The Direction of Intention

Truly Powerful People (303)

Posted on January 8, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

303.
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 high school biology I remember dissecting frogs. We had a worksheet that guided our dissection, identifying internal organs, muscle groups, and the skeleton. We analyzed the component parts of a frog’s body, reducing it to smaller and smaller parts, reducing the small parts to even smaller component parts until we were looking at cells beneath a microscope. The lesson was designed for us to understand how all of those components, when reassembled, combined to be the body of a frog. Even then I was aware of how dependent my education was upon dissection and reduction: we diagramed sentences, we divided history into centuries, into decades, into years, into months, and so on. Synthesis, an action that is the opposite of analysis, was rare and generally discouraged.

As Joe recently said, “analysis is comfortable.” It leads us to believe that we know, that we are competent. If we can reduce it to its component parts then we can talk about it. We can agree on the functional purpose of the heart of the frog. The road of analysis leads to the city of Rules in the county of Doctrine in the state of Objectivity. It is useful, practical, and only half of the picture.

Synthesis is a walk in the other direction. It leads to greater and greater questions. It is to step toward uncertainty, to entertain possibilities, to have differing perceptions and points of view. To synthesize is to engage. To synthesize is to step into the picture and experience the frog hopping through your fingers. It is to touch life. It is another way of knowing, the kind that cannot be isolated or contained. It is the kind of knowing that requires poetry to articulate.

Our bias is our blind spot: to contain is not the same as to comprehend. There are many ways of knowing. To fully grasp what has value and what does not requires both analysis and synthesis. Our analysis bias is the line tripping educators and business alike. The test can tell you some things. The data can describe some things. There are a myriad of other things that tests and bottom lines can’t illuminate.

The same tenet applies to you. How much time do you spend analyzing your self, dissecting yourself, reducing your life to the component parts, focusing on the outcomes? Do you ever see your life as an ongoing process, as a miracle of connectivity, as a step into the unknown (do you really believe that you are containable, knowable)?

Think on this: To analyze the component parts of the frog it is necessary first to kill it. Do not be surprised when analyzing yourself that you wonder if you really matter or are confused about the greater meaning of life. To reach those experiences you first have to put down your scalpel and step into the dance.

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Truly Powerful People (302)

Posted on January 7, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

302.

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 moved to Seattle over a decade ago. My move was not planned. It was spontaneous, reactive, and felt like a leap into the unknown. It felt like a leap into the unknown because it was a leap unknown. I didn’t have a job or an intention. I didn’t know anyone and more to the point, no one knew me. There was no role to fulfill, no expectations, no identity that I had to uphold. It took me a few weeks to realize how much of my life was defined by the day-to-day relationships I had before my move. Suddenly, I was undefined. I was unknown to others. I was unknown to myself. It was both liberating and disorienting.

As I met new friends I was conscious of how I told the story of myself. I was amused and often surprised by story I told. What did I share of my past? What did I withhold? What did I need them to know? What did I want to scrub from my definition? What was true? What is truth? What is the difference between experience and interpretation? I was conscious of how my new friends told their stories and identified themselves, too. It was like a game. I began to understand how we story ourselves every moment of everyday: we tell ourselves and the people in our lives a story of who we believe we are. We tell the story of what we do or wish we did, we tell the story of what we have or do not have, of what we fear to do or have mastered. And, most significantly, I recognized that the story is not fixed, it is fluid, it is dynamic.

I recognized that the healthy people in my life knew that they were dynamic and not fixed. Their story was vibrant and relational. The powerful people were not investing great amounts of energy in claiming their identity like a miner claims territory. They did not need others to see the world as they saw it; they needed to engage with multiple perspectives not eliminate them. Growth to the truly powerful is expanding consciousness. Their energy is directed at the creation of life and not the perpetual creation of rules and boundaries. They were not fixed; they were fluid. The truly powerful people were not enabling others or themselves.

I’ve learned (from experience) that this quality of fixed or fluid story reveals the root: a fixed story is a story of fear. A fixed story is looking for power in others. A fluid stroy is rooted in love and knows itself as powerful; the story is not about need, it is about gift. It is a story lived through what you bring to life.

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Truly Powerful People (301)

Posted on January 6, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

301.
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 morning I watched the sunrise as I coached someone. Our conversation was about disappearing and I remembered this post from another time, another blog. It serves the meditation today so I’m reposting this in the truly powerful people stream).

I am sitting in Leigh’s townhouse. From here I can see downtown Oakland, the Bay Bridge and now I can see downtown San Francisco; the city is just emerging from the morning fog, a cold grey silhouette. I knew it was there. For the past hour I’ve been sitting at the window, sipping coffee, waiting for the city to reappear. I wanted to see the moment. I wanted to be present when the city returned like Avalon from the mists of time.

Lora tells me that her mother used to stop what she was doing and go outside to watch the sun disappear beneath the horizon. Every evening of her adult life, for a few moments, she would step outside, feel the last rays of the days’ sun on her face and watch until the last hint of light dipped beneath the horizon. In my imagination she stepped out of her “to-do list” and for a few moments stood as a silent witness, present in the world.

These rituals of appearance and disappearance are much on my mind. There are cultures that face east in the dark predawn hours and sing so that the sun will rise. It took me years to understand that their song was not so much about invoking the sun to rise (a result) as much as it was about reaffirming their connection to the cycles of life (a relationship). While going through college I drove a bread truck to support myself. My route took me east so I saw the sun rise every morning. After several weeks of watching the sunrise something changed in me. I no longer watched sunrise as an event or a marker of time. The sun rising had little to do with time. It had everything to do with renewal and affirmation. The sun invoked a song in me and I sang with a kind of abandon I have not known since. It was an imperative. I had to participate in the reappearance of the sun.

My friends surprise me sometimes because they see my time in the bread truck as a hardship or as something beneath me. They say, “I don’t know how you did that.” They do not understand; at that point in my life I had disappeared like San Francisco into the fog. I was in a liminal space, no longer what I was and not yet what I would become. I was like the body of the caterpillar gone to mush, unrecognizable with no hint of the butterfly yet apparent. I was lost and afraid. The bread truck was my cocoon. In the stillness of the predawn hours I regained the quiet of my mind. I lived simply. I delivered bread, I drank coffee, I ate hot baguettes, and each morning the sun raised from within me a song of renewal. In my bread truck I began to understand that my life would no longer be understood through results, lists, achievements, or outcomes. The meaning of my life would be defined by the quality of my relationships – and by that I mean my capacity to be present. Slowly, I appeared out of the fog.

Most of the people I coach are somewhere in the cycle of reappearing or disappearing. They are usually uncomfortable because they are still living under the expectation that their song must raise the sun (their focus is on the result). The things on their to-do list have overtaken the reason why they are doing them. We live in a society that has little awareness or appreciation of the cycles of life and sometimes I think my work is simply to give witness to the caterpillar as it reduces to mush. Disappearing is natural and necessary for the butterfly to emerge and the butterfly always emerges. The struggle is necessary. Resisting the change is like trying to keep the sun from going down.

Leigh is one of the world’s leading authorities on Rock Art (cave painting, petroglyphs, etc.) and his townhouse is a feast for someone like me. It is a treasure house of books and images from Rock Art sites – places where centuries ago humans scratched an image into rock or painted a picture on the wall of a cave. We don’t know why they made these images, we can only speculate about the figures and what they represent. I’m willing to bet that these people weren’t working for some effect or result. The images they created were less important than the relationships the image encouraged; the “doing” was in support of the “being” and happened in that space between disappearing and reappearing.

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Truly Powerful People (300)

Posted on January 5, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

300.
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 used to be particularly gifted at catching other people’s anger. I’d say to myself, ‘I caught the bullet on that one.” I was not (well, not often) the genesis of the anger but I certainly knew how to stand up at the perfect moment to catch the bullet. Had I lived as a saloonkeeper in Dodge City, I would not have lived long.

I caught bullets because I thought it was mine to do. I was the middle child, the peacekeeper in the family. Stepping in front of warring parties came with the job description. It was the job description. And then, one day deep into adulthood, I asked a really good question: “What am I doing?” The bullets were not aimed at me, they were not meant for me, why was I taking them? Here’s a secret: bullets fill you with a false sense of worth. When I asked myself, “What am I doing?” I was also saying to myself, “You are worth more than this.” People stopped shooting when I stopped accepting bullets. Like all forms of enabling, bullet-taking is a bargain (I’ll take your bullet if you give me a sense of worth); the bargain diminishes the shooter and the bullet-taker.

Questions of worth are really questions of Ownership in disguise. No one can give you your worth. You can push it away, you can look for it in the eyes of others but at the end of the day, you are the one who knows if your work is good, if you are following your bliss, if you are doing your best, if you are bringing you game to the world. You are the one who knows. It is your standard that needs meeting. Own it. Meet it. Worth will become a non-issue.

I understand ownership (and worth) as a dynamic energy flow: practice owning your energy, practice not owning anyone elses energy. Own what is yours; refuse to own what is not yours. Ownership begins with boundaries and grows strong when you stop making assumptions about what would be best for others. I’ve learned that people will still shoot bullets but we choose whether to catch them, duck them, or let them pass through.

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Truly Powerful People (299)

Posted on January 4, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

299.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

We had a great conversation in class today. Alan and I co-facilitated a discussion about one of the Hermetic Laws, Correspondence, (As within, so without. As above, so below), and how the principle relates to coaching and personal responsibility. Correspondence is, in Alan’s words, about “communicating with…,” it is, to use again my metaphor from yesterday, about the dance of giving and receiving, distinction and oneness as paradox: two ways of experiencing yourself. In Correspondence, there is no separation; you impact everything, everything impacts you. In this sense, you create everything and everything creates you.

It is a powerful shift of perception when you cease thinking of yourself as a bystander and realize that you are a participant. Even as an observer, no matter how passive you believe yourself to be, you are changing the equation; you are in relationship – or to be more specific: you are a relationship. Your choice is about how you want to participate.

Plenty of us stare into our television sets and complain about the state of the world; we believe we are too little to have an impact. Others march and protest. Others go to work everyday, everyday, everyday. Some of us raise children, some of us write poetry, sing or dance. Some of us run for office, govern, practice law, practice medicine, play basketball and some of us vote. We commute, we bank, we purchase, we consume, we worship, we produce, we rest, and none of it happens in a vacuum. We commune. We commune globally (warning, here comes a mini-rant: the economy has been global since Marco Polo. Those spices in your spice rack didn’t come from Kansas. Chances are that grandma’s fine china was not made in the continental United States. Innovation has always happened at the cultural crossroads and the United States is nothing if not humanities first intentional crossroad. Movements to “bring jobs back to America” or to “buy American” are fundamentally unclear on the concept or locked into an old world notion. Functionally, there is no “us and them:” that thinking is born of fear and a desire to have power-over. That’s why the recognition of Correspondence is so potent: there is no separation, there is only what we create together. Change always moves from the inside out and that goes for nations as well as individuals).

As one of our class members said, “You can ask yourself a rhetorical question, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ This question will provide the illusion that you have no responsibility. Or you can ask yourself a very different question. The second question looks very much like the first but is fundamentally different. As an active participant in life, as a creator, ask with curiosity, ‘Why is this happening?” It all depends upon how you choose to participate.

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Truly Powerful People (298)

Posted on January 3, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

298.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

There is an amazing image of connectivity from The Go-Giver, a powerful business parable by Bob Burg and John David Mann (this book is not just for business folk). They structure their parable around 5 Laws of Stratospheric Success and the image I adore comes from the final law of Receptivity:

“At this instant, all over the globe, all of humanity is breathing in oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide. So is the rest of the animal kingdom. And, right now, at this instant, all over the globe, the billions and billions of organisms of the plant kingdom are doing the exact opposite – they’re breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. Their giving is our receiving and our giving is their receiving. In fact, every giving happens only because it is also a receiving.”

You cannot take a breath without entering the dance of giving and receiving. In fact, you are never out of the dance of giving and receiving. How might you live if you recognized that everything you do and think is a form of giving and it matters; somewhere someone or something is receiving your offer just as you are feeling the impact of their offer. Bob Burg and John David Mann write, “the key to effective giving is to stay open to receiving” because “every giving happens only because it is also a receiving.” Entering the dance often requires us to learn how to receive.

Your dance can be a dance of amplification, renewal and empowerment or it can be a dance of diminishment, resistance and exhaustion (in other words: are you in it for what you bring to life or for what you get out of it?). Drop the wall of protection, let go the mask and the editor and bring the greatest gift you have to offer. And then open you arms and receive without false modesty the best that the world has to give.

Breathe. Dance.

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Truly Powerful People (297)

Posted on January 2, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

297.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Sometimes the smallest pebble unleashes an enormous avalanche. This morning I decided on a whim to clean out a computer file; a small gesture to begin the new year with one less file. Soon entire folders were disappearing, years of accumulated blather whisked onto thumb drive (a little e-mausoleum). Before I knew it I was possessed and found myself cleaning out filing cabinets, storage boxes and drawers. I hovered above my body and watched myself organize 2011 receipts and bank statements (I wondered if I was actually possessed by David Miller, artist extraordinaire, one of my heroes, and the only person I’ve ever know who loves to prepare his own taxes). I prepared numbers for my accountant, paid bills that didn’t need paying, and set up new files for 2012. “What’s happening to me, “ I thought as I cackled and sequenced bank statements.

I came back to consciousness when the sun went down. I was staring at my closet suppressing the impulse to take all of my clothes to Value Village when I realized it was dark and the day was past. I was a bit disappointed realizing that, instead of being a vampire coming to life at sunset, a shape shifter with eternal life, I had become an obsessive-compulsive office assistant by the light of day. And, although I might have wanted a more dramatic story, I couldn’t be more surprised at my actions today. The sun down saved me – can you imagine the clothes I’d have found in my closet if I’d let my new persona do the shopping?

Day one of 2012 was a festival of clearing. It was a feast of reorganization. It was more than a step toward discomfort – it was a mad sprint toward things I generally avoid. It was astonishing and playful and fun. And it bodes well for an amazing year of wonderment

What I learned today: I can have a good time doing anything. And, I think I will choose to have a good time doing anything all year. What will you choose?

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Truly Powerful People (296)

Posted on January 1, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

296.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

We wake this morning to a new year. Last night in Rio people wore all white to the beach. At midnight they walked into the ocean and cleansed themselves of the past and emerged with a clean slate for the New Year. All their burdens were washed away. Then, they danced all night.

In Edinburgh at midnight people opened their front door AND the back door to let the old out and the new in. Then, they shared whiskey and cake with their friends and anyone else who saw that their door was open.

In Spain, people ate 12 grapes during the final 12 seconds of 2011; one grape for each passing second and with each grape they made a wish for 2012. And then they shared wine with their friends.

There are amazing rituals all over the world of welcoming the new after releasing the old. Whatever your ritual, no matter if it is internal and quiet or raucous and lively, stand before the blank canvas of 2012 and ask yourself, “What will I bring to this year?” And have a great time bringing it to your life. I will meet you there.

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Truly Powerful People (295)

Posted on December 31, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

295.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

There were colors in the sunset sky tonight that I have never seen before.

I went for a walk late in the afternoon to clear my mind and to ponder this question: How can I best give what I have to offer? I’m wrestling with the “how” questions. I know the “why” but wonder if there is a better form for my work – or perhaps I am standing in my own way and can’t see what path to walk. I was struggling. My pockets were loaded with 3×5 cards and pens so I could capture the answers that were bound to magically appear as I walked (they often do). The moment that I stepped out of my apartment my oh-so-important-question evaporated into the winter sky.

I am a painter so my usual first thought when I see color like I saw tonight is, “How would I mix that color?” Instead, the my first thought (post-wow-moment) was a statement of surrender, “I don’t have a clue how to mix that color.” And then the idea that I needed to mix it or capture it or get a photograph of it evaporated, too. It was THAT beautiful. So I walked into it, thinking it would fade in a few moments as sunset skies do. Instead, it grew more intense.

I lost myself in it. What I’d intended to be a short walk to clear my mind became a long walk that blew my mind. I lost track of time. I lost track of the need to track. I walked with it. And then, in a moment, as if released from a spell, the sky darkened, the colors faded and I found myself several miles from home asking myself another question, “How did I get here?”

As I retraced my steps home I realized that my original question no longer seemed relevant. In fact, it was the wrong question to ask. Instead of trying to see the path before I walk it perhaps I should do what I already know to do: walk it. The idea that there is a prescribed path that I will take if only I can see it is a desire to control, to know what is coming; it is an attempt to be safe and comfortable instead of uncertain. My prescribed idea of an afternoon walk did not include a sky that took my breath away. My idea did not come close to the actual experience of living it. Isn’t that always true? So, this is what I wrote on my 3×5 card: Get lost in the beauty of it all. I’ll recognize the path at the end of my life when I look back at it.

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Truly Powerful People (294)

Posted on December 30, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

294.
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 morning I read an article that Joe sent my way- it was in the Harvard Business Review and is about a large $700 million company, Morning Star, that runs without managers. I cheered! The employees are self-directed and self-regulated and the company is prosperous and efficient by any standard. Not only that, but the people that comprise the company are happy.

It might be hard to imagine in our culture of control but, given the opportunity, most people will chose responsibility and the freedom that comes with it over compliance and the drudgery that comes with that; no one wants to be told what to do, especially when they know what needs to be done. Everyone will do their best work if they know why they are doing the work and have some say in defining what their best work is. Everyone will excel when they are part of a team and know that they matter and their work matters to the team.

It is an old world notion that time = money; it is a new world reality that relationship = money (efficiency is a quality of relationship, not a aspect of good management). Productivity is maximized when the producers are invested in the quality of their work – and that is a team sport as much as an individual investment. Bureaucracies are breaking down because the world of work has changed. Hierarchies are antiquated in the age of inter-connectivity. It is the same challenge that our schools are experiencing with a slightly different face.

It is an odd assumption that people need managing, and that managers need managing, ad infinitum. People do not need to be forced to work when they are in pursuit of mastery.

It is a sad assumption that empowerment necessarily comes from the top down. It doesn’t. Empowerment is not something that is given (that is the misguided assumption of privilege); empowerment is something that is shared and amplified; it is tangible when a group of people are invested in the growth and betterment of all members and are not relying on Olympus to tell them when they do good work or not.

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