The Direction of Intention

Truly Powerful People (261)

Posted on November 27, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

261.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Dear Horatio,

I want to respond to your question and it will take a few posts. First, to let everyone into the conversation: you asked me to give examples or anecdotes of the relationship between control and power and how to break the cycle. You told me that you recognized how this dynamic works in your life but that it is also an abstraction. I responded, telling you that my fascination with this topic (power) comes from the ubiquitous paradox within your question: how can you know how this works in your life but also experience it as an abstraction? That experience is true for almost everyone; when you are in it, you know it in your bones and it is almost impossible to wrap your fingers around it. So, to begin:

I know that it sounds too simplistic but the picture changes when people recognize that 1) They have choice in where they place their focus and 2) They have choice in how they interpret their experiences. These are among the most powerful and transformational recognitions that people can have. It’s easy to say and hard to do when you are convinced that what you see is truth.

Seeing is never passive, no one is ever an objective observer – despite what the past 300 years of science has asked us to believe – it’s now telling us something different. Recently I read Brain Rules by John Medina and in the chapter on seeing he describes what happens in your brain – literally – when you see something. It is akin to an image dispersal and reassembly process. The glue of the reassembly is past experiences: we make meaning of our seeing based on where we’ve been and what we believe about our past. If your life story is one of fear you will most likely see fearful things everywhere. If your life story is filled with adventure you will see opportunities for adventure.

Because seeing is not passive – because you are telling yourself the story of yourself at every moment of your life – you have the capacity to change your story. To see is to interpret and we interpret according to patterns of our lives and how we group things: “this is like that.” You first have to become aware and then detaching from patterns is possible.

For many years fear was my focus so fear was my creation. Living in fear is the equivalent of living full time in resistance and so my story was a story of resistance of the future. I am a dedicated edge leaper so leaping was my first idea about how to get out of fear. If I just kept leaping, if I just kept seeking I was certain I’d find “it.” And then I lost all that I held dear and this is what I saw (finally): It is not in the leaping (the action); it is in the seeing (the story I tell). The shift was immediate. I was a dedicated vampire and suddenly I was practicing something I’d been preaching for years: I was creating power-with. And I know you know what I mean.

[to be continued]

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Posted on November 26, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

260.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Here’s another snippet from the workbook (you know, the workbook that is trying to tell me that it aspires to be more; it knows in its heart that it is a book-book. For the first time in my life I am trying to write less instead of searching for more to say. This problem would have come in handy all those years in school. Alas, all my efforts at containment are futile):

When people believe they need to control what other people see, think or feel they are creating stories of power-over-others or fear-stories of others having power over them. People play power-over-others stories (or the reverse) when they’ve lost their true power; they put it down somewhere. They can’t remember where or when. They are afraid others can see that they’ve lost it. They’re afraid others will see the hole in their being. When people are no longer the source of their own power the only option left to them is to drink power from others.

It is a fantasy story born of the fear of being seen; no one wants other people seeing behind their mask. No one wants others to see that they are missing a piece of themselves. In the midst of so much fear, attempting to control what others see is an imperative. So much potential shame! So much danger of being seen as lacking! So much emptiness groping for the feeling of fulfillment!

How can so many people be trapped in the same tiger pit and yet believe that they are in it alone? It is a form of hell: a community of people so enrapt in their individual stories of need that they can’t really see the other members as allies. No one realizes that everyone is in the same trap. Everyone is hiding so no one can see. This kind of Separation is one of the side effects of Control. People trade their true power for control fantasies every single day.

It’s a paradox: what’s really happening in the control story is that people are giving their power away. In trying to control other people’s perceptions they’re actually giving away the only thing that they can control: what they think, feel and see and believe about them. They are dancing according to what others might think, they are changing themselves based on what others might see, and stifling their growth based on what others might feel or think. It is to practice the art of giving themselves away.

Are you playing an inner story of diminishment? Are you reinforcing in yourself the notion that someone else has your power? Are you trying to get your power based on others responses to you? Are you drinking your power from others or letting them drink their power from you?

You might not yet see it but it’s a waste of your energy, a drain on your creative potential. It requires you to manipulate others instead of dedicating your energy to the creation of what you want. Your thirst for power from others is, in truth, a series of actions dedicated to reinforce your powerlessness. It is a vicious cycle.

All you need to break the cycle is a boundary.

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Truly Powerful People (259)

Posted on November 25, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

259.
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 night I wrote this for the workbook for the class, Bring Power to Life, that I am offering in January. It is impossible for me to make an outline and then write a workbook, I have to do it in reverse: write and then organize the thoughts by creating the outline. I’m writing the first week of the class and it is already outgrown the workbook; too many thoughts spilling over the edges of my intention. Here’s a snippet:

When the actor in training stops trying to determine what the audience sees (power-from-others) and instead places his or her focus on their intention, they become powerful (power-with-others). Trying to control what an audience sees is an attempt to hide from what the audience might see.

It is paradox that most young actors, like most people, want to be seen but are afraid of what others might see if they were actually seen. It is a split intention: they want to be seen and at the same time fear being seen so they attempt to control the wrong thing. Fear will always have you believe that you have the capacity to control what others see which, in truth, is an action of masking, editing, or diminishing yourself. To control is to hide. As the young artist learns, trying to control the feelings and perceptions of others is in essence pouring their creative energy into a black hole. It is a winless game guaranteed to make them feel less safe in the world. It is a rule that holds on or off the stage.

Once they learn to control the controllable, instead of hiding, they participate. Instead of investing in power-over they place their focus in the play and begin creating power-with. They become clear and simple. They become available and present. The power comes when they learn to draw a line between what they can control and what they cannot. The power comes because they invest in relationship creation instead of relationship manipulation. They learn that they are only as powerful as the relationships they create. They are truly powerful when they are powerful-with-others. This is true on or off the stage.

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Truly Powerful People (258)

Posted on November 24, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

258.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Recently, a woman in class used this glorious phrase: she said, “This week I’ve learned to linger. I’ve learned not to move too fast to the next thing.”

On this day of Thanksgiving, I am particularly grateful for all the people that I’ve met in Hastings, Nebraska who, among their many gifts to me, have helped me learn to linger.

Lingering looks a lot like tossing Runza fries to ducks. Lingering is spontaneously making sack puppets that drink beer through eye glasses-shaped straws. Lingering is playing hide-n-seek in high school halls with my twin. Lingering is a big red chair in the Blue Moon with a mocha and my favorite insatiable curious mind asking really good questions. Lingering is not going back to the hotel too soon, u-turns, mischief, and a really good soundtrack. Lingering is breaking boards in the back yard after drinking Fireflies and eating pizza. Lingering is a stroll through Prairie Loft, and gardens, and secret passages in barns.

Lingering is this capacity for love that I have learned that is as big as the Nebraska sky.

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Truly Powerful People (257)

Posted on November 23, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

257.
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 sat with Stephen and his mother in my office. They came in once a week so I could review Stephen’s schoolwork and together we’d set goals and identify assignments for the next week. Stephen had Asperger’s, a form of autism. I’d worked with him for many years. He’d been in several of my plays and recently I’d taken a job in an independent learning center so I was his teacher overseeing his studies. He was a senior and the last time we met he wanted to talk about what he might pursue after high school. He told his mom and me that he wanted to be a disc jockey! He loved music and his enthusiasm was palpable so we set him up with an internship at the local radio station.

Now, as we sat in my office, Stephen was upset. He’d been surprised that the duties of his internship were something other than hosting his own radio show. He thought he was going to go to the station and launch The Stephen Show and was surprised when he was only able to assist the people in the station to produce a radio show. His mother tried to explain that no one hosted a show on day one. I listened as she explained again to him the need to learn the equipment, the roles and responsibilities of all the people involved, of how to record and edit.

Stephen listened patiently and then said, ‘I know all that. I just want to jump to the end.” We laughed heartily.

I think of that conversation often when I work with people – that would be most of us – who just want to jump to the end without moving through the beginning and middle; we want to be “there” at the expense of missing “here.” To be in such a hurry to achieve the goal and never fully comprehend that this goal is not an end but the beginning of the new goal. The riches are here, no matter where you are in the arc toward your idea of fulfillment. “There” will someday come and I’ll wager you, like all the wise old souls I am privileged to know, will reminisce about the times that you missed speeding to get somewhere that didn’t exist.

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Truly Powerful People (256)

Posted on November 22, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

256.
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 1984 and I have moved to Louisville, Kentucky to support my girlfriend, Linda. She has been accepted into the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville’s intern program, an elite intense year of actor training, all day, everyday, seven days a week.

We’ve been in Louisville for several weeks and our money supply is running dry. I apply for jobs all day, everyday and I am either too educated or not educated enough, too skilled or not skilled enough. I’m doing temp work, unloading semi-trucks filled with mattresses, digging holes, raking leaves, painting houses and still we are falling behind. We have very little furniture. In fact, the stuff we call furniture was never meant to be furniture: cinder blocks and saw horses. We are now rationing our Ramen noodles.

One night Linda snaps. She is angry and tired and frustrated. I come home from a day of waiting in lines and being summarily excused from potential jobs. I pick up the landlord’s newspaper as I come up the walk, look up and Linda is waiting for me, arms crossed. She unloads her exhaustion on me and I am too young to realize her anger is not meant for me so I take the bullet and return her anger with some frustration of my own. I fling my arms up in protest, the newspaper slips from my grip and like a pop fly at home base, it soars straight up above my head and down again, retracing it’s path, bounces once off my head with a supplemental bounce off my shoulder before I reflexively catch it.

She is a master of comic timing and waits just long enough for me to recognize that I’ve just clobbered myself with a newspaper before she bursts into gales of laughter. I try to continue my protest but cannot through the storm of her glee. My black mood cracks and I chuckle too, claiming that I meant to do it. I assure Linda, now overcome with her laughter, that I am an excellent shot and although I may not be qualified to do many things in Louisville, Kentucky, I am very qualified to humiliate myself publically.

The newspaper helped open our eyes. Her fear and exhaustion was hers. My fear and anger was mine. As is always the case, the bullets we shot at each other had nothing to do with the other person. It would be years of public humiliations before I’d learn the lesson: it is never personal; my stuff is mine to navigate, theirs is theirs to navigate, no matter how angry or ugly I have the choice to take the bullet into my body or let it pass me by. More importantly, navigating my stuff means to speak my truth, to say what I need before I start with the bullets.

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Truly Powerful People (255)

Posted on November 21, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

255.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

John is very present with me today. I haven’t seen or talked with him in years yet I feel as if he is sitting in the room with me. It’s odd. John is one of my heroes. I met him when he was 15 years old and he already knew the direction of his life path. He was going to direct plays and movies. He was fearless and capable of moving through obstacles with ease because he did not treat obstacles as reasons to stop; for John an obstacle is spice, a reason to engage.

John is dyslexic and as a young boy he was treated as if he were somehow deficient; he was placed in the “slow learner” classes and felt as if he were dying. One day he refused to go back to school until he was placed in the mainstream (whatever that means) and allowed to succeed or fail based on his work and merit. I’ve never known a harder working person.

When John was in his early 20’s he played Hamlet for me. I will always remember him, hours after rehearsal, sitting at a desk in a dark room illuminated only by a desk lamp, working with his script. For hours after the other actors had gone home, John was working his words. Years later, if I needed to know the worth of a script, I’d ask John; like Beowulf’s bees he’d transformed his nemesis dyslexia into his ally; he could see the structure of a script like no one I’ve ever known. He could see beyond the words.

The capacity to turn an obstacle into an ally is a skill all of us possess but few of us exercise. John has been a great teacher for me and I’m delighted that today he’s dropped in for a visit.

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Truly Powerful People (254)

Posted on November 20, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

254.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Power-with-others is quiet; it doesn’t need a trumpet or a drum. It needs no show. Power-with-others is like a mountain meadow during the first snow of the year. It is to stand still with the autumn sun on your face, eyes closed, and breathing deep.

Power-over-others is loud; it needs to dance and prance and make sure everyone knows it is there. It likes to roar and kick things. It is the alpha male beating its chest. Everything is a challenge. Everything is a reason to roar.

Both require agreements with others. The agreement central to power-with-others is conscious, intentional and generative. The agreement central to power-over-others is conscious, intentional and destructive.

What are your agreements?

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Truly Powerful People (253)

Posted on November 19, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

253.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Two old guys wearing suit coats and ties went to a coffee house to meet with a web designer (doesn’t this sound like the beginning of a joke!). The designer was a few years shy of 30 years old and he showed up to the meeting in his uniform: sweat pants and a hoodie. Two different eras and ideas of business collide! A microcosm of the old world meeting the new plays to the sound of steam, lattes and the smell of espresso. They stood gaping at each other wondering whether they should sit and talk or run for the exit.

They sit. The young web designer was studied in his ease, feigning confidence as he slumped to mask his what-the-hell-am-I doing-here panic. His grey haired clients looked knowingly at each other out of the corners of their eyes, silently carrying on a conversation they started before they walked in the door; “I told you so,” one look betrayed. “We’re wasting our time,” the other silently responded. They were out of their comfort zone, out of their culture, and wondering what happened to the time when an elder guided the youth through the complexities of the world, not the other way around.

And then, a beautiful thing happened, something that always happens when people look beyond their judgments and expectations and say what they really feel. The young designer sat up and through some divine inspiration said, “You have to help me know how to help you?”

The old guys, eyes popping, stuttered and said, “We don’t even know where to begin.”

“Thank goodness. Then we’re in the same boat with each other!” the young designer smiled. “How about if I ask you a few questions. Maybe you could teach me a bit about business and especially about your business. Let’s see if we can identify why you might need a website?” The old guys relaxed and replied, “The world passed us by and we’ve been a little intimidated.”

Common ground is a beautiful thing and so easy to establish when approached with open hands. Despite what we like to think,no one is powerful alone.

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Truly Powerful People (252)

Posted on November 18, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

252.
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 was a lazy autumn afternoon and we sat in a coffee shop for a few hours talking about art and life and travel. Our conversation was like a winding path that slowly went deeper and deeper into more personal and meaning-full territory. He asked a question, more to himself than to me, “If I value my family, why is it that I can never let myself just be with them? Why is it never enough to just be?”

A great question!

He was quiet for a moment as the question hung in the air between us, then he continued, “Why the judgment? Why the need to achieve all the time? I can never just be – and this need to achieve things every moment of every day is driven by this voice on judgment! There is no resting in the moment. Why can’t I feel contentment?”

His questions are ubiquitous; I hear people asking the same questions everywhere. Why can’t we feel contentment? Why the judgment?

Here are some questions to ask about these ever-present questions: What are you actually achieving? What are you actually judging? Do you know what you are trying to achieve or is it some abstract idea that is impossible to attain? What do you gain by giving away your life and relationships to something that is impossible to grasp, like sand running through your hands? What does doing enough look like? What does being enough feel like? Who in your life is the keeper of “enough?” Whose voice is in your head judging you? Why do you listen? Do you need to listen to the judgment?

As Viktor Frankel wrote, “Happiness ensues.” Contentment, like happiness is not something you attain, it follows. It is in the meaning your give to your day and your life not in what you achieve. Your life is like sand and it runs through your hands each and every day. What would it take for you to decide to be present and content in it?

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