The Direction of Intention

Take Off Your Container

Posted on July 16, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

For weeks I have been meditating on containment. Specifically, how I contain, limit, confine, stifle or otherwise inhibit my spirit. I want to be free. It is funny to me since this is the very thing I teach. It is the center of almost every coaching relationship (personal and organizational), it defines the work that I have done with artists and leaders and entrepreneurs. And here I am, taking a good long look at my self, laughing at what I’ve discovered. I am glued into a tight container.

The good news is that I am surrounded by angels and people who see through wise-eyes; many do not know they are helping me step outside of my tight container; some know and are giggling with me: teacher teach thyself.

The route out of the container is actually a path into my body. In another life my acting teachers would have called this rooting myself. Yoga instructors would call it grounding. Saul-the-Tai-Chi-Lantern would call it, “receiving the benefit.” In any case, I am compelled to let go, to run in meadows, to play hard and fall down laughing. Ian, my twin, re-introduced me to the necessity of free play. Catherine said my emergence from the river after my game of chase with my twin was a kind of resurrection. It certainly felt that way; coming back to life. As a rocket thrusts into the earth to reach into the sky, so must I.

Alan listened to me talk about what I was experiencing and said, “Oh, man. You made people uncomfortable before, I can’t wait to see what you start doing with groups when you work with them.” We laughed because it had not occurred to me that by stepping into and fully embodying my life, that I might have a wee bit more fervor when calling people into a circle of transformation.

I’ve never been comfortable wearing a tie (containment); don’t ask me to wear dress shoes (suffocation), it’s hard for me to button the sleeves on dress shirts (constraint), I was a miserable wretch sitting in a desk (or behind a desk), I do my best thinking when walking or running or biking, if you work with me you will move, explore, experiment, bump into others, and communicate without language (so your will use your body). I suppose it is relative. I am more in my body and aware of my need to live beyond the boxes than many people, and apparently not as aware as I thought I was.

When Alan and I were done laughing, he asked a world-class question: “We need containers to get stuff done (limits orient us) yet how can we know what the optimal container is until we know what it is to live without a container?”

I guess I am about to find out.

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

Lose Your Balance

Posted on July 15, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

493. 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 the language of story, the story begins when the main character is knocked off balance. Stories are about transformation and transformation cannot happen in stasis. Losing balance creates motion so the story can begin.

You are the main character of your story and the rule applies to you, too: loss of balance is necessary for change. Although when knocked off balance our first impulse is to hold on to the known, which is a necessary impulse, an important action, yet ultimately you have to surrender to the new reality. You have to surrender to the unknown. Paradox warning: The new reality comes with the clarity that you do not know what to do. Admitting that you don’t know is a necessary and vital part of learning; it is a key to transformation.

We resist the new circumstance (being off balance) by treating it as if it was the old circumstance. We pretend that nothing is happening. This, of course, is an attempt to reassert balance and to make sense of what we don’t understand. Trying to regain balance is a good strategy for increasing discomfort and creating further imbalance: more heat, higher stakes, more motion. It is a form of creative tension.

This dance of holding on to the known in the face of the unknown splits us; it comes laden with contradictions. You love and hate your spouse. You fear and anticipate the move. It is a complexity: there is no black and white, no simple and easy answers. The point is to dissolve, to lose your orientation, to have nothing solid to grasp. The absence of stability facilitates the surrender: with nothing to hold on to, a step into the unknown is the only possible step; letting go becomes necessary; the only way out is into the void.

And it is in that moment, the moment of stepping into the unknown that the task or the journey seems insurmountable. That is necessary, too. If you knew you could survive, the journey would not be worth taking. When the only way to regain balance leads through the insurmountable, the story, your life, suddenly becomes worth telling.

Filed under: Awakening, Story, Transcendence, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: balance | 1 Comment »

Catch A Thought-Bobber!

Posted on July 14, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

492. 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 have lately been thinking a lot about learning. Something has been niggling at the back of my mind and today during my morning walk it bobbed to the top of my consciousness. These thought-bobbers are the reason I take morning walks; insight evades me when I sit at a desk. When I move physically, my thoughts move; my perspective changes and those little thoughts lurking near the bottom of my consciousness ocean catch some air bubbles and shoot to the surface.

The thought that bobbed to the top was leveraged by a question someone recently asked me about me ebooks. They asked, “What is your hope for your books? What do you hope they bring to people?” My first thought was, “I hope they sell a lot!” My answer was blah, blah, blah, save the world, open perspectives for people, etc., but it was a good question and started tickling my mind. My focus was on the ebooks, on the material as if they might actually do something for someone, not on the person reading the book.

Here’s how the thought bobber popped up. It was simple and complete: The idea is to open the person, not illuminate material. My hope is that the material helps people open. Isn’t that elegant? And, isn’t it where we so often lose our way? We think learning is about the content, the delivery of the content, and the reception of the content. Learning is not about the content. Learning is about the learner. And, what about the learner?

In my work, when all the context and content is boiled away, whether workshops, retreats, coaching, business consulting,…when it is stripped of it’s circumstance are all processes that reinforce self-discovery. Isn’t that also true of math, science, English, and all of the other topics we think we are “delivering?”

There is a profound shift that happens when, 1) someone begins to see that they make the meaning of their life, that meaning is not something they find. And, 2) they are capable of seeing/reading their life metaphorically – which simply means the great stories become personally relevant. Imagine if history was taught with the intention to open the learner to a greater purpose: to discover in themselves the universal story cycle and pass along what they discover in their unique history to their descendants, just as their ancestors tried to do for them. They become a link in the story chain. They become connected through time.

Filed under: Education, Story, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: learning, meaning | 1 Comment »

Learn To Learn

Posted on July 13, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Dr. Alan shared his notes from a lecture on education given by Daphne Koller, professor of computer science at Stanford University. This phrase jumped out at me:

Testing is a learning tool, not just an assessment tool.

Such a small phrase to be sure but it is loaded with sanity in a world of education that has lost its mind, its bearings, and its purpose in a cesspool of testing. This single note gives me hope. It is a small cry from academia to stop the madness.

It sounds so simple: testing is a learning tool. Yes, testing is a tool in service to learning. However, learning should never be in service to testing and yet that is what we’ve created; listen to the national mantra: how do we raise our scores? We’re not asking how do we open minds or how do we support critical thinking or how do we create a citizenry capable of participating in its governance; we want test scores that somehow translate into business acumen. Could the bar be set any lower?

People do nonsensical things when they are panicked and I can only make sense of our Obsessive Compulsive Testing Disorder through a lens of panicked, lost, people. The aim (learning) is in service to the tool (assessment); the tail is wagging the dog and the dog is in hysterics.

Learning has nothing whatsoever to do with testing. Learning has everything to do with experience, with exploration, with “seeing what’s over there.” Learning is about opening a heart and mind to possibility, the pursuit of curiosity. Learning is to take off the shackles and the blinders; it is to, at its best about self-discovery.

It sounds so simple.

Occasionally we need to stop and assess where we are. It’s a good idea when on a journey to pause periodically and get your bearings. Locating yourself is useful (getting lost is also useful though that is a topic for another post). Testing a hypothesis is what science is all about, a contemporary form of call and response. However, the point of the journey is not the assessment; the point of the journey is discovery; the quality and level of engagement with life. Reinforce discovery and a test is useful. Reinforce testing and discovery withers. Compulsive assessment is a sign of fear, starvation, and madness.

Dr. Alan’s notes gave me hope. Perhaps we are nearing the point when we are in too much pain to continue pretending that we can test our way into learning. Maybe an education system designed for the 21st century is closer than we think.

Filed under: Education | Tagged: learning | Leave a comment »

Stop The Bus

Posted on July 12, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

The dog came from nowhere. It bolted out into the street and the bus needed to brake hard not to hit it. At first, the bus driver thought it was my dog and gave me a sour look. Through sign language she asked, “Yours?” and I signed, “No.” She made a sign that at first I didn’t understand – her hands went to her throat and it looked like she was strangling herself. She read my puzzled face and mouthed slowly, “Check. The. Tag.”

By now the dog was 100 feet away. It was trotting down the street looking at the odd gestures the humans were making. I could see it was waiting for the chase. I took one step toward the dog and it ran. I stopped and it stopped. The bus driver watched and waited. I took another step toward the dog and it sprinted farther up the street.

The bus driver looked at me in disdain, drove the bus to the next block, and pulled over. I do not know what she said to her busload of passengers – or if she told them why she was getting off the bus. She put on her emergency flashers, turned off the engine, and jumped out. Now the dog was between us. We both assumed goalie position while the dog, ecstatic at its good fortune, turned a complete circle, feigned a move toward the street, making both me and the driver jump, and then sprinted up a driveway and disappeared through a fence.

The bus driver called to me, “Did you see the tag?” She was serious. The dog was never closer than 100 feet to me. I loved her question, the absurdity born from concern, so I replied, “My eyes aren’t that good.” She wrinkled her brow, caught my meaning and tossed her hands in the air, a gesture of disgust and surrender. She turned, stomped back onto the bus and drove away.

I wondered what her story would be as she recounted the experience later in the bus barn. Was it a tale of the inept near blind pedestrian dog chaser? Or perhaps she recounted the drama of almost hitting a dog and attempting a rescue? My story was hopeful. A bus driver with a bus full of commuters stopped her route for a few moments to corral a wayward dog. For a moment she took responsibility for the safety of the pooch. She was gruff, lovely, and absurdly hopeful. As far as I could tell, her passengers sat politely and watched the drama unfold. Of course, I imagine the dog later in the day at the dog bar buying a round of drinks, making his pals howl with the story of stopping a bus and making two humans dance.

Filed under: Random, Truly Powerful People | 2 Comments »

Pop The Bubble

Posted on July 11, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

489. 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 I asked Carol what was the one thing I needed to know before going to Alaska. Her answer took me by surprise. She said, “Oh, that’s easy. When you go to Alaska you re-enter the food chain.” She was right. I had the same impression: a walk in the woods is never just a walk in the woods. Being lunch for a bear is not an abstraction. It is amazing how your priorities shift when you recognize that your position atop the food chain is an illusion. It is amazing how you come alive.

Sean told me that we are always in the food chain but society acts as a kind of bubble; it buffers us from the nature of things. Besides, within the bubble with our natures buffered we are highly efficient at killing each other and ourselves (with stress, cigarettes, etc.). A buffered nature spawns unnatural acts. A buffered nature – or a “culture of comfort” as Martín Prechtel would call it – distorts our story to the point that we forget we are part of and not on top of nature. The “on top” idea is lethal. It is the mother lode of comedy. It is not bears we need fear but the neighborhood watch, the rival gang, the other political team, the police, the banks, and those who are supposed to be governing and protecting our interests. I think I prefer the bears; they are upfront in their intentions.

I suspect the point of having a bubble is to feel safe within it. A city is nothing if not one big campfire. We are supposed to be safer together than alone so why does our bubble, our mega campfire, engender so much alienation and loneliness; all these individual bubbles walking around within the larger bubble? How many times have I met with groups in urban settings who want to “create community?” Too many – apparently proximity to millions of other humans does not a community make. Life within the bubble, buffered from nature, alienates us from…our nature and each other. Bubbles create smaller bubbles.

Outside the bubble, when I was aware that I looked like coleslaw to big furry animals, I wanted other people around. I wanted a lot of other people around. I like my big Seattle campfire – and I wonder what it might be like inside the bubble if we put down the ridiculous notion that we are separate from the natural order of things and stopped pretending that we were somehow above it all.

Filed under: Perspective, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: culture, nature | Leave a comment »

Where Are You Standing?

Posted on July 10, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

488. 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 First Thursday, the night that artists across Seattle open their studios. To pass the time as we await the crowd, PaTan, the artist across the hall, shared with me a Life magazine from 1994. It has four articles that, read together, have my head spinning.

The first is entitled, “Saving The Endangered 100;” it is a photographic list of 100 species of plants and animals in America that are, by now, most likely gone. The second article is about the young boy who was identified as the reincarnation of Ling Rinpoche, tutor of the Dalai Lama. This boy will be the teacher of the next Dalai Lama. The third is an overview of Ken Burn’s Baseball documentary series. The fourth is a photo essay called “Eyewitness to Rwanda.”

Genocide, baseball, extinction, and among highest forms of spiritual tradition – all wrapped in a glossy cover under the umbrella name, “Life.” The magazine reads like a spectrum of human capabilities; the greatest horror to the heights of poetry. It is shocking, inspiring, troubling, breathtaking, overwhelming,…. It is life. At least it is life as we report it; it is life as we story it.

I long ago stopped asking why we do what we do. Asking the “why” question almost always brought a fixation on the horrors and injustice so that I’d miss entirely the other end of the spectrum. Asking “why” assumed the existence of “an answer.” What possible answer can there be for mass murder? What possible explanation is worthy of the reincarnation of a great teacher? There are beliefs, assumptions and justifications. There are stories. We destroy and we create; depending upon where you stand sometimes my creation brings your destruction; Oppenheimer learned this all too clearly. Is it right? Is it wrong? I no longer believe anything is clean enough for such small absolutes. Life is messy.

There are better questions and they usually come in pairs. For instance, “Where are you standing?” is a great question. Locate yourself but don’t stop there! Before justifying your actions consider asking, “I wonder what might this look like if I stood over there with you?”

Filed under: Perspective, Story, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: Why | 2 Comments »

Help Me. Please

Posted on July 9, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

487. 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 the day after the 4th of July in the United States of America and a morning explosion roused my inner sociologist. He is not one for early rising so complained a bit when I told him this morning presented a superb opportunity to study human post-party behavior. “With a walk on the beach?!” he protested. “Where do you think all the human parties were last night?’ I replied. He harrumphed, adjusted his sweater, and reminded me that he wished I were taller so he wouldn’t have to stoop so much when doing field research. “I would wish for a taller host body,” he moaned.

We were rewarded almost immediately upon arriving at the beach. “By the piles of trash it looks like an army camped here!” he observed, reaching for his notebook. The public trashcans were jammed. Additionally, sacks and bags and empty six packs were stacked 3 feet high around every can forming a kind of garbage ring art installation. The birds were frenzied trying to tear open the garbage bags. A particularly loopy gull missed his landing and tumbled down a garbage cliff causing a trash avalanche. “Good heavens!” my inner sociologist exclaimed. “One does not see that everyday.”

The sea wall was literally lined with Roman candle remains, beer bottles tilted to just so to better launch rockets (for the red glare), and remnants of bombs bursting in air. There were hundred of those little red sticks, evidence of a sparkler orgy. I caught my inner sociologist just in time – he was moving to dig in the trash. “How can I truly understand human behavior if I leave so much evidence unexamined!” he complained. I pointed out that the only evidence he needed to note was the presence of the piles, “Look how much stuff people packed in and how un-interested they were at packing it out.” He slowly scanned to area and said, “Yes, too true,” narrowing his eyes, he lifted a single brow, and scribbled another note.

It was then that we spotted the real treasure, proof that there is still hope for humanity. Just across the street standing boldly in the middle of a grass strip was a bright red upright Hoover vacuum. “My, what’s this?” I had to remind him to look both ways before dashing crossing the street. “Unbelievable!” he cried, dropping his pencil. “Have you ever seen anything so remarkable?” It was a rhetorical question but I said, “No,” and stood back to admire the gesture. Taped to the front of the Hoover was a small crayon sign that said, “Help me. Please.”

“Isn’t a little humor refreshing?” he asked, looking for his lost pencil. “It gives me hope,” I replied. “Well,” he sighed, “People surprise me at every turn.”

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

Set Foot On The Stage

Posted on July 8, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

486. 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 John was in college he was rehearsing a play. It was late, perhaps midnight, and the director wanted to do more work. The student-actors complained. The director asked them to follow him. He led them across campus to the medical school and pointed to the med students visible through the windows, hard at work burning the midnight oil. He said, “Your work is also capable of saving lives. If you are not working this hard you have no business being on the stage.”

Once, when I was assisting a director, he told the student-actors, “Each night on the stage your work will have the capacity to impact the lives of others. That is a very serious obligation. If you take it lightly you will do harm and it is best if you never set foot on the stage.”

This is how I understand art in all its forms. It is meant to change lives. It is meant to hold the central narrative of a community (the identity); the arts are the container of both tradition and change. It is necessary and powerful because it is capable of holding paradoxes. It is potent because is serves the conservative impulse while facilitating the path into the unknown. A healthy society is built upon a living art. A healthy society negotiates its paradoxes through its arts.

Reduce the arts to entertainment, intellectual concepts or a luxury for the elite, remove it from the schools and from daily life, and there is no center. Social gravity weakens with the absence of a coherent narrative – people are like planets and without the pull of narrative gravity they spin off into space and wonder why they feel so alone. Without a common center we will continue to kill each other for bling because we have no concept of what matters and what does not.

Rather than walk away from our arts, telling our selves they are too expensive or merely electives, it might be time to attend to our business, look within (that is the point after all), and set foot on the stage with a gravity worthy of our obligation to others.

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

Tell A Better Story

Posted on July 7, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

485. 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 preparing my notes from Seek The Bear class and thought this might be useful to share:

We are hardwired for story. We can’t help it; it is what we do. We interpret, we judge, we speculate, we remember, we ponder, we investigate, we justify…we story. Meaning making and interpretation are processes of story. Even hard data is a form of story—when we story ourselves we locate: where are we now, where are we going? How we locate ourselves is a process of story.

The story you tell yourself about your self is often hard to see because you don’t see it as a story. It’s your life and you are so used to the inner-narrative that you stop recognizing your self as the narrator/interpreter of the events. You assume that your story is truth; you assume that your story is “normal.” Your thoughts are your story.

The language you use to tell your story determines the world you see or do not see.

Recognizing that you are the storyteller of your life is one of the most potent paths to transformation available. When you recognize that you narrate and interpret every experience, every moment, every day of your life – that your memories are not passive, your imaginings betray a specific narrative point of view; then you can begin the path of creating. What you believe is possible, what you see as a limitation is unique to you: it’s your story and you’re telling it through your thoughts and how they drive the actions of your life. When you recognize this you come to a simple truth – and this one is ancient: you can change your story and in doing so you can change your world.

People have for centuries understood that wholeness, power, and creativity are immediately available once they recognize that life is not happening to them, rather they are actively creating the story of their life. They told stories, not for entertainment, but as guides for the next generation: a map for powerful living; a map for navigating the unknown.

Ask yourself, “What is the story I tell?” And then ask, “Is this the story I want to tell?”

Filed under: Story, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: locate | 2 Comments »

« Previous Page — Next Page »