The Direction of Intention

Truly Powerful People (320)

Posted on January 25, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

320.
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 life as in stories, sometimes you seek the adventure and sometimes the adventure finds you. Soldiers seek the adventure of war. Displaced civilians caught in the path of war would rather have stayed at home. Sometimes the adventure arrives when we get what we think we want and what we get is not what we expected: the world is full of lotto winners whose good fortune ruined them. Whether it comes in the form of good fortune, a yearning, or the arrival of your desire, the call to adventure (change) is supposed to arrive with enough force to knock you off balance. Divorce packs a wallop. A doctor can change your life in six words or less: “I think you’d better sit down.”

When the force of change roars down the road we ground ourselves in the known; we run to our comfortable patterns. Rarely do we seek discomfort as a first action. We plant our feet, bury our head in the sand and deny that the storm is coming. We clean our house, we cook a comfort meal, clean our cubicle – we reassure ourselves by moving through the routines we’ve established. That is one of the functions of ritual! To affirm who you are; to reinforce where you belong. Finish your breakfast. Sit in the sun and breath in the early morning air. It will not stop the hurricane but it will help you face it.

This is a necessary phase. It is akin to the homeowner, knowing that the sheriff is about to knock on the door to evict them, sweeping the rooms of their home, cleaning the kitchen – not because it needs cleaning – but because they know it will soon be gone. They must touch it to leave it. This is how we say goodbye to who we they are and prepare to step into the unknown. It is necessary for us, just as it is necessary for the characters in a story, to tell ourselves that everything will be fine even as we push the angst of the unknown into the back of our mind. It is necessary to touch base with safety and security one last time, to run our finger along the mantle of what we know, before we are pulled across the threshold and thrust into the adventure.

It is the visceral memory of what was that drives us through the trials and into the arms of the new.

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Truly Powerful People (319)

Posted on January 24, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

319.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Last week we were deep in snow. It does not snow often in Seattle and when it does it rarely sticks down the hill at the water level where I live. Not so last week! I watched a neighbor cross-country ski around the block. There were snowmen everywhere; a veritable army of snowmen populated my neighborhood! Cars were stuck and roads were closed. Magically, it disappeared in a single night. A torrential rain with heavy wind erased the snow while we slept. Poof. It was like going to sleep in the arctic and waking up in the tropics. I was a bit disoriented and thought I dreamt the snow.

Today I walked the neighborhood to clear my mind and found carrots everywhere. There was a carrot in every yard. Some had two. The crows were trying with minimal success to pick them up. There is nothing more hilarious than watching a crow try to wrap its beak around a carrot. A symbol of ambition! That’s akin to me trying to pick up a pine tree with my mouth. I am not nearly as optimistic as the crows.

The carrot noses of the snowman army were all that remained as evidence that once things were different. Once there were snowy men with button eyes and twiggy smiles. Some wore vests. Others waved branch arms and were wrapped in scarves. Standing there, appreciating the carrot proof of snowmen past I couldn’t help but wrinkle my brow and ponder: we’re in an election season and I wondered what the candidates leave behind after the votes have been cast? What remains after they melt and move on? What is left after all of the character assassination, the accusations, the justifications, and the answer pandering? What did the good folks of Iowa or New Hampshire or more recently South Carolina find as proof that a storm blew in bringing snowy men with twiggy smiles and button yes and then just as quickly disappeared?

Of this I am certain: the crows would be loathe to touch it.

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Truly Powerful People (318)

Posted on January 23, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

318.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

You can learn to tell a different story. Change your story; change your world. You can create new patterns and see your life through a clearer lens. In fact, you can learn to see through your story; you can learn to let go the drama and resistance, the struggle and the emptiness. This is not new news: for centuries people have known that wholeness is immediately available when they let go the story blanket that they’ve wrapped around their experiences. Wholeness is not found on a path to some other place in the future. It is here and now: we just can’t see it through the security blanket of story that we’ve wrapped around our lives.

When our ancestors learned to release their story blankets they were kind enough to leave us maps to guide us. Paradoxically, the maps are stories. They understood that a “how to” manual is useless (remember, no one has your answer); the specifics of how they did it will not help you do it. It is a personal journey, each route as individual as the person that lives it. However, they understood that there are universal questions in every unique life-story; to participate (stories are a participation sport) in how a character in a story wrangles with the big questions will help you wrangle with the big questions in your own life. Our lives are mirrored in the stories that we are told. We know what to do in our personal story because we identify with the heroine/hero in the story. Their journey of transformation is a guide to our journey of transformation. Their follies and foibles give coherence to our messy passage. Their death and rebirth is a map for our death and rebirth. Their story is a call for us to step more fully into our adventure.

The most efficient route to transcending your story is through engaging with a story. Another paradox!

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Truly Powerful People (317)

Posted on January 22, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

317.
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 certainly possible to tell yourself the story that you are broken, that someone else has your answer, and that the universe is against you, that life is hard or unfair and the best you can do is survive it. It is also possible to tell yourself a different story, a story of choice, potential, opportunity and vibrant life. Either way, the story you tell is a choice so why not choose to tell a story of wholeness and true power?

The story you tell translates into the actions you take. Gather some information: for a single day, without judgment, pay attention to the actions of your life. How much of your day are you resisting or justifying or defending? How much of your life do you spend seeking fulfillment, for purpose, for what matters, for meaning, for happiness, for contentment – as if these aspects of life were some other place? How much of your life do you spend “just getting through it?” For a single day, pay attention to the choices you make; entertain the possibility that you choose how you react, how you interpret, and how you respond – regardless the circumstance.

What do you discover? Are you telling the story that you want to tell?

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Posted on January 21, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

316.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.” Niels Bohr

The steps in organizational growth are the same steps necessary to take in personal growth. We wrap different language around the steps but the steps are the universal. Like Hollywood blockbusters we weave different details through them, the characters have different faces and names, but the story follows a well-known plot. This has been true for centuries! We like to tell the same story over and over again and there is a very good reason for that: our lives are mirrored in the adventure. We know what to do in our personal story because we identify with the heroine/hero in the story. Their journey of transformation is a guide to our journey of transformation. Their follies and foibles give coherence to our messy passage. Their death and rebirth is a map for our death and rebirth. Their story is a call for us to step more fully into our adventure.

If there is one thing we’ve learned in the past century it is that change is the only constant. And, the subsidiary lesson: the pace of change is escalating. Whether we realize it our not we are always in a process of change. The Dream Society, a book published over a decade ago by the market futurist Copenhagen Institute, suggested that this dramatic escalation of the pace of change has thrust us out of the age of information and into the age of story. Information and data can locate us in a moment, describe a point in time, but the point is of limited use because we are living so close to the event horizon. The point that the data describes is obsolete before we can translate it into meaningful action. The best we can do is to use the data to story ourselves into an unknown future. In this sense, it brings us around to something our ancestors understood with certainty: true stability is found in the story that we tell, not in the things we possess.

Of course, therein exists my favorite paradox: Our stories are both road maps for change and anchors of stability. We know who we are by the stories we tell. We know who we want to become through the stories we tell. We know what we want to create through the stories we entertain.

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Truly Powerful People (315)

Posted on January 20, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

315.
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 Bluetooth earpieces were new and business guys in suits ate their lunch, drank their martinis and posed on street corners with their power symbol literally stuck in their ears, Albert went on a rant. He is a keen observer, comfortable on the margins of society so he is less susceptible to gadget status. He does not chase after the next new thing. “Oh, please!” he raved as he imitated the strut of an imaginary broker, posing and prancing around our table answering faux calls. I am a good audience and the more I laughed the more outrageous his rant became. “You won’t catch me dead wearing one of those things!” he proclaimed as he sat down to finish his coffee. That was six years ago.

Today, Albert and I talked for the first time in months. He lives in Los Angeles so I see him rarely but we talk often. “You can’t believe what happened to me!” he exclaimed. “I was walking down the street wearing my new shades thinking I look pretty good for a 50 year old guy. My phone rang and I answered it. And then I realized – oh no! – I’ve become one of those guys! I had one of those things in my ear! And, I wear it all the time! Oh, nooooo!” he howled and laughed. “What’s become of us?” I could not see the imitation he did of himself strutting down the street but the narration of his inner monologue was priceless. “I don’t look so bad,” collided head-on with “I’ve become that guy!” Never say never.

I adore Albert. His capacity for keen observation extends as far inside himself as it does to the world around him. His capacity for laughter and humor is endless and he applies it to his own foibles as well as to the quirks of others. Mostly, he reminds me not to take any of this too seriously. When we were in college he’d say, “We’re just making this stuff up!” and then he’d lapse into thought, take a drag on his cigarette and say, “you’d think we’d want to make up something better.” And then he’d laugh.

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Truly Powerful People (314)

Posted on January 19, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

314.
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 1993 and I alone in my studio. It is night in Los Angeles. I am exhausted and tired of being afraid. My life is fueled by anger and fear and I can see no alternatives. I have made a mess of it all. I am convinced that my paintings are worthless – which means that I am convinced that I am worthless.

My studio has a 20-foot ceiling and great exposed beams that support a mini-loft area. I find an orange extension cord and throw it over the beam, securing one end and loop a noose in the other. I place my rickety old wooden chair beneath the noose, climb up and put the noose around my neck. And then, I play with the balance of the chair, slowly rocking the chair back onto two legs. Only then do I realize what I am doing. I am blessed with good balance and I hover on that edge, my life teetering on the back two legs of a rickety old wooden chair, uncertain which way I want to go. It is on this edge that I recognize, perhaps for the first moment in my life, that I have choice; that I am always making choices. Always. This revelation blows a hole through the center of my victim story and it collapses. I am disoriented and see that I am depending upon others to tell me that I am worthy. I wonder why I have given the measure of my worth into the opinions of others. I wonder why I am choosing so much pain.

I hear in my head the voice of my friend Roger. A few years before he told me that he’d never really understood why people commit suicide. He asked, “Why wouldn’t you just do something else? Why wouldn’t you just do anything else?”

“Yes.” I say to myself, “Do anything else.”

I make my choice and softly let the chair down onto all four legs. I take off the noose, I take off the victim story, and as I pull the orange cord off the beam I suddenly I see my life as precious, sacred, and wonder how I could have lived so long and not known it. I wonder what I was running away from. The revelation stuns me and I sit on the chair and laugh. I know the answer the moment I ask the question: the victim story dulls us; it is a murky lens that leeches the vitality of life and feeds on itself. It is an addiction. I was running from myself so afraid of making and owning my choices, terrified of being seen, of saying, “look, this is who I am.” For the rest of the night I sit in the chair letting my eyes grow accustom to brilliant colors of life without the lens.

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Truly Powerful People (313)

Posted on January 18, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

313.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Lora was on a ship that late one night ran aground in the Icy Straits of Alaska. They had to abandon ship. With several other passengers she was taken onto a fishing vessel. One of the passengers had a cell phone that had service so she left me a message (I was on the east coast sleeping in a comfy bed while she was having her adventure) telling me that she was fine, that all of the passengers where safe and that she’d call me when she was able. She wanted to call because she knew the news channels would tell a story of disaster instead of the story of safe competent response to an unfortunate accident.

Indeed, the next morning after receiving her message I turned on the news and saw the ship run aground. All around it were life bright orange rafts – in cold climates the life rafts are like tents – the news choppers couldn’t see inside so they were reporting that people were freezing in the rafts and that almost certainly there would be casualties. The rafts were deployed but no one was in them. All the passengers were transported to an Alaska State Ferry boat; while the news reported a tragedy the passengers were enjoying a warm breakfast and a good nap after a night of high adventure.

I remembered this experience today as I listened to the stories being told around the tragedy in Italy. People died. The captain most certainly abandoned his ship. And, within two hours, the crew safely evacuated over 4,000 people despite the limited ability to launch their lifeboats – a listing ship renders the boats dangerous to deploy. Someone did something right. And, it was certainly messy and panic-filled.

Yesterday I listened to economist Tyler Cowen’s TED talk in which he implored us to doubt our facility for story. I think he got it wrong – we are storytelling beings and our facility for story is what makes us human. It is the glue that binds community; it is how we make sense of the world. What we need to doubt is the intention behind the stories that we tell (and are told). We are in too much of a hurry to assign blame, too interested in whipping up disaster. Affixing blame also limits our capacity to see, to think, to act, it is easy, feels good (because we are not to blame), and makes victims of us all.

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Truly Powerful People (312)

Posted on January 17, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

312.
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’ve been asking a lot of people a lot of questions about the work I do. I ask questions like, “What brought you to work with me?” or “What attracted you to this work?” or simply, “What do you see?” I’m asking because my business posse, my pals who know business better than I do, tells me that I’m supposed to have a “target audience.” “Who is your audience?” they ask. There is very little common ground shared by the people that stumble into my business. “Everyone,” I respond. So, I unpack the bag for them:

Everyday I have potent conversations with people about their power and empowerment. Everyday I’m reinforced in my assumption that the single quality that makes a person truly powerful is their capacity to empower others. It’s a conscious intention, not separate from the other work they do, it is a way of doing the work that they do.

The word “power” can be an obstacle for some. It is a word loaded with trash-potential. Some folks don’t want anything to do with power because they think power means to have supremacy. In some circles I suppose that is a definition of power. I’d call that control. The desire for supremacy is born of fear; the objective of supremacy is to control.

Power is not something that can be given or taken away. It is something that is invoked within someone and amplified in relationship with others. Empowerment is found in the intention to amplify. My best work should inspire your best. I cannot be fully powerful if you are not also powerful. Our best (or worst) is never isolated or separate from impact. It all matters and we get to choose what we create together.

“Who needs to step into their power and intend empowerment?” I ask my business posse (hoping that they will help me recognize my target). “Everyone,” they nod their heads in agreement. “So, what do you see?” I ask, looping back to the place I started. “Well,” they wrinkle their brows and say, “who’s your target?”

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Truly Powerful People (311)

Posted on January 16, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

311.
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 perpetually making lists. Well, to be more specific, I am making one list that has no end. It grows everyday. It is self-generating; when I check one thing off the list, I scribble three new things on the list. It is my “to-do” list. It is my attempt to remember my intentions, to contain the details that an intention inspires, to locate myself in time and space relative to my creation.

I am an “out-of-sight-out-of-mind kind of guy. If I turn the page on my list it no longer exists. If I turn the page my intention becomes untethered and like a hot air balloon floats up, catches the currents of air and disappears (beautifully) over the horizon of my mind. Without my list I lapse into the illusion that I have nothing to do and begin looking for things to create or projects to initiate. Turning the page can (and has) lead to serious over commitment and keystone cop-esque racing about. Newly headless chickens do what I do when I’ve made new projects and new lists and then turned back a page to find that I already had a list.

Since page turning defeats the purpose I’ve created a ritual in my list-making. My ritual has grown over time and now has more to do with aesthetics than it does with functionality. I simply do not turn the page until my list is unreadable. I do not turn the page until my list is visually beautiful. I add things to do in the between spaces. I stack to-do items on top of old things to do. I write vertically up the margins, I circle empty space and fill it in with reminders of things already on the page. Soon, the visual aspects of the list take over and I start to design. Checking things off the list provides visual counter balance. Check boxes move the eyes, different color pens are useful, and punctuation is a dynamite design element. Sometimes I pretend that the new note to myself is emphatic so I can use multiple exclamation points. Stars are good and I’ve found that there are different kinds of stars for different kinds of emphasis and effect. Jackson Pollock has nothing on my list. It is a visual record of my dance in this life.

When my list is absolutely unreadable and unbelievably beautiful and visually stimulating, I transfer the things that still need doing on to a new page. If I don’t remember stuff it probably didn’t need doing in the first place. It always feels so clean! There is so much space! There is nothing like open space to remind me of the infinite opportunities available each day of my life. I choose what goes on the list. And to think that I used to hate making lists!

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