The Direction of Intention

Truly Powerful People (271)

Posted on December 7, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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Here’s an interesting phrase that came up twice today: soul searching. This is not a new phrase. In fact, I’ve heard it a lot. I use it myself sometimes. I heard it anew today because I had two conversations and the phrase was used in two remarkably different ways (I have permission to share this with you):

• “I have a soul and I am searching within myself for my truth.”

• “I have lost my soul and I’m looking for it.”

The first usage is healthy. The second is tragic. What is it to feel as if you’ve lost your soul? I am not asking a religious question. I am asking something fundamental and practical that applies to us all.

Here is the context from the person who feels as if they have lost their soul (I’m generalizing a much bigger conversation): In business (and government) there is often an invisible scale – like the scale of justice – in one tray is the word “values” and in the other tray is the word “interests.” How often have you heard someone in a position of authority say, “We had to weigh our interests against our values,” as a way of justifying the action that betrayed the stated values? My conversation was with a man in authority who recognized that he makes that statement a lot. Today is the day he realized what he was really saying. He said it this way: “I have no values that matter. The bottom line, what we’ve been calling interests are in practice, in truth, what we really value; interests trump values every time. I’ve been making excuses, pretending that I’m serving a set of values. I’m not. It’s a lie.” Strong words! That’s when he used the phrase “soul searching.” Today, he is my hero. I do not underestimate the power of his revelation and the bind that he now faces.

I think his dilemma is the dilemma of our times. There is not greater expression of values lost in service to interests (there was no weighing) than a government that collaborated with its financial institutions to rape its people and bring down the world economy. And the people (that’s us) are not innocent either: shoppers stampeding and pepper spraying each other to get a bargain are certainly in service to their interests and completely void of any greater value set.

The question posed by my hero-of-the-day is this: aren’t our interests supposed to be in service to our values and not the other way around? We could all use a bit of soul searching.

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Truly Powerful People (270)

Posted on December 6, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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In every vital creative process the first creation is safety.

In the theatre there is a mantra: control your control-ables and let the rest go. Most people with creative blocks are trying to control what they cannot control, like other people’s opinions, and not controlling what they can control, like their own thoughts and opinions. Another uncontrollable that people always try to control is the quality of an outcome; they will sacrifice their health and happiness for the product or the appearance. Mastery comes when the focus is placed on the only thing that truly can be controlled: the quality of the process. Great process will always lead to expansive creativity. So, the two things you CAN control:

• Your thoughts, opinions and perceptions.

• The creation of a quality process.

The two things you CAN’T control:

• Other people’s thoughts, opinions, and perceptions.

• An outcome or result.

Creating safe space begins with controlling your control-ables and letting the rest go. Ultimately this is a process of 1) drawing boundaries and learning to hold them, and 2) choosing where to place your focus and energy. Valuing your opinion over the opinions of others and learning to create a process as opposed to push for a result is core to a generative creative process and how you establish safety within yourself.

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Truly Powerful People (269)

Posted on December 5, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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Once you recognize that you have the capacity to choose your story, once you realize that you have choice in where you place your focus, you can begin to unlearn some of the limiting patterns that come with an outcome focus and hyper-investments in control.

We live in a culture that generally values intellect and shuns intuition. We’ve buried our dreaming beneath the safety of data. Play this game: place your focus on outcomes and witness what happens to the voices in head. Shift your focus to the “space between” (the relationships), focus on creating a quality process and witness what happens within your body and your inner monologue.

Your intellect feeds on the illusion of control. The intellect likes the idea of outcomes, the satisfaction and safety of the delusion that the train will pull into the station and you will live happily forever after. No mess. Check the box and move on to the next thing on the list. Your intellect will have you believe that you are one thing, a single identity. Stray from the safety of the prescription and the inner judge will pound you back into the box and have you coloring between the lines.

The intuition does not think its way into limitation; it feels its way into freedom. Intuition likes to wander over the next hill to see what is there. Intuition engages with what is there, not what you think is there. In a healthy creative process, when your focus is on the process, the intellect is in service to intuition. Focusing an impulse is a radically different action than controlling an impulse. Intellect wants to control, intuition wants to create. Learn to distinguish between focus and control and you will be on the road to becoming truly powerful.

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Truly Powerful People (268)

Posted on December 4, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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Where are you? On what mountain are you standing? From what point of view are you asking questions about your life, power, and creativity?

If you believe that you are standing on a mountain of deficiency, your fulfillment will look like a distant meadow. It is some other place. Every question you ask will be asked from a place of deficiency and reinforce the idea that what you want is some other place outside of you. What you see is separation. The story structure that you buttress holds the notion that there is an arrival place, another mountain or meadow – some other place called creative or happy or fulfilled. In this story your focus is on an outcome or result that resides somewhere out there in the future.

It can be scary to step out of an outcome focus and into a process focus because control is the sole aim of an outcome focus. To show up and be seen you must first relinquish your illusion of control. Letting go of control feels a lot like stepping into the unknown. It is. Creativity is nothing more than your capacity to step into uncertainty. Creativity is the blossom of a process focus. Power is possible when you stop controlling and start collaborating.

Every story is told from a specific point of view. Choose your story.

Where are you standing? What is the mountain of assumptions upon which you stand and relate with the world?

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Truly Powerful People (267)

Posted on December 3, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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All creative limits or blocks originate from some form of separation: you have cleaved a part of yourself and locked it away in the closet. Or, you have put manacles on your impulses and fear what might happen if you release the restraints; what will people think of you if you give full voice to your thoughts, ideas, perceptions, dreams and desires. What part of you fears annihilation if you show up as you are? What part of you fears being seen?

Fear has a lot to do with the need to control and control has a lot to do with your access to power (your creative impulse). Fulfilling your creative potential begins with allowing yourself to be seen – not as you think you ought to be but as you are.

Spend a week gathering information about the story you tell yourself and mining your assumptions. Recognizing where you are, identifying the mountain of belief upon which you stand is a necessary first step to bridging the separation. Watch out! Separations are slippery and express as false comparisons (with whom do you compare yourself? Why?), false expectations (do you need to be perfect? Do you have to do everything yourself? Why?), and false investments in stories (what achievement will make you valid, valuable, or whole? Why?). What stick do you use for self-measurement? Just gather information, without judgment, and see what you discover.

Is there a gap between the life you live and the life you think you live? That’s the first separation to bridge.

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Truly Powerful People (266)

Posted on December 2, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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Fulfilling your power and your creativity is essentially the same process. Power and creativity are, in my mind, actually the same thing; two roads up the same mountain.

The road to expansive creativity begins with unlearning the idea that creativity is an outcome or a divine gift for a select few. The road to fulfilling your power begins when you stop believing other people are the source of your power. Both are questions of source.

Where are you standing when you look at these aspects of yourself called creativity and power? What are your assumptions? What is your point of view? What is your relationship to your creative impulse? What is your relationship to your self as power-full? Are you riding the brakes? Have you divorced yourself from your creative impulse? Have you given away your power?

No one is powerful alone. No one is fully creative in a vacuum. No one has your power or is more or less creative than are you.

Locate where you are in your creative geography, put to rest the idea that creativity is something you do or that power is something that you get. Recover the most potent, powerful, creative source available to you: your self.

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Truly Powerful People (265)

Posted on December 1, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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I think one of the reasons we have so much trash associated with the word “power” is that it has been for centuries confused with material interest (control of resources). The confusion in shorthand reads like this: Power is control. To make matters stickier, when power and control are switched in their cribs, a more insidious confusion follows: the person that controls the resource is understood to have a divine mandate or is somehow more blessed than the rest. In shorthand it reads like this: morality is money.

In such confusion, what is one to believe? What values are we to hold when no values can stand in the wasteland of such confusion? When power is mistaken for control of resource and control will do whatever is necessary to control the resource – no matter the cost to the community or other communities, and the only explanation available is moral authority… we’re all losers. Only the most pathological among us will knowingly seek power in this form. I think the proof is all around us.

It is the mistake the OWS movement is making: it knows what it is against but can’t articulate what it is for – so it is engaging control with tactics of control – and missing the point entirely.

Power is not control. Control is control, money is money, and morality has nothing to do with either control or money. Power is neither good nor bad, it is a force to be used and can limit or amplify. Alan writes that the limiting kind (power-over) is an immature use of power; power-with becomes available when we mature; he calls it power-to-be.

Power-with, power-to-be, either way it is the same thing, it’s time for us to grow up in our understanding and practice of power of how we are in the world.

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Truly Powerful People (264)

Posted on November 30, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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Here’s my favorite phrase from class today (it didn’t come out of my mouth but I wish it had). It is a thought from the amazing Alan Seale:

“No one owns power. Power is energy; it is everywhere. It is everything. How you relate to it determines whether it serves you and others or whether it gets in the way and depletes you and everyone else. Using power as power-over-others is an immature form. The mature form of power is power-to-be.”

The phrase that I most appreciate, the part that is most important to pay attention to, is “How you relate to it.” In listening to the class participants today I realized how much trash we have around this word, “power.” Most of us have had it wielded over us or we have used it over others. We resist it. To imagine amplifying power WITH others is…unimaginable. Yet, it is just as possible as using power to control.

We think power is something we have or do not have – it is our experience. The growth comes when we learn how to relate to power in a different way because we learn to relate to ourselves in a different way. Power is energy and it is everywhere.

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Truly Powerful People (263)

Posted on November 29, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

263.
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I learned a long time ago that I do my best thinking with a big drawing pad in front of me. My doodles become maps. What initially looks like and awful mess of scribbles emerges as a circular form of coherence.

For the past few hours I’ve been mapping the class I will teach in January: Bring Power to Life. Sometimes the maps come easily! All the scribbles fit on the first pass. If I were Joe looking at these scribbles, I’d use the word “elegant.” This map, this thought-path, is elegant (get ready Joe!). It looks like a well-constructed play – clear actions feed a spine that scribes an arc of inevitable transformation.

The spine of the six weeks course is “to create power-with-others” which I maintain is our natural impulse; needing power-over-others is only necessary once you’ve given your power away (you have no need to take power from others when you ARE the source of your power). I suppose the subtitle would be: Return AS the source of your power.

The course is constructed around six relationships; each relationship requires a movement that is easily described by a shorthand phrase and made tangible in a single action. So, for instance, the first relationship is with Control; the shorthand is Stop Enabling and Start Empowering; the action is to draw a line between what you can control and what you can’t control. Drawing the line (boundary) changes your relationship with control and creates movement toward empowerment. Empowerment activates Choice, which is the second relationship we’ll engage in the course; the shorthand for Choice is Stop Blaming and Start Choosing; the action is to draw another line making a distinction between “things happen to me” and “I make things happen.” This new boundary creates movement toward Choice and Choice activates Intention, which is the third relationship to explore. The remaining relationships are Motivation, Seeing, and Ownership.

The relationships are linear in the individual pieces but together create a cycle: Ownership is Control transformed. Empowerment, creating power-with-others, is not a mystery; the path is well worn and available when you decide to walk it.

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Truly Powerful People (262)

Posted on November 28, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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[continued from 261]

Horatio,
You’ve been teaching me about the art of filmmaking and recently you told me that all movies are about pain; when the pain is relieved the movie is over. I have a similar definition for stories (regardless of the medium): a story begins when the main character is knocked off balance and ends when balance is restored.

Everyone is starring in their own movie. Everyone is telling their own story.

My years of leaping were years of resisting what I didn’t want and grasping for what I believed I didn’t have. The dance of resisting and grasping is a dance of pain that leaves you dizzy and off balance. It is a box dance with people pretending to follow but deeply invested in manipulating the lead – or the opposite: pretending to lead by manipulating the followers. I have been guilty of both and learned that either way it is dance of seeking wholeness in the responses of others.

T ran a small company. He was constantly frustrated and couldn’t understand why no one would take even the smallest action without first coming to him. He wanted people to take responsibility for their work! One day he saw to his chagrin that everyone came to him because, if they didn’t, he’d find fault with something and make them do the work again according to how he thought it should be done. He told me, “I was blind to what I was doing. I was telling people I wanted them to be responsible and then punishing them for making choices. I was the problem.” He thought for a moment and added, “I was really trying to control them. I hated it when I realized that putting down my employees made me feel powerful. They were fine; I was upside-down.”

J said it best when she told me, “I have been seeking liberation from others, from my boss, from my work, from systems and from society – I was looking for permission when what I really wanted was liberation from myself! Liberation is something I give myself! No one has my liberation! No one has the key to my chains. I have it! No one else knows who I am or what I want so why am I seeking approval from others so I can be who I am?”

These are tales of pain or disequilibrium. And the threshold to a better story happened for both J and T when they realized that they were seeking their power from other people. Both are deeply interested in service. Both are learning that they are incapable of service as long as they are drinking power from others; true service comes with true power and true power is in what you bring to a relationship, not what you get from it.

[there may be more…]

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