The Direction of Intention

326.
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 I was a little kid in the neighborhood where I grew up, there were no fences between houses. My parents looked after all the neighborhood kids and the other parents looked after me. Our backyards formed a wide-open field for play ringed by modest brick houses. For a time, the world I grew up in felt safe. And welcome.

Many of the moms at home during the day (the moms that worked at night) watched soap operas. I remember sitting in front of a black and white television set, the kind with a rabbit ear antennae, eating a Twinkie and watching the high drama. And it was high DRAMA with a capital “D!” Wicked betrayal and character assassination in every episode, lot’s of hospitals and people miraculously coming back from certain death. Doctors with a swagger, desperate socialites, pretty men and beautiful women each trying to survive in a cutthroat world spinning out of control. I knew even as a kid that this was humanity reduced to its lowest common denominator – and it was a religion to the neighborhood moms. To miss an episode was tragic. The gossip swirling around the characters had the same weight as the gossip swirling around the people living on the next block.

It occurred to me that I watch the news of the day much as the moms of my childhood watched the soaps. I don’t really believe in the reality of it yet I watch it none-the-less; it is heightened for me-the-viewer to create maximum effect. Last week I counted how many times in a half hour newscast that a story was introduced as “Breaking News!” – complete with graphics and whooshing sound effects: seven times in fifteen minutes (the time before the weather report). Breaking News! “This just in: A house almost burned down in Capitol Hill!” Almost. The image on the screen is a house on Capitol Hill, a very serious reporter standing in front of the house pointing to the spot where the fire did not happen. The organ music swells as the Doctor swaggers in just in time to stop The Lover from injecting a bubble into the heart of his sedated paramour. I take another bite of Twinkie, wipe the crumbs from my mouth and think, “I’m glad nothing happened.”

As I pay attention to the presidential election this time around I find myself yearning for the time when the characters where contained within the pretend world of the soaps and not attempting to be the most powerful person in the free world. If you wonder why our children bully each other on the playground, why there is diminishing respect for each other, take a gander at how we behave in our public forums – how we tell the story of ascension to power, the story of how adults are supposed to treat each other. Breaking News! We put up fences. The neighbors stopped talking. These are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

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299.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

We had a great conversation in class today. Alan and I co-facilitated a discussion about one of the Hermetic Laws, Correspondence, (As within, so without. As above, so below), and how the principle relates to coaching and personal responsibility. Correspondence is, in Alan’s words, about “communicating with…,” it is, to use again my metaphor from yesterday, about the dance of giving and receiving, distinction and oneness as paradox: two ways of experiencing yourself. In Correspondence, there is no separation; you impact everything, everything impacts you. In this sense, you create everything and everything creates you.

It is a powerful shift of perception when you cease thinking of yourself as a bystander and realize that you are a participant. Even as an observer, no matter how passive you believe yourself to be, you are changing the equation; you are in relationship – or to be more specific: you are a relationship. Your choice is about how you want to participate.

Plenty of us stare into our television sets and complain about the state of the world; we believe we are too little to have an impact. Others march and protest. Others go to work everyday, everyday, everyday. Some of us raise children, some of us write poetry, sing or dance. Some of us run for office, govern, practice law, practice medicine, play basketball and some of us vote. We commute, we bank, we purchase, we consume, we worship, we produce, we rest, and none of it happens in a vacuum. We commune. We commune globally (warning, here comes a mini-rant: the economy has been global since Marco Polo. Those spices in your spice rack didn’t come from Kansas. Chances are that grandma’s fine china was not made in the continental United States. Innovation has always happened at the cultural crossroads and the United States is nothing if not humanities first intentional crossroad. Movements to “bring jobs back to America” or to “buy American” are fundamentally unclear on the concept or locked into an old world notion. Functionally, there is no “us and them:” that thinking is born of fear and a desire to have power-over. That’s why the recognition of Correspondence is so potent: there is no separation, there is only what we create together. Change always moves from the inside out and that goes for nations as well as individuals).

As one of our class members said, “You can ask yourself a rhetorical question, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ This question will provide the illusion that you have no responsibility. Or you can ask yourself a very different question. The second question looks very much like the first but is fundamentally different. As an active participant in life, as a creator, ask with curiosity, ‘Why is this happening?” It all depends upon how you choose to participate.

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243.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Mark works for a government organization and he told me of a great revelation he had a few years ago. For the first 14 years of his career he got into a lot of trouble. He couldn’t figure out why he was in so much trouble all of the time because he was performing his job to the best of his abilities. And then, one day in the shower the reason hit him like a thunderbolt: his superiors didn’t really want him (or anyone, it wasn’t personal) to do the job. They didn’t want anyone to improve things because, as Mark so beautifully said, “Improvement makes waves.” He did an experiment and stopped doing his job and almost immediately his approval ratings began to rise.

Years ago I had a conversation with a banker, a vice president. I was doing work in system’s change and he told me that if I worked in his department he’d have to fire me. He said, “My job is to keep the status quo. The people that work for me want to come to work and go home with a paycheck. They don’t want change – even if it actually made things better. They want consistency.” I challenged his position. I haven’t met very many people (outside of management) who desire routine over effectiveness. And, his big misperception from my point of view is that change lives in opposition to consistency. In today’s world of business, the only consistency is change.

Recently I heard a speech by the outgoing Washington State Auditor. He’s been around for 20 years and told us that he can’t audit the departments of state government unless they request it; he’s the auditor but he can’t audit anything that will reveal waste and corruption unless the wasters and corrupters request it. You can guess how many requests he’s received in career.

Do you see the pattern? This is thinking of a time-gone-by. Compartmentalization and control are dinosaurs in a digital age. The only thing consistent in our world is change and the pace of change increases every year. Compartmentalization and control are power killers; an expansive economy requires expansive thinkers who know how to engage with multiple possibilities. The folks in the executive suite need to learn a new pattern of empowerment and fluid motion. We have a job to do and pretending that we’re doing it is flushing a ton of potential, time, energy and creative ability down the tubes.

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227.
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 morning I read an article in National Geographic magazine about the last reindeer herders in Scandinavia. I found myself yearning for the simplicity of that kind of life. I’m not romanticizing the difficulties. Theirs is a hard life and it is likely a community about to disappear into contemporary society. What I am aware of and yearning for is a community with a clear central focus that knows each member is necessary – it requires the best from everyone if the community is to survive and thrive. And each member of the community knows their value to the greater whole. Their rituals are meaningful, their narrative intact. To betray the community is to betray your self – it is unthinkable.

Last night I watched the documentary film, Inside Job that tracks the decisions and events that made our 2008 economic suicide possible. It is basically the story of how the largest financial institutions in America knowingly sold worthless products to the world in order to realize obscene profits – all with the collusion of the government and the agencies tasked with regulating them. When their ponzi scheme failed it took down the world economy, 30 million people worldwide lost their jobs, more lost their retirements, and savings,… and the bankers and government officials at the center of it all profited mightily. To betray the community was rewarded. To betray the community was profitable.

I found myself wondering what the reindeer herders in Scandinavia would do to a member of its community that so violently betrayed the trust and ruined the health of so many of its members. What must a community do when their rituals are violated and their narrative assaulted? We did nothing.

What does a community do when their rituals have no substance and their narrative is hollow?

The juxtaposition between these two stories about community reminded me why I started this exploration of power – and not power over other; power with. I wrote it yesterday but it is present for me again today, these power-over stories and structures are old, old, old, and they threaten our very survival. We live in the age of power-with (it’s called a global community for a reason), no single member’s actions are separate or distinct; if one member falters we all falter. Just ask your local financial services representative (I use that term loosely) what will happen to markets in America if Greece’s economy falls. No need to ask the Greeks what will happen to their economy if a few American bankers drive the USA’s economy over the cliff – they already know. There is no such thing as “us and them” in our times. It is a world of “we” and truly powerful people know that in their bones.

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226.
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 remember leaving the meeting with the school superintendent and being utterly baffled. The district hired me to create art projects in their schools and to inspire and promote experiential learning processes. Apparently, the art projects were becoming too powerful. The experiential learning was uncontrollable. The teachers, students, and parents were debating issues and engaging in meaningful conversations about big ideas, conversations that had no easy answer and required wading neck deep into deeper questions, they’d started digging into issues and challenging superficial responses, in short, they were thinking critically. They were on voyages of discovery and resisting attempts to contain their exploration. They were having fun. The board, through the superintendent, asked me to stop it. They wanted something more tame – the art was meant to be a distraction, an entertainment. It was the first time I truly understood the purpose of the public schools and the revelation was as disorienting as it was breathtaking.

I wrote a letter as part of my resignation explaining the purpose of the arts to the board and to the superintendent: it is through the arts that a community identifies itself (asks, “who are we?”) and engages with the deeper questions (asks, “why are we here?”) and has the capacity to re-imagine itself over time (asks, “what is ours to do?”). A community that reduces its art (and its expectation of education) to entertainment is a community on life support; it is already dead.

I wrote that letter 20 years ago and remembered it today as, more and more, I recognize the work of truly powerful people is to be the agents of retiring the old and make space for the new. The time for life-support is done. We have too many inert old world systems that we pump energy and resources into even though we know the patient is long dead. For instance, it is almost 2012; continuing to entertain the rhetorical blather that testing has anything to do with improving the quality of learning is to support the ill-intended purpose of education as taught to me by the board and the superintendent so many years ago. We’d get more for bang for our buck if we gave teachers bathroom breaks, time to eat lunch everyday, and the capacity to teach (as opposed to feed the insatiable needs of the test).

Or perhaps we should continue to focus on the short-term market gains and losses as the meter for how well we are doing in the world? How well are you doing? Who is explaining the market to you? Is the purpose of the market the same as the purpose of your life on this planet? How might you otherwise meter the worth of your time here? How might we as a nation set a more worthy intention?

Maybe we should continue to protect all the institutions that are “too big to fail” at the expense of the real health of the community; isn’t that the equivalent of saying, “The tumor is too big to remove so we will do nothing and hope that it takes care of itself.” It won’t. The heart continues to beat although the brain is clearly dead.

It is old, old, old, old thinking.

We live in the age of the internet. Bigger is not better. Connectivity and relationship rule the day and our systems and our expectations are decades behind. Better questions to ask in every sector, for a start, might be, “What are we doing?” Followed hard upon with a hearty, healthy series of the question, “Why?”

As Alan said after he returned from his recent teaching trip to Europe, our work as artists and coaches and teachers and leaders is to roll the old paradigm into hospice and become the midwife for the new.

Empowered people empower others when they look at the clearly naked emperor and cease to pretend that they see clothes.

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200.
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 few years ago Duncan sent me an article about Nature Deficit Disorder – children who are deprived of nature. I rolled my eyes. I don’t have kids and I grew up running through the mountains, playing in the streams, riding my bike off of cliffs, throwing mud, looking at stars and sneezing in the spring (I had terrible allergies). I was wary about the article because it seems to me we have a cultural predisposition to see pathology everywhere. “Where are the parents,” I thought. “Go outside and play!”

And then…. I’m now convinced that we are so used to the reproduction that we rarely recognize the authentic. Our environments are constructed, our realities artificial. I’m now collecting phrases overheard in public spaces, things like “Those stars look just like the ones in the planetarium!” Or, “Those frogs sound just like a soundtrack!” I delight in the term “reality TV;” do an experiment: point a camera at someone and note the face they put on (note how you change when a lens is focused on you). The island is constructed, the race is scripted; there is a cameraman behind that camera so that intensely private moment you think you are watching is…a performance.

It is less a disorder than how we construct order. Distraction. Comfort. Disconnection from nature (unless used as a playground) is an intention. These are our priorities. Nature is messy and there are bugs. It is not an accident that the soundtrack is more recognizable than the frogs. And the frogs – the real ones – are disappearing (a phenomena known as “mystery declines”). From what I understand, a frog’s skin is porous and absorbs water so it is especially susceptible to pollutants in the environment (hmmmmm). Some researchers say that disappearing frog populations are an early warning signal of ecosystems in trouble.

Isn’t this yet another case of label-libel (the label absolves us from further thought). Place side-by-side the terms, “Nature Deficit Disorder,” “mystery declines,” and “Ecosystems in trouble” and ask yourself, is this really a mystery? Are these labels particularly sanitary and devoid of personal relevance?

Perhaps an early warning signal that we are in trouble is that the stars look just like the ones in the planetarium. The next time you wonder what life is all about, go outside, find someplace that you consider to be nature and sit for a spell. Take your shoes off. Get dirty. Feel the rain. Swat the fly. Imagine that you are a participant, part of it all.

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179.
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 takes a western mind to look upon nature and see a hierarchy: simple cells progressing up a ladder to more complex plants and critters – and isn’t it convenient that humans occupy the top of the pyramid! We gave everything its name so we get to determine its fate, or so the story goes. When you draw the pyramid you generally reserve the top spot for yourself.

Bending nature to our will, breaking her on the wheel of our superior plan, is a play that has had a long and violent run but the scenery is now tired and the lead actors are way too old for their roles – not to mention that the story is outdated and less and less relevant.
Scrambling to be on top (pretending to be on top) is likely killing us. It breeds fundamentalism (the dedication to being absolutely right, the insistence of occupying the top spot while maintaining an enthusiastic devotion to the role of “the persecuted,” the warm blanket and sharp sword of insisting that your god is THE god, your way is THE way and there is nothing left to do but fight,….); evidently there is a lot of division and disagreement in the top spot on the pyramid, a pyramid within a pyramid you might say.

Manifest destiny and survival of the fittest are great ideas if you occupy the top spot, not so much if you are a wrung or two down the ladder.

There are other stories available to us. When ecosystems break down, when any system breaks down, those believing they occupy the top spot are generally the last to know, not because there was no warning or lack of evidence, but because denial is one of the most potent human characteristics. Many kings and queens sat on their thrones insisting they were superior even to the moment that the usurper took off their head. Many kings and queens have sat on their thrones insisting that the ends justified the means as long as the ends they justified kept them securely on the throne.

There are other stories available to us. If we can draw a pyramid and call it reality, we are certainly capable of drawing something else.

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