The Direction of Intention

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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 Mark wrote a comment about my recent post on Zero. His thoughts and question made the top of my head blow off. Everything from the eyebrows up is gone. I have substantial eyebrows (from my father’s side of the genetic pond) so I will attempt an eyebrow comb-over to cover the crater that used to be my cranium. If heads were volcanoes I’d be Mt St. Helens. I may need to invest in hats.

In my post about being at Zero I wrote, “As choices go, Zero can be utter stillness, the wasteland, lost in the woods, a score on a math test, or the moment before the big bang. It most certainly is a state of mind.”

This is Mark’s comment:

“If the Big Bang occurs at the very moment that the universe knows all that is knowable, and the subsequent explosion forcibly disperses that knowledge in the formation of the rapidly expanding new universe, that next infinitesimal moment represents one unit of knowledge gained. Therefore, the journey has begun whether or not you know it. You’ve passed through zero already. What do you learn next?”

Sitting in front of the Fremont Library on a sunny spring afternoon I mentioned to Scott that I was at Zero and he hit me between the eyes with poem by Hafiz. I wrote about being hit by Zero and Hafiz and Mark shot from the hip unloading both barrels of E.O. Wilson at point-blank range. I’m not sure what I learn next but this is what I just learned: 1) Zero is provocative! 2) I have amazing people in my life, and 3) my new dish shaped head is great for carrying a full half pound bag of peanut M&M’s; I’m never far from a tasty treat.

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370.
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 those wonderful rare weeks that the dials of my mind turn a notch or two, the penny drops, the door of the safe opens, the apple hits my head, and something that I have been wrangling with for years becomes crystal clear. I always know the insight is worthy if it seems too simple. As I learned in school and experience in life, a complexity is never changed with another complexity; systems always change through local simplicities. I am living in one of those zones. The apples are raining on me everyday. Over the weekend I saw with absolute clarity how to create structures within organizations so that they might function as fluid, dynamic, self-organizing systems: systems for our times and not the 1860’s. It’s so simple! And, of course, it requires the creation of power-with-others – no managers necessary.

I learn something new everyday and ironically most of my new learning comes from those that I teach or coach. Today, another penny was dropped on my noggin by a brilliant class and this time it wasn’t a revelation about something new, it was an explanation of something old, a piece of a puzzle that I didn’t even know was missing. Here’s the reader’s digest version (or for those of you under 40, the blog version):

Master coach, teacher and author, Alan Seale, developed a simple but profound model he calls The Four Levels of Engagement. This model is extraordinarily useful for personal and/or organizational change – it’s the same thing.

According to the model we plug into life, into our conversations, into our thoughts at one of these 4 levels:
1) Drama – (to blame)
2) Situation – (to fix or to solve – to try to contain a complexity)
3) Choice
4) Opportunity

The rule is to get the third level as fast as possible: learn that you are always in choice. Always. Our actions will reflect which level we inhabit. Most of us run our lives from levels 1 & 2: driven by circumstance, reactive, blaming, problem solving, defending and justifying. If you doubt me, listen to yourself for 24 hours or pay attention to the conversations happening around you for a day; most will be blame stories, a few will be tales of fixing problems, occasionally you’ll hear someone in choice.

Here’s the apple that hit my head today: when teaching the 4 Levels most people will report that Choice and Opportunity feel powerful, but Drama and Situation are more comfortable. I’ve always explained to myself that Choice and Opportunity require personal power and responsibility: when you recognize that you are in choice every minute of every day you of necessity must own your choices – and it feels good to be powerful but not always comfortable. But, that’s only part of the picture –and this is what occurred to me: Drama provides an illusion. We go into drama when we are feeling powerless; blaming (Drama) provides the illusion of control/power. That’s where the comfort comes from: the illusion of power to soothe feelings of powerlessness. The same is true for the Situation: when you don’t know what to do, fix something. We enter fix-it mode when we feel helpless; the illusion of competence is most comfortable in the face of helplessness. This is the business world’s Achilles Heel. In the face of complexity (so we don’t know what to do), we reduce everything to a problem and pretend it can be solved, tested and fixed. Voila! Competence.

Living in choice is not always comfortable. Moving into power often requires releasing the security blanket of knowing. Growth, in all its forms is a step into not-knowing and that can be many things but rarely is it comfortable.

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327.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Sometimes I think all of life is a set-up for a joke or it is the punch line (wow, I just noticed for the first time in my life the language around jokes: set-up to be punched). This day had all the characteristics of a good set-up. Lora’s health has been in a down cycle and she is struggling – there is nothing I can do and it is hard to watch her struggle. She had a procedure very early this morning that she somehow navigated through extreme fatigue, a migraine headache and the incapacity to keep food or water in her system. I was supposed to be co-teaching a teleclass at the same time I needed to take her to the procedure so I listened in to the class, tried to participate, but my earpiece died (the universe is regularly telling me to do one thing at a time and it’s method is to disable my technology). I got Lora home and back in bed and then had to run to do some errands to get information together for a special IRS audit for which I’ve been selected – I received the congratulations letter a few days ago. The letter read like I hit the lotto. “Congratulations!” it exclaimed. “Oh, hell!” I replied as my lotto winning assumptions morphed into visions of incarceration. Talk about a set-up!

Needless to say, as I returned with my envelope of secret documents, receipts and other IRS necessities, I was having a serious discussion with myself about karma and past life transgression. “I must have really been awful,” I mused. The day was too pretty for me to invest in self-pity so I stopped the car and took a walk by the water. The truth beneath the circumstance is that I love life. I love being alive in my life. That was not always the case but more and more it’s true for me. I thought about how much of my morning would be good fodder for a misery tale if that were the story I chose to tell. It’s just as possible to be a story of generosity. The medical folks at the clinic treated Lora like she was the most important patient in the world. I never doubted for a moment that Alan, my co-teaching partner, wouldn’t cover the class; he is the spirit of generosity. I have an accountant who threw herself in front of the IRS train on my behalf the moment she knew it was coming. These experiences are rich and colorful and I can story them any way I choose.

Here’s the punch line: As I walked up the stairs to my apartment I thought, “There’s always a gift,” and as I turned the corner I saw, propped against my door, a package, a flat rate box from the postal service, if it fits it ships. And it did (fit and shipped)! And what fit in the box and shipped to me was an abundance of treats from Megan – a just-because gift. I sat in the hall in front of my apartment and laughed like a kid at Christmas as I pulled coffee and music and chocolate and amazing scarves for warmth out of the box. This box will make Lora’s day. It made mine. Timing is everything in a good joke and the same is true with a good gift. This gift packed a huge punch. And I can’t wait to pay it forward.

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297.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Sometimes the smallest pebble unleashes an enormous avalanche. This morning I decided on a whim to clean out a computer file; a small gesture to begin the new year with one less file. Soon entire folders were disappearing, years of accumulated blather whisked onto thumb drive (a little e-mausoleum). Before I knew it I was possessed and found myself cleaning out filing cabinets, storage boxes and drawers. I hovered above my body and watched myself organize 2011 receipts and bank statements (I wondered if I was actually possessed by David Miller, artist extraordinaire, one of my heroes, and the only person I’ve ever know who loves to prepare his own taxes). I prepared numbers for my accountant, paid bills that didn’t need paying, and set up new files for 2012. “What’s happening to me, “ I thought as I cackled and sequenced bank statements.

I came back to consciousness when the sun went down. I was staring at my closet suppressing the impulse to take all of my clothes to Value Village when I realized it was dark and the day was past. I was a bit disappointed realizing that, instead of being a vampire coming to life at sunset, a shape shifter with eternal life, I had become an obsessive-compulsive office assistant by the light of day. And, although I might have wanted a more dramatic story, I couldn’t be more surprised at my actions today. The sun down saved me – can you imagine the clothes I’d have found in my closet if I’d let my new persona do the shopping?

Day one of 2012 was a festival of clearing. It was a feast of reorganization. It was more than a step toward discomfort – it was a mad sprint toward things I generally avoid. It was astonishing and playful and fun. And it bodes well for an amazing year of wonderment

What I learned today: I can have a good time doing anything. And, I think I will choose to have a good time doing anything all year. What will you choose?

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