The Direction of Intention

Truly Powerful People (421)

Posted on May 4, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

421.
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 is an example of why Ana-the-wise is wise – and I am a David-the-slow-study. Our conversation this morning went something like this:

Ana: What are you trying to create with your work?

David: Success. I want to create success.

Ana: David! I’m confused. Aren’t you happy?

David: Yes. I’m very happy. Why are you confused?

Ana: Maybe it is not me that is confused.

David: (silence. I know Ana well enough to recognize the incoming dope slap). Uh……

Ana: Do you know what my teacher taught me about success?

David: (stepping lightly onto the thin ice) No…. What did he teach you?

Ana: My teacher taught me that the successful person was someone who knew how to be happy regardless of their circumstance. You seem like a happy person to me.

David: That’s true. I am a happy person.

Ana: You seem happy in all kinds of circumstances.

David: Yes, that’s true.

Ana: So you are already successful! Why do you set an intention for something you have already realized? You are teaching other people how to be successful, aren’t you?

David: I guess so.

Ana: No wonder you are confused!

(And so on. I might be confused about success but I am crystal clear about where to go for perspective, support, and wise-eyes).

The End (Or yet another beginning)

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Truly Powerful People (420)

Posted on May 3, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

420.
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 spent the day in an organizational training designed to help people in office settings have difficult conversations. It is a formula, a training from a box, good for any context. It outlines specific communications steps to prevent emotion from overwhelming the conversation. An essential step is to distinguish between “fact” and “story.” The facilitator was excellent and guided us through exercises meant to help us separate our facts from our stories, our emotion from our intention. We practiced our skills in scripted role plays and wrestled with questions like, “I wonder how this would work in an actual crisis or when facing an angry co-worker?”

Our facilitator was very personable, relational, and taught through story and I wondered how I would experience the training with a less capable trainer. Although the information was useful in the abstract I couldn’t help but wonder if it was training from another time – something that had great application in an industrial world, a world where relationships are commodities, but might not be as useful in the age of story (information). It is predicated on a false premise: the processes are rational/sequential, grounded in acronyms and in a hot moment the rational mind leaves the building. It flees. It runs for the hills. The reptile brain is left to navigate the discomfort. The training is meant to make relationship efficient through application of formula (which negates relationship in the moment; the formula pulls focus from the person). It’s built on the premise of separation.

The previous day I had a lengthy discussion that, at least partially, was a pursuit of the intersection of art and science. I wondered when we separated these two disciplines. Leonardo would not have recognized the fence that we’ve erected between them. I suspect we tore them apart at the same time we separated head from heart, mind from spirit, and cast emotion and intuition into the closet.

At lunch Mark reminded me that EO Wilson has spent his life trying to bridge the gap between biology and the social sciences and both camps are firmly in resistance. I joked that the resistance comes from an obvious admission we’d have to make: that ant colonies are as complex as human colonies; no university-educated human wants to admit that an ant is his or her equal. After lunch I wondered if ants attended trainings to learn how to better work together in a hot situation but something tells me they have that one already figured out.

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Truly Powerful People (419)

Posted on May 2, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

419.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Wikipedia tells me that poiesis is derived from a Greek word meaning “to make.” It is the root of our word poetry and was initially understood as a verb: an action that transforms and continues the world. It implies a reconciliation of humans with the world in which we inhabit.

A word like poeisis can only come from a people less abstracted from nature than are we. Many indigenous people sing the sun to rise each morning; that is an action that transforms and continues the world. There is a different kind of relationship implied when a community believes their actions have the power to continue the world. It is a story of relationship and participation; reconciliation, not dominance. It’s a different kind of story.

Last night I watched a National Geographic special about what would happen to the earth if humans were somehow eliminated. The theme running beneath the disintegration of our cities, collapse of our dams, and disappearance of our roads was how long it would take the earth to recover. How many years would pass without humans before the air cleansed itself of carbon and acid. How many years were required before fish populations recovered, ecosystems transcended our attempt to control things are returned to balance. The message: we are transforming the world and working hard to discontinue our participation.

Earlier in the day I listened to an interview with an ecologist and nature photographer talking about their new book about the signs of collapse in the eco-systems that they’ve been studying and photographing for the past several years. Their message: there is still time, but not much.

This odd word poiesis rolled out of the archives and into my mind. What would we do if we believed that ours to-do was to transform and continue the world – if we chose our actions each day based on our capacity to transform and continue rather than consume and dominate? Poiesis is the root of our word poetry; a verb that implies a reconciliation of humans with the earth we inhabit. Poetry: how to express in language that which cannot be expressed in language. Denial: the refusal to acknowledge the existence of something; the refusal to face unpleasant facts.

What is it that we are attempting to make? What is the story that we are trying to tell?

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Truly Powerful People (418)

Posted on May 1, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

418.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Mike was in an especially fearful place. Life’s challenges were stacking like bricks and she could see nothing but wall. In a particularly dark and monster-steeped moment the phone rang. It was her old friend Andrew. He asked the requisite conversation starter, “How are you?” and Mike, not wanting to unload the full weight of her monsters on Andrew instead confessed her fear. “I’m really afraid,” she said.

“Oh. Well, let me tell you what I do with fear?” Andrew chirped without missing a beat, “I put the fear in the palm of my hand, place my hand on the small of my back, and let the fear move me forward.”

Later, Mike told me the story of her conversation with Andrew. “Sage,” she said. “First, he didn’t commiserate and reinforce my fear. He made me laugh with the idea of putting fear in the palm of my hand. Second, I saw immediately that as long as I held the fear in front of me I was going to be debilitated because fear was the only thing I could see. When I placed it in the palm of my hand and put it behind me…well, the wall was behind me and I had some useful fuel to move forward. So I did.”

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Truly Powerful People (417)

Posted on April 30, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

417.
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 called Tom this morning. I rang his phone at the ranch and he answered but before responding to my, “Hi Tom!” he passed the phone to Marcia. I heard her explain to Tom who I was. “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” he exclaimed as she gave the phone back to him. “Hello!” he chimed.

“Tom, how are things at the ranch?” I asked. “Oh, I haven’t been at the ranch in months,” he said. I know enough about Alzheimer’s to go with the flow. No resistance. “Where are you now?” I asked. There was a long pause and then he said, “Well, I don’t know. I’ll have to ask.” He dropped the phone and went in search of Marcia. Far away I heard him ask, “Where am I?”

The last time I talked with Tom he knew where he was. He knew who I was. And so, we enter a new phase in our relationship. As I held the phone and waited for Marcia to come back to the phone I was suddenly thrust back in time, 6 years ago, late one night when I was visiting, Tom looked at me and said, “I need your help. I need your help with a story.” For the next three years, every few months, I flew to California and spent long weekends with him, sometimes recording, sometimes scribbling furiously, capturing as much as I could of his family origin story. Tom passed to me the seed. He is the rememberer of his clan and there was no one to pass the stories to. As I waited for Marcia I wondered if he knew this day was coming. He knew, as he put it, “I am on the glide path of my life now and don’t know what to do with the story.” I wondered why he chose me, was it a coincidence, spontaneous or was it planned. Either way, I was grateful that he did. I am grateful that I keep his stories burning.

Today, his story became mine and I will create an origin house to hold it. And I am compelled to find the connective tissue to my origin story so that I might wrap the fibers of Tom’s story into mine. Marcia came back to the phone, lifted the receiver and said, “Well, you know what DeMarcus used to say (her father), ‘Pay attention to the coincidences – they just might be small miracles.”

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Truly Powerful People (416)

Posted on April 29, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

416.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Sylvia and I talked this afternoon about a project and our conversation sparked a return to an old topic: place your focus on creating a great process and the product will take care of itself. You’d be amazed at how many organizations hire consultants to pull employees out of their working environment, give workshops about team building and expect the employees to return to their work and magically be a better team. Sylvia has a magic wand and we had a good laugh imagining the corporate change fairy dinging people on the head for instant “team-ness.” Team is not an outcome; it is a day-to-day process. Team is a relationship and relationship is not an outcome, it is a process that happens in the little choices we make together each day. The same is true of happiness. Or living with purpose. Or peace.

Here is a list of some of the other relationships that we’ve mistaken for outcomes: business, education, leadership, management, administration, governance, marriage, friendship, art, worship, nation, and community. These grand words are forms of relationship and are not achievable: they are created and recreated every day in the little practices that we practice together. They are the stories we tell and live each day through the actions we take, the agreements we live with each other.

We know how to make the trains run on time and we know how to produce stuff but seem utterly inept at being together in a generative, life-giving way. Our focus is glued on the outcome while things like meaning, happiness, and higher purpose are found in the relationships we create in the process of making stuff.

It seems so simple and that is probably why it is so difficult to see and embrace. So we seek for an answer. We hire consultants or watch the news or buy self-help books– seeking something or someone that will provide the answer. It is not until we surrender the need for an answer that we can fully taste the life that we are living now. Turn off the television, put down your book. Look at who might be in the room with you or in the next cubicle. What are you practicing together?

If we want to create something else, we need practice something else. And that implies a certain amount of responsibility and a new understanding of power created with others. Be your own magic wand and see what amazing relationships you are capable of creating.

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Truly Powerful People (415)

Posted on April 28, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

415.
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 spent the afternoon with Paul Gauguin. He looks good for a guy that died well over a hundred years ago. Imagine leaving that lucrative career as a stockbroker and dedicating your life to painting! An especially ridiculous leap when you consider the man didn’t touch a brush until he was a responsible adult with a family and a mortgage. Imagine looking at your life and finding it meaningless and then imagine doing something about it. “People must of thought that you were nuts!” I said. He arched his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders, and spit a fleck of tobacco on the museum floor.

In the exhibition program I read, “…the key feature in his personal mythology is the constant yearning for an exotic paradise.” I looked at Paul. He rolled his eyes. “That’s what I thought,” I said. Imagine looking at your culture, your society and thinking, “We are off the rails.” Imagine knowing in your guts that somewhere on the planet people must still see through sacred eyes and then imagine doing something about it. Imagine wanting more from life or, better yet, imagine life wanting more from you and then imagine showing up with everything you’ve got!

He’d rolled a cigarette and looked to me for a light. I’m not a smoker so I couldn’t help him but I did indicate that there was no smoking in the museum. He didn’t say it but I could see disgust in his eyes at my need to follow the rules. “They’re trying to protect your paintings!” I said in my defense. He lit his cigarette and looked around a bit. I followed. “What does Gauguin think about his own work?” I wondered. He took a bit of charcoal from his pocket intending to correct something in one of his later works. “Paul!” I hissed with some indignation. He smiled and winked at me as if to say, “Gotcha!”

We stood together and looked at the last painting in the exhibit. It was shaky though the color was confident. He painted it not long before he died. He sighed. “You never got there, did you?” I asked. Through narrowed eyes he looked at me as if to say, “You know better.” “It’s the wrong question, I know,” I said. “But my god, look how hard you tried!”

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Truly Powerful People (414)

Posted on April 27, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

414.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

My studio is in an old Immigration and Naturalization Service building. The building was designed basically as a large detention and government office center. Two floors were built with dormitories for men and women; there was a section with bleak jails cells. The top floor, for reasons I cannot fathom, was the regional assay office. Someone thought it was a good idea to weigh, trade, melt and store gold in the same building where human lives were weighed, traded, and melted. My studio was originally the smelter room where the gold was melted down. Now, in a surprisingly careful transformation, there are nearly 100 artists occupying the space writing a next chapter for the building. The Wing Luke museum is working with the contractors to preserve and honor the first chapter. It is a building of stories, a threshold.

The artists in the building, myself included, are writing a next chapter in our lives. We moved in because we transform things. Clay, salt, sand, found objects, steel, sound, paper, wood, ideas, perspectives, beliefs, images, and stories are daily being reassigned, rearranged, rewritten, rethought, re-purposed and resurrected. As we perform our alchemy within and without, the building slowly sighs and releases its prisoners.

Artists are constantly looking for the way in, for a way to bring their best offer to a culture that doesn’t really know what to do with them. Artist’s change and challenge things. They value what cannot be contained. Artists are lousy at the commodity game. Artist’s trade in expansion of thinking and are disoriented by reduction of life to dollars and cents. Artists are wily and entrepreneurial and do what they do for reasons beyond explanation. The Muses burn hot even if we’ve forgotten their names.

In the lobby of the building someone taped to the wall a movie poster. I appreciate it every time I pass through the lobby because I know it is an accidental commentary and beautifully appropriate to the circumstance. The image is of a man in a toga carrying a sword sprinting to the end of a pier; the poster is dominated by a quote from Joseph Campbell: “We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

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Truly Powerful People (413)

Posted on April 26, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

413.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

During a recent Transformational Presence Leadership call I referenced a story concept that is important for doing the work of transformation: embrace the wolf. In the story of Red Riding Hood, the wolf is the character that drives the story forward. Without the wolf there is no story, no action, no catalyst, or creative tension. Without the wolf there is no transformation.

What is true in the story of Red Riding Hood is also true in our lives. The wolf drives the story forward yet we dedicate much of our time and energy attempting to eliminate the wolf from our story. If we are not trying to eliminate the wolf we at least try to neutralize it, avoid it, or pretend that it is not there. In protecting ourselves against the wolf we inhibit our growth and stall our capacity for change.

Wolves bring discomfort and disequilibrium. Wolves bring conflict and doubt. No one willingly seeks discomfort yet if the wolf is the catalyst then we must learn to walk toward the discomfort and utilize the creative tension. The common mistake we make in our lives and businesses is to believe that discomfort indicates that something is wrong, that we’ve lost control. That may be the case sometimes but more often discomfort signals that something is right; there’s movement into the unknown!

Investments in keeping our experiences safely cotained within The Comfort Zone, in balance, stasis, equilibrium of process at all times, is a recipe for stagnation. Wanting to be in the Comfort Zone all the time is the equivalent of Red Riding Hood never setting out on her journey to Grandma’s house. It is like trying to stop the seasons because you want to live in summer all of the time.

The comfort zone serves a purpose: there are seasons for balance, maintenance, and stability. There are also seasons for movement, growth and change. And, because we are deeply invested in maintaining control and staying in our comfort zone we need to be kicked out of the nest, we need to be knocked off balance, and compelled to leave the safety of the comfort zone in order to grow. That’s the role of the wolf in our story.

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Truly Powerful People (412)

Posted on April 25, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

412.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Bobby is a sports massage therapist. Most doorframes are not made to accommodate a man of his size. He is strong. He is big. He has been known to the block the sun when passing by, sending confused patients in the rehab center scrambling outside to see the eclipse. Bobby could spin me like on his finger like a juggler spins a plate.

The first time I saw him (in silhouette, of course, he stood between me and the sun) I thought, “This is going to hurt.” He said, as if reading my thoughts, “Don’t worry. I’m a shoulder guy. I promise not to hurt you. Much.” He grinned as I followed him back to massage room, the room so far removed from the rest of the center that screams cannot be heard. My first sports massage performed by my first giant. It was a day of firsts!

Bobby is helping me recover the use of my shoulders. He knows the exact spot to press in a muscle set to release traumatized muscles. He is the largest magician I have ever known. There are handstands in my future. I might even pitch a baseball or reclaim my yoga master superhero status (I demoted myself to yoga bystander when I lost my downward dog). While Bobby had my arm going places it had not gone in 4 years, he fell prey to what I now call, “that thing about me.” Roger used to call it my geek magnet. I am like a roving bartender; people spontaneously tell me their troubles or their life stories – even if they don’t want to – and although Bobby is a Sumo to my twig, he began telling me why he couldn’t be an engineer. I asked no questions. He just started, “Ah, that’s the one. Did you feel it let go? I always wanted to be an engineer,” he said. It was the math. Specifically, it was algebra. He could get the correct answers; he just couldn’t show this work. He told me he barely passed algebra class, squeaking by with a “D” so the course of his life was altered forever. “I had the answers!” he repeated, “but I really started to doubt myself. How could I know the answers but have no idea how to get there?”

I laughed (through my grimace) and said, “You’re lucky! Most people spend their lives looking for the answers AND have no idea how to get there. Imagine their doubt!” He said, “Hold on, I think this next one is going to hurt.”

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

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