The Direction of Intention

176.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Many years ago I ran a theatre company embedded within a school district. I also founded and ran an alternative school program. They had many things in common but this little aspect was critical: little or no janitorial services – partly because of district budgets and mostly by design. Early on I recognized that ownership of the space in which we worked had a direct impact on the quality of our work; if it’s our space it is ours to care for, to clean, to shape, to decorate, to cultivate the culture of what happens in it. It mattered because we mattered. Initially it was a bloody battle to implant the idea: how you treat your space is a reflection of how you treat yourself. When you believe the work you do is important, when you believe that you are important in the work, then your care for the space. When you care for the space you care for yourself. After the first generation it became a tradition. The older students taught the newcomers: it matters how you embody the space, it matters how you embody your life. It was not uncommon to see students sweeping the parking lot prior to a performance: these kids believed that the audience’s experience of their art began when the car pulled into the parking lot. It mattered. It was theirs to do.

Ownership and mattering are easy words to say – it is easy to say values and ethics and generosity. They are more difficult notions to live.

Each morning I walk down the beach. It is littered with the remnants of last night’s party: old pizza boxes (the birds love that), broken bottles and cans litter the walkways. There is always a clean up crew paid for by the city – apparently it is the city’s job to pick up after the citizens.

We are a people who believe it is someone elses job to clean up our mess. There is scant ownership, no sense of mattering in how we treat our spaces and I can’t help but think it is a reflection of how we think of ourselves. Do you matter? Do your actions matter?

Whose job is it to clean up after our party? How would we live life if we knew that our actions mattered – all of them! When you know you have impact you are conscious of your actions and how they effect other people and the places of your life. You are connected. You own it because you own yourself.

I can’t help thinking about those kids sweeping the parking lot. It is an odd image of powerful people but think of it this way: those kids had no doubt that they mattered and they were bringing it 100%. When was the last time you were that powerful?

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

170.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

There are 3 foundation principles for all forms of the work that I do as The Circle Project with Patti Digh and in my own work as a coach and artist. I reviewed them again this morning in preparation for our September classes:

1) What you think is what you create. The story you tell yourself about yourself is a creative act – it is not happening to you. What you think is what you see is what you create. We talk a lot in the classes and in coaching relationships about where you choose to place your focus: what you choose to see. A great skill for an artist to develop is the capacity to see beyond what they think. There is more color and possibility in the world than your intellect will allow.

2) You are always in choice. Building upon the first principle is the understanding that you are always in choice. You may or may not have any control over the circumstances in your life but you have ultimate control over how you are within your circumstance. One of my favorite practices is to control your control-ables and let the rest go. Most people try to control what they can’t control (for instance, what other people think) and refuse to control what they CAN control (like what they think).

3) You are not broken; nothing needs to be fixed. It is an unfortunate tendency in our self-help world to treat all behavior as pathology, as if something in you is missing or broken. If you work from the basic assumption that you are broken you will forever seek answers that are outside of you. Assume that you are whole; believe that you are the source of your answers. Assume wholeness and your work will be about learning and expansion. Assume wholeness and you will of necessity have to take full responsibility for your choices.

What you think is what you create. You are always in choice. You are not broken. Can you imagine it?

Filed under: Education, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

137.
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 1984 and I am teaching my first acting class to high school students in a summer theatre program. I am certain that I do not know what I am doing and am more interested in hiding than in confessing my disbelief in myself (I would learn later that great teachers know that they know nothing so there is nothing to hide); I am still under the misguided notion that a teacher should be the answer-man.

I have been preparing for weeks and although I have a degree in acting, although I have just spent a year in an intern program for actors, although I actually have lots of thoughts about what to teach actors, I am still convinced that I know nothing and need to pretend that I know something of value. I have meticulously constructed my first day so that there will be no room for questions (questions are dangerous when you have to be the answer-man). My plan leaves no air for breathing and no chance for uncertainty: control is the driving force and agenda of my plan (education based on the teacher’s needs and not on the student’s needs will always lead to a culture of control).

The students enter the room for the first time and I am immediately thrown out of my plan, knocked off my center, standing naked in barren land of what-do-I-do-now; what I had identified as the beginning point, the zero point, is still too far advanced for my students. Control is no longer the problem; I actually have to begin where they are, not where I assumed they would be – which is to say that I have to start asking questions. I hadn’t considered that their zero was different than my zero. In the first 5 minutes of my first class I was required to say, “I don’t know, let’s find out.” What a gift!

By some divine wisdom I knew enough not to force them down a road of meaninglessness coverage of material based on my need to control their destination. We started where they were. We pursued questions that were relevant for them. We had a blast and everyone learned – especially me.

These are the lessons from my first class – they are life lessons:
• Know nothing.
• You have to be knocked off center to grow.
• You have to be willing to stand in the discomfort; to deny the experience is to protect yourself from learning
• “I don’t know, let’s find out” is the where the juice of life is. It is also the key to great teaching and learning.
• Cultures of control (internal and external) are signs that the essential intention is lost in a jungle of fear. What you are trying to hide is the thing that most needs to be seen.

Pay attention to what you are trying to control; release your grip and you’ll always find the love.

Filed under: Education, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

114.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

In Nebraska this summer we named the institute, The Art of Teaching and Learning, and we meant it. It was not a fancy title, not meant to be clever; it was an intention.

Artistry is not something you do; rather, it is a way of being that is defined by the capacity to step into the unknown. That’s a good definition for learning, isn’t it? Teaching when done well is high art. If you were looking for easy answers and manufactured solutions, this was not the place for you. There was no room for transactional thinking. This institute was about the ferocity of inquiry and jumping into the exuberant uncertainty of transformation. It was a form of art called teaching and learning.

On one of final days we led an experience called The Bridge. It involves a lot of chairs and a clear intention. As this group of teachers supported each other to safely cross the chasm, they transformed into a community. Each member mattered. Their actions mattered. Their focus mattered (all false outcomes and standardized blah-blah went out the window, excellent process and relationship cleared their sight and they remembered why they’d become teachers). There was no win or lose, there was only powerful offers and potent learning. They transcended their circumstance and entered a common narrative (a single intention).

How often do we lose our intention in the tall weeds of our circumstance? A community forms when an intention is pure. There is nothing more powerful than a community with a clear intention. They can’t be derailed by circumstance or politics or experts or status because they are in service to the fulfillment of their community and that is not possible if any single member is left behind. Quality process and a focus on relationship trumps test scores and outcomes.

Transformation is never found in the answer, it is always found in how you engage with your questions. This too is a great definition for learning. Just ask the teachers at the institute that rediscovered their artistry. They are clear about what learning is and what it is not.

Filed under: Education, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

103.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Last week Patti and I had an extraordinary week working with educators. Among the many deep pools we explored together, there is one that is troubling to me: the tendency (or is it a bias) to separate life into compartments. These are just a few of the separations I noted: teachers are taught to think of content as separate from method. They are steeped in a tradition that abstracts learning from application, mind from body, and body from spirit. And spirit from any serious consideration (thus, the arts are neutered).

Why?

This is a rhetorical question. I know.

Here’s the big separation, the one that dismembers the entire western world: the notion that doing is separate from being (of course, this is the epicenter of the belief that content can possibly be distinct from method). Is it any wonder that teachers are beleaguered and students are bored and frustrated? As one teacher so aptly noted, “the students are going around us; we are the impediment.”

We are our own impediments. How could it be otherwise when separation is the organizing principle and expectation? I work with people in a variety of circumstances and most, if not all, believe that they are missing a piece of themselves – or perhaps looking for peace anywhere but within themselves. They are searching for something and in the mean time their lives roll by. They are losing this moment hoping that in some distant moment they will achieve…something; presence, completion, peace, unity (add your word here).

Many years ago my friend Roger told me that somewhere in his middle 30’s he realized that he was no longer becoming someone; he was someone. Patti reminded the educators that children are already complete. They are someone. Yes, they are becoming. Yes, they are already whole. Nothing is missing. Nothing needs fixing, nothing needs adding.

Good words to consider: nothing is missing. Nothing needs fixing. Your “doing” can’t possibly be separate from your “being.” Your content can’t possibly be separate from your method. Those cubicles in your mind are…in your mind. They are infinitely removable.

Filed under: Education, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

101.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

There is a term I learned in the theatre that I have grown to appreciate the more I work with organizations and the education system. The term is, “save-your-ass-theatre” and applies to plays that have weak or no direction so the actors have no choice but to save their asses.

In a well directed play the actors are in service to something greater than themselves: a specific story that is illuminated through the clear actions of the actors. The actors pursue specific intentions; their focus is on the pursuit of the intention (not on the audience, not on how they appear, not on “being liked”). The honesty of the actor’s pursuit is what opens the door for the audience to participate. My favorite definition of acting is, “the honest pursuit of intention in an imaginary circumstance.” The honesty of the pursuit allows the audience entry to the story.

In a play with weak direction, the actors are unclear of their intentions, less clear of their story, and are in service to not looking stupid. Said another way, they are in service to themselves. They are in front of an audience and do not know what they are doing so they do the only thing they can do, the thing we all do in a dangerous situation: they save themselves. They diminish the other actors, they hide, they upstage, they lie. The audience has no access to the play because the actors are not present, so they, too, pretend that something worthwhile is happening.

When an intention is clear, people are generous in their support for each other. They are in service to the same thing and do not get confused in games of power or territory. When an intention is not clear, people default to survival mode and save their asses.

Systems go awry when they no longer serve the purpose for which they were created – or when the purpose for which they were created is no longer relevant. The public schools are a perfect example. The system was created to produce minimum competency for a world 150 years ago. It is an antique. And, because it no longer knows the story it is telling, brilliant, dedicated teachers are being forced into a production of save-your-ass-theatre because we as a nation have confused passing tests with learning. We blame them because we don’t know what to do (proof positive that we, too, are in a production of save-your-ass-theatre). Brilliant, dedicated students are suffering in a production of save-your-ass-theatre because we as a nation have confused answer-regurgitation with ferocious inquiry.

Learning is not testing. Answer-regurgitation is not inquiry. We can clarify this play when we choose to stop pretending that what is happening on our stage is worthwhile, when we stop denying that our Model-T is the machine that can get us there.

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