The Direction of Intention

211.

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 circle comes back around in this meditation on power. It begins with a very simple idea: truly powerful people are dedicated to inspiring true power in others. And, like all simple ideas, it is harder to do than it is to talk about doing. Abstractions are always easier to entertain than the actual daily practice of doing something; it is the integration into your being that takes the effort.

It goes like this: empowered people empower others, not as something on the “to-do” list, not as a nice intention like going to church on Sunday so you can say, “I did it,” on Monday – empowered people empower others because that is how they’ve decide to orient into the world. It is who they are, not something they do.

Is it “pie in the sky?” A utopian ideal? Maybe. Maybe not. That depends on how you choose to look at it. Think about this: how powerful must you become to free yourself of the need to diminish others? Who might you become if you no longer needed to reduce others to elevate your self?

Power and worth and connected at the hip, they are the Siamese twins of potential. You’ll recognize someone struggling with their worth because they have the need to diminish others (assert power over others). Just so, you’ll recognize someone who is not questioning their worth or value because they bring power to life – in themselves and in others. They bring it to life. They are not wrestling with the perception of power or trying to attain power; they are power-full.

Power-over is a dramatically different thing than power-with; power-over negates power, power-with creates power.

This equation is like a mirror that reflects both ways. If your game is to reduce others you might stop and consider how much thought-time you spend reducing or editing yourself.  Do you carry in your bag of beliefs the stone that says, “You are not worthy?” How much time do you spend comparing yourself, hiding or tempering yourself?

What if your worth was no longer in question? What if your value was no longer an issue? What would you do with all of that newfound time and energy that previously was dedicated to bullying yourself or reducing others? You’d empower others simply by how you were showing up in the world.

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210.
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 a good deal of my life running away from the idea that I was powerful. Or, running toward it but like all good mirages it was never quite where I thought I’d find it. Like many of the people I now work with, I had been taught that my power and my answers were lurking “out there” somewhere if I could only find them. Inner truth, intuition, feeling, and heart took the back seat to intellect, reason, and the idea that truth was another one of those things located “out there” somewhere and I’d know it if I could capture and measure it. But, to capture it, I’d have to kill or compromise a part of myself, that part that feels or intuits. That part called soul. I might have a hole in my psyche but I’d have personal power. If it wasn’t measurable, it wasn’t important.

How do you measure love? What about friendship? Who has a tape measure that can accurately quantify passion or community? Is there a standardized test anywhere that can determine the depth of character or size the creative spirit? Who has a rubric for the quality of life?

I don’t know about you but this world has never made much sense to me. It’s always seemed to be upside down or riddled with false oppositions: is it really necessary to pit the head against the heart, the intellect against the intuition, the soul against the ego, and to demonize one of the poles? What a great recipe for internal warfare! There is nothing better to create and then have to control those combating inner voices; driving with one foot on the gas and the other on the brakes. Divide yourself against yourself and you are bound to develop a healthy case of self-loathing. As within, so without: the internal will find an outer expression for one very simple reason: if the story-you-are-telling-yourself-about-yourself (your inner monologue) is one of separation and disunion, the story you live, the story you see and practice in the world will be one of separation and disunion. The meaning you make will be one of division and usually the thing you will be divided from is any sense of meaning.

There are more potent forms of personal power than “power over” but you have to put down your ruler to see them. When you call a cease-fire to the inner warfare you quickly lose interest and need for power-as-dominance. You see it for what it is: like a drowning man only the powerless need to push others down to get to the top. Drowning others to save your self is a litmus test for low self-esteem. Think about it: if you can only experience a high by bringing others low, you are utterly dependent on how others see you. Instead of relying on others for your power, why not be powerful?

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208.

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 years I resisted the label of “life/business coach” because through my graduate work and new career exploration I visited many coach training academies. I generally left the experiences feeling that the relationships were constructed upside-down. They were transactional and often built upon the notion that the coach was responsible for making sure the client achieved their goals; coach as the accountability police. Yikes! So, in essence, the coach held the power in the relationship, the responsibility for forward movement, and was the keeper of accountability. In such a construct when the coaching relationship ends, the coach walks away with all of the learning. The client may or may not have achieved their goals but has certainly been thoroughly reinforced in a pattern of powerlessness.

Consequently, I didn’t have a label for my practice. I only knew that I wasn’t…that. There were many default phrases mostly dancing around the notion of connecting to creativity.

And then I met Sam and later Alan. Both call themselves coaches and their work is transformational, intuitive, and client-centered. In their practices (as in mine) the relationship is created so that the client is responsible for their actions, accountable to and for themselves, the emphasis is on their becoming more powerful, more capable, and more intentional. Clients learn to seek their answers from within instead of perpetually looking for how others do it. The work is as much in the “being” as in the “doing.” There is alignment between those two words (being and doing); they were never meant to be divorced or thought of as separate things; how can you be separate from what you do, how can your doing be anything other than an expression of your being?

It is all in where we place the emphasis. I can help you meet a goal and reinforce your powerlessness. Or, I can help you fulfill your potential, a process of emphasizing your power because you are personally accountable, as intuitive as intellectual, and take responsibility for your actions and choices (this is a great definition for creativity, too).

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204.
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 young couple pulled up in their battered white Ford truck. They were coming to pick up an old table that Lora sold though Craig’s List. We loaded the table into the bed of the truck and then Clay, the young husband and I, stood in the street and talked for an hour.

He talked of his love of remaking things and restoring old furniture. He told me his ability to restore stuff was life giving and I could see it in his eyes when he said it; he literally meant “life-giving.”

He told me he’d just been through a rough patch and struggled because he lost a bunch of work – he was a private contractor – and didn’t want to go back to being a cop. The thought was killing him. He told me the crucial moment came when he stopped entertaining the notion that he had to go back. He realized he didn’t have to do anything. He would choose to go back or he would choose not to go back – either way, it was a choice. His choice. And, he realized that he’d already made it. So he “stayed the course” and some work came his way.

He said, “A man with a plan can get through anything.”

I asked, “What’s your plan, now?”

He said, “To restore this table! It’ll be life-giving and there is no better plan than that!”

Do what gives you life! There is no better plan than that.

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