knew everything anyone at the university could teach me; what I sought was a way of seeing and I just didn’t yet recognize that I already saw systemically (insert the word “artistically” – they are largely the same thing). The degree program would open my eyes to what I already knew. Second, he said, “ You will set out thinking you know where you are going; you believe you know what you seek. Yet, what you find will be far greater than anything you ever imagined.” He was right on both counts.

I’ve thought often of Harold’s two tidbits of advice and I think they apply as much to life as to the university. First, there is nothing I can teach anyone that they don’t as some level already know. I can help them with their courage or shake up their assumptions, but at the end to the day self-knowledge is what the game is all about and it is a game of recognition. Second, as Joseph Campbell said, “No one lives the life that they intend…” and usually, the life we live is far more rewarding, far richer than anything we initially imagined. The obstacles and intrusions and unforeseen challenges are what give life its dynamic, the relationships are what give life its potency. What if you approached each day raising your eyebrows like Harold, saying, “This should be interesting.”

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

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