What Happened?

Posted on May 5, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Today was too beautiful to stay inside. My pals kidnapped me and took me to the beach. We ate chicken salad, looked at the waves roll in and talked of things past. We talked of changes in our lives, particularly the changes in the narrative we tell ourselves. The story of my life in 2013 is drastically different than the story I told in 2003 or in 1993. I have changed and the story I tell about myself has changed with me.

Personal change happens when we change our story, when we change our relationship to the story we claim as our past. Growth is not possible when we hold onto the story as we’ve always named it. Growth happens when we can open our hand and let go of the story that says, “can’t…” or “will never be….” Growth happens when we suspend the judgment and see the choices and opportunities.

Once I metaphorically lit a backfire so I might survive the forest fire that was roaring toward me. At the time I thought my actions were cowardice. Now I see them as wise. I survived.

Once I stood alone and without friends in a new city called Seattle. I had no job and no reason to move there. It was a pretty day in September so I decided to stay. “This is where I am so why not here?” I thought. At the time it seemed so arbitrary and without consideration. Now I see it as destined. It was the right choice at the time. Now I tell myself, “I was supposed to live in this city.”

Memory is a construct. It is a story that changes in the re-membering. It is not fixed in time. It is not truth. It can be contradictory. What once seemed so difficult, so painful, is now a story of potent learning. What once seemed so important is now insignificant. The smallest gesture can leave the greatest mark. The sequence of events is malleable. Memory is untrustworthy. It is unreliable. Memory is fickle. We create our past again and again and again.

We create ourselves again and again and again.

What if the story you tell yourself is neither true nor false? What if it is simply a story with multiple interpretations and you get to choose which version you claim? What would it take for you to open your hand and let go of the old story? What would it take to tell the story of thriving and fulfillment? As Megan recently reminded me, “What would your story be if you assumed the entire universe was conspiring for your good?

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Open The Spigot

Posted on May 4, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

786. 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 hear this a lot: “I’m not very creative.” I learned a long time ago not to contradict that statement. It is provocative to contradict someone’s defenses.

Turning off the spigot of creative energy takes some serious control mechanisms. It is not easy to do. In fact, it is impossible so the control mechanisms are really justifications of “Why I’m not creative.” The justifications generally taste bad so to make them palatable we spin stories. Usually the stories that we spin are intended to make others responsible for how we feel. It is easier to assign blame for the bad taste in our mouth than it is to ask, “Why am I afraid of my creativity?” All of life is essentially creative, so the real question is, “Why am I afraid of living?”

As a reminder of many previous posts, no one can determine what we think or see or feel. That’s our job. We abandoned our center when we assign the responsibility for our feelings to someone else. We abandoned our center when we claim responsibility for how others think or see or feel. Taking responsibility for how others feel or think is essentially an attempt to inhabit a center that is not ours. If you are strangling your creative impulse because of what others might think you are essentially assigning the responsibility for your creative health to another person. That’s how the control mechanism works. “I can’t say it because they might think that I’m…(fill in the blank).” You can’t possibly know what others think. You can’t control what they think. So it is a losing proposition all the way around to snuff your light based on an illusion of control – an illusion that you create to prevent your full expression.

A deep sense of ownership and responsibility live at the center of every person who knows and experiences him or herself as a creative being. Your center is already yours – there is no need to go looking for it. Simply stop giving it away. What you seek is already within your grasp and it is waiting for you in your center. It’s your pure curiosity. It is your wild creativity. If you doubt me, think about this: the illusion/idea that you can control another person’s thoughts and feelings is a creative act. The idea that someone else is controlling your thoughts and feelings is an amazing story creation. Who else but you would whip up such an amazing superpower story and then live according to it?

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Invite Creativity

Posted on May 3, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

To invite creativity it is necessary to first coax curiosity to open the door. I know that is an odd statement. Why would curiosity close and lock the door?

It is impossible for a human being to not be creative. We are in our nature creative. Every moment of our lives we are creating.

However, it is possible a human being to experience him or her self as not creative. Many people above the age of 5 years old define themselves as not creative.

If you have defined yourself as “not creative” it is a good bet that at some point in your life you got slammed for being curious. Your endless stream of questions was not welcome, your scribbling outside of the lines was not appreciated, and opening doors to see what might happen was not convenient. You might have stuck your finger in a light socket and it hurt. Your great capacity to ask “what if…” was curbed. You got into trouble. You put a lock on it.

It is possible to shackle your curiosity. It is possible to bottle your imagination. It is possible to restrict your voice. It is possible to define yourself too small. We are free to reduce ourselves to the lowest common denominator and we do that from the fear of what might happen. “What if…” can cut both ways (note: either way is a process of imagination).

The story goes something like this: curiosity called us out to play and we answered the call! Answering the call exposed us, made us vulnerable, and when we were completely immersed in play and unprotected, singing loud or dancing without bounds, someone laughed at us or criticized us or shook us or told us in front of the whole class that we were no good. BAM! The curiosity door slammed closed. We installed locks and began looking at the world through a peephole.

We develop an overzealous control mechanism to reign in our curiosity and strangle our creative range. We begin this process by dulling our curiosity. We sit still. We color between the lines. We learn to raise our hands if we want to speak. We play a game called “search for the correct answer” and do not ask too many questions. We develop and profound commitment to finding a right way. We make profound control commitments called trying to be perfect. We show up but not too much. We decide we need to know BEFORE we step.

To have the full human experience of wild creativity, curiosity needs an open door. Curiosity needs to run free. Creativity follows. Creativity ensues.

Learning is creativity and creativity is learning. Mastery in any discipline requires unbridled experimentation and play. This is curiosity.

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Open The Door

Posted on May 2, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

…and since I wrote but never published THE OPEN STORY – and am now rediscovering it myself – I will publish it here in bits and dribbles. It begins like this:

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” Plato

Open the door called curiosity and creativity rushes in. Creativity requires no invitation. The door to open is curiosity. For most of us, curiosity has been minimized. Curiosity deals in questions, exploration and discovery. Adults want answers, goals and a plan so we pattern ourselves away from our greatest gift. Curiosity doesn’t have any answers. Curiosity deals in unknowns. The door may still open but the security chain (called, “I need to know”) prevents our creative spark from fully entering. Creativity will come home when we take the locks off the door.

The door is curiosity. The invitation is to creativity.

Here’s a bit of definition from the dictionary:

Curiosity: the desire to know (note: it is a desire, not to act of knowing…)
• Inquisitiveness.
• The tendency to pry.

Creativity: being creative. (What does that mean?)
• Originality (n.)
• Imagination (n.)
• Inspiration (n.)

Are you original? Are you filled with imagination? Do you inspire or are you inspired? The dictionary definition is not very helpful until you flip it. Creativity is not a place of arrival. It is not singular as in “the act of being creative.” Creativity is the action of a creative being. Here’s the inescapable truth and very good news: you are a creative being. You can’t help it and you can’t help it because the most natural impulse central to your being is your desire to know; what happens if…? Ask the question, open the door, and step into the unknown!

Consider these 3 tidbits:
1) You are unique in the universe so originality is not an option; it is a given.
2) It is virtually impossible for you to not imagine. Imagination is what you do. To feel into the future and to re-member the past is to imagine. To interpret your daily experiences is to imagine (interpretation is an act of imagination). It is how you know who you are. In fact, knowing yourself, learning about yourself is your greatest point of curiosity. Imagining yourself is your single greatest creative act.
3) To inspire means, among other things, to breathe in. To breathe is to exchange the stimulus of new life. It is to fill yourself with new energy so you can give new energy. Take a breath and pay attention. This is how you begin to know yourself.

These are not qualities that need to be achieved. These are qualities that come standard with every human being. You are a creative being. Curiosity is your driver. Do you know it? Is that your experience of yourself? Or have you closed the door to your creative identity?

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Lose The Justification

Posted on May 1, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

783. 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’m reviewing some material for a project and pulled up a chapter from the rough draft of my unpublished ebook, The Open Story. I liked this section and although I know it was expanded from a past post, after 782 posts I’m pretending that you will read this with fresh eyes as I did today:

It is my habit to look beneath behavior to the underlying “structures of the land” (from Robert Fritz, behavior like water follows the path of least resistance – behavior will change when you change the structure of the land). I’ve coached hundreds of people: the process of fulfilling potential or expanding thinking almost always entails reaching beyond the realms of visible behavior into the underlying structures.

The other day Ana Noriega, coach extraordinaire, dropped a thought-bomb on me (she always does) that went something like this: if you want to change your belief, change your justification of the belief. It had never occurred to me to think of belief in the same way I’ve come to think of behavior.

I was about to say, “What!?” but she was already filling in the idea – Ana is usually 3 steps ahead of me and said, “Think about it. If you believe you are not worthy or something like that, there is always a justification beneath the belief. You justify the belief. I’m not worthy because….” Beneath every belief there is a justification: there is a reason you hold onto the belief.”

Justification is a form of story. Most of us are attached to our stories – why we can or cannot do something; why the world is this way or that way. Usually our justifications have to do with maintaining comfort – making sure we don’t stray into lands that challenge our beliefs – and that would require a peak into our justifications – it’s a loop.

Take a look at the things you want to change or manifest in your life. What are your beliefs about it? What are you justifying?

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Let It Flow

Posted on April 30, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Skip and I are talking a lot about the motion of ideas and movement of information. Ideas are not fixed. In fact, collapse an idea into form too soon and it dies. Valuation in a market is a dynamic movement. It is not a fixed in time. It is motion driven by a variety of forces. Hanging out with financial folk, I learned that money grows when it moves. Impede the flow, park the money and the growth is stunted.

The same principles apply to relationship. A healthy relationship is distinct in the flow of communication and transparency of feeling. Hide, block, edit, withhold and the relationship suffers. What is the quality of movement in your life?

Many years ago I trained to be a massage therapist and I learned that health in the body’s systems is the result of unimpeded flow: anywhere there is blockage there is disease. Health is movement.

When I began doing organizational work I learned the same lesson: a healthy corporate body is the result of unimpeded flow of communication; where there is blockage there is dis-ease. Power games often take the form of communication disruption. Withholding information is a control game and weakens the organizational body.

When I began working with artists I learned the lesson again: dynamic art in all its forms is the unimpeded flow of expression; where there is blockage there is dis-ease. Kink the garden hose and pressure builds. Block the artery and heart will seize. Stilt the communication and dysfunction and power games erupt.

Inhibit your expression and you become just like the garden hose: pressure builds and the inner life jams.

Vitality in body, mind or spirit is nothing more than unimpeded flow.

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Take Advantage Of The Easy

Posted on April 29, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Images from the past few days:

In the early morning light a young couple dance in the swirling pink blossoms raining from the trees.

A father sits at the base of a slide so his daughter sitting at the top will let go and slide.

A woman is trying to catch a train. She will miss it because she can’t carry her luggage down the escalator. Strangers intervene to help. They carry her luggage. They communicate with the conductor. She catches her train.

The mountain emerged from the mist and stopped commuters cold in their tracks. One muttered, “I’ll never get used to that.” Another muttered, “Me, too.”

A man enters a coffee house and the barista knows what he wants before he orders. The man does not take it for granted. He tells the barista, “No one takes the time to pay attention to me. Thank you.” The barista’s eyes tear up.

Carol told me that kindness is easy. It is easy to be kind. It is easy to transform the day of another. It is easy to offer your small gift to this big world. It is easy to enjoy the moment. It is easy to see the wonder. It’s easy if you pay attention. It’s easy if you open yourself to see it. The opportunities are all around us. It’s easy and it matters.

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Begin With A Charge

Posted on April 28, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Given my post yesterday I laughed out loud this morning when Saul-The-Chi-Lantern started talking about the cult of exhaustion that is sweeping the nation. He said, “Have you noticed how many people start their morning by saying, ‘I’m exhausted?’ Why would someone choose to start their day exhausted?”

Now, isn’t that a world-class question? The choice of exhaustion comes to those who believe they have no choice. After Megan hammered my thick noggin yesterday, I’ve been looking at my choices.

Saul led us through a section of the form before picking up the thought. “People talk of tai chi as some kind of cult but given the choice of starting your day with a vital charge or starting your day exhausted, why wouldn’t you choose to begin each day with a vital charge?” He laughed and continued, “I want to get things done when I get up in the morning. A vital charge is useful. I guess I belong to the cult of people who desire to feel good.”

A month ago I was in Holland with an international group of coaches. They were talking about their health care and the number of weeks of paid vacation they get every year. One of the participants asked me why Americans were dedicated to working so hard. Essentially her question was about why we are so dedicated to exhausting ourselves. Balance is not high on our priority list. Scratch the paint and look beneath her question and find a deeper inquiry: she wanted to know how I explained the gap between our identity as free people and our national dedication to servitude. We work for health care. We work more hours by far with less time off. We seem okay with the every increasing gap between the haves and have-nots. Sequestration is the best we can do because the other options would require us to take a look at the gap and its drivers. I had no answer. Denial didn’t seem satisfactory. I didn’t want to say, “We think we have no choice.”

And then I flew home and promptly exhausted myself. The universe has never been subtle with me when I need to pay attention to something. Saul’s question followed Megan’s admonition. Stillness, listening, and choice.

Saul returned to the practice saying, “Exhaustion makes no sense to me especially if I can avoid it.”

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Eat For Stillness

Posted on April 27, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

779. 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 am exhausted today. I spurned all work and cleaned the studio. I prepared canvases. I stayed away from sharp objects and power tools. I made sure not to cross the street until I looked three times. During days of exhaustion, personal safety is the best I can do.

During my cleaning frenzy I cleared space in the studio. I made space. I created space. I needed space and that meant that things had to go. I made a rule that if I hadn’t touched the book or the tool for a year, I had to get rid of it. I got rid of a lot of stuff! Had you walked by my studio today and mentioned that you liked a painting, it would have gone home with you. I’d have given you two paintings because the spaciousness – the feeling of space – was energizing in my exhaustion.

This evening, Megan shook her finger at me for not taking good care of myself. Yesterday I forgot to eat. It happens when I get focused and busy. It won’t surprise you to learn that lack of food and exhaustion are connected. Making space and eating are both great remedies for my low energy. Megan read to me a passage from a book. The passage was about listening. According to the book listening is about stillness. Inner chatter disrupts listening. Her message was about taking care of myself inside and out. I am not listening to what I need. I am not listening to what my body is telling me. She was prompting me to return to my practice of stillness with a reminder that stillness inside is impossible if I am not caring for myself outside, not eating well, not resting appropriately.

Now that I’ve created spaciousness I intend to regain my stillness. To that end, I’m going in search of some very big, very hot, very yummy food.

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

If Not Now, When?

Posted on April 26, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

778. 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 sent me a text this morning. She is attending a state teachers conference. Her text said: I’m in a conference where the keynote lecture is on the importance of creativity. Novel, huh? How many times will we say this before we do something about it?

It’s a great question: How many times will we say this before we do something about it? It’s a question that generations of educators have been asking. Literally. Generations. How many times will we say this before we do something about it? Later in a phone conversations she said, “If I hear another person state the obvious I’m going to puke.” She also said, “I’ve had it.”

I’ve heard that a lot lately. The amazing educators, the fire starters, are taking their fire elsewhere. When survival is the best a teacher can do, when thriving is out of reach and dowsing fire is the aim of the system, the choice is to be dowsed or to go make creative fire where fire is welcomed. Think of this: teachers can leave in disgust but students have no choice but to be dowsed. And make no mistake, their fire is being dowsed. And, as levels of absurdity stack upon levels of absurdity, listen to the overriding complaint of businesses about new hires: where’s the self-direction? Where’s the critical thinking and capacity to innovate? Why aren’t we preparing our students for the world of work? Answer: Because we are dowsing their fire with buckets of wet tests to feed metrics that tell us nothing usable. We are patterning them to complacency.

Fire is dangerous to test makers. Educational fire is anathema when answer regurgitation is the goal.

The disjoint between what we know and what we do is vast. It is a farce. If you doubt what I’m asserting, think how ludicrous (sad) it is for a keynote speaker in the 21st century to address educators on the importance of creativity. The speech is only necessary in an arena that has stripped creativity from the system.

After the call with Megan I remembered my recent conversation with Robert. His son is just starting school and he was appalled by what his son’s teachers are being forced to do. He said, “There’s no room for creativity. I’m not talking about art or music – I’m talking about any form of creativity. It’s a wasteland.”

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