The Direction of Intention

Truly Powerful People (201)

Posted on September 28, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

201.
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 just read a friend’s dissertation. He is an educator and his work is a model of leadership development for administrators. It is an elegant model, well researched and written and yet there was something troubling about it. The assumptions defining an administrator’s role are about “minding the outcomes of student achievement.” Achievement is the goal.

There is nothing wrong with achievement – everyone wants to achieve something in life – but the real question in public education is “achievement of what?” What are we trying to achieve? And, why? We’re learning that test scores are not great indicators or predictors of success yet “achievement” has become synonymous with “test scores.” Really? Our intention is better test scores? Our best intention for our children is preparation for a job in the marketplace?

This is from Neil Postman’s book The End Of Education: “Thomas Jefferson…knew what schools were for – to ensure that citizens would know when and how to protect their liberty. This is a man who produced an essay that could have cost him his life, and that included the words: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal: that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ It would not have come easily to the mind of such a man, as it does with political leaders today, that the young should be taught to read exclusively for the purpose of increasing their economic productivity.”

Has the bar for public education always been this low? I suspect it has and that’s the challenge. “Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic,” the mantra of a bygone era, rings hollow in an age screaming for complex thinkers. Reducing all learning to a mechanical skill is a notion from an industrial age. If the role of the principal is the equivalent of the manager, the superintendent as CEO of achievement, then imagine what the role of the student must be: chassis on the assembly line; sit still and listen. No wonder 25% of our kids drop out of school before graduating!

What would be the administrator’s role if the intention was to ensure that citizens would know when and how to protect their liberty? What would the administrator’s role be if the intention was to ignite ferocious inquiry? What if we wanted more than another generation of consumers and decided we wanted to support the development of children hungry, capable and unafraid to bring their best to the community and the world?

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Truly Powerful People (200)

Posted on September 27, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

200.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

A few years ago Duncan sent me an article about Nature Deficit Disorder – children who are deprived of nature. I rolled my eyes. I don’t have kids and I grew up running through the mountains, playing in the streams, riding my bike off of cliffs, throwing mud, looking at stars and sneezing in the spring (I had terrible allergies). I was wary about the article because it seems to me we have a cultural predisposition to see pathology everywhere. “Where are the parents,” I thought. “Go outside and play!”

And then…. I’m now convinced that we are so used to the reproduction that we rarely recognize the authentic. Our environments are constructed, our realities artificial. I’m now collecting phrases overheard in public spaces, things like “Those stars look just like the ones in the planetarium!” Or, “Those frogs sound just like a soundtrack!” I delight in the term “reality TV;” do an experiment: point a camera at someone and note the face they put on (note how you change when a lens is focused on you). The island is constructed, the race is scripted; there is a cameraman behind that camera so that intensely private moment you think you are watching is…a performance.

It is less a disorder than how we construct order. Distraction. Comfort. Disconnection from nature (unless used as a playground) is an intention. These are our priorities. Nature is messy and there are bugs. It is not an accident that the soundtrack is more recognizable than the frogs. And the frogs – the real ones – are disappearing (a phenomena known as “mystery declines”). From what I understand, a frog’s skin is porous and absorbs water so it is especially susceptible to pollutants in the environment (hmmmmm). Some researchers say that disappearing frog populations are an early warning signal of ecosystems in trouble.

Isn’t this yet another case of label-libel (the label absolves us from further thought). Place side-by-side the terms, “Nature Deficit Disorder,” “mystery declines,” and “Ecosystems in trouble” and ask yourself, is this really a mystery? Are these labels particularly sanitary and devoid of personal relevance?

Perhaps an early warning signal that we are in trouble is that the stars look just like the ones in the planetarium. The next time you wonder what life is all about, go outside, find someplace that you consider to be nature and sit for a spell. Take your shoes off. Get dirty. Feel the rain. Swat the fly. Imagine that you are a participant, part of it all.

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Truly Powerful People (199)

Posted on September 26, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

199.
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 found a slip of paper tucked in an old journal. It carries a message to myself, a vow that I made on a weekend retreat several years ago. This is what I wrote: I will leave starving behind and orient my life according to the feast.

I used to create starvation because I used to fear starvation. I used to feel as if the world was too big and that I had no capacity or skill to negotiate it. My way of controlling – of fending off the starvation was to retreat from the world, to hide as if the hounds of my fear would not find me in my retreat.

One day, the day I wrote this note to myself, I realized that I was starving myself – it was not “the world” that was starving me or my size relative to my desires – it was my fear that kept me from the table and the table was rich with taste and texture. The hounds of my fear created my retreat. I’d never literally starved (which was my fear) but I had never fully fed myself, never allowed myself to feast at the table of life because I was clinging to the shadows. The realization of my starvation-creation took my breath away.

Fear was my focus so fear was my creation. Starvation was my focus so starvation was my foundation. I’m grateful I found this note! It has been a long time since my emaciated soul stepped up to the table and took a seat. The feast is now my focus and yet everyday I see people just like me, starving, trying to control the things they cannot control, creating the things they fear the most.

I long ago learned I cannot open anyone’s eyes to the abundance of this life, but I can make room and keep an open seat at table.

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Truly Powerful People (198)

Posted on September 25, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

198.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Occasionally I have days when there is no gas in my tank, no thought in my head, no impulse to do anything. I call them “filing days” or “no power tools” days. I used to resist them. I used to push through them and force some kind of movement (and sometimes nearly cut off my fingers, thus the “no power tools”). I always paid a price.

Today I am empty. I am more empty than I can possibly describe. It is passages through emptiness that taught me – or required me – to distinguish between the energy (the feeling) and the story that I tell myself about it. Working with the energy is useful. Investing in the story is not. Emptiness provides an opportunity to sense – to stop all action and pay attention to what I feel.

The story was (and is) always a story of resistance. I am as puritan as the next guy in my orientation to the world but I have slowly recognized the power of non-resistance, the necessity of non-pursuit. Rejuvenation is sometimes only found in stillness, in non-action. My inner-puritan wants toil and hard pews, it warns me that rest is for the wicked and I smile (a particularly wicked smile) as I sit in the sun with my book. It yammers for a spell and quiets after a while, it has learned that I’m no longer invested in inner persecution.

Productivity will sooner return if I honor the emptiness of this day. And feel the sun on my face.

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Truly Powerful People (197)

Posted on September 24, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

My topic has been power, not the kind that people exercise over each other, but the kind people cultivate within themselves and others. “Power with….”

Most of my life my arena has been the arts and I believe the arts are meant to be a dynamic force in community. The arts, when functioning, are the force of identity and identity change. The arts are a great training ground for sorting out power.

In rehearsals and fine art collaborations, I have seen over and over again what happens when people stop wrestling with others for status and position. They stop waging war outside themselves and so, stop waging war inside themselves. People blossom when they stop eating each other for lunch. People excel when they align, focus on something bigger than their individual agendas and offer their best game. All of the energy of combat is rededicated to creation. All the energy of tearing others down is repurposed to calling forward the finest in everyone. Instead of diminishment and negation there is generative action and support. Everyone is necessary. Everyone matters. The competition moves from between people (externally driven) to within each individual (internally driven) – mastery becomes the focus.

Pie-in-the-sky? I suppose that depends on your point of view: are you in this life to bring your best to it or are you here to see what you can get out of it? Bring your best – even for a day – give what you have without inhibition and notice what happens to the people around you. I believe you will find that when you become truly powerful you invoke true power in others. Don’t take my word for it. Try it.

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Truly Powerful People (196)

Posted on September 23, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

196.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Terry taught me to scuba dive in the ocean around Bali. I signed up for a class and was the only student and he taught the class anyway. It took me a few days to realize that Terry was teaching me more than how to dive. He was teaching me about how to be alive. Like all great teachers, the subject matter was not important: the content was the method.

Scuba diving is about buoyancy. The mastery of neutral buoyancy was his first lesson and was the center; all other lessons could be traced back to this simple focus: get neutral. Find that sweet spot of neutrality and release all struggle, let go of all resistance. When you are neutral, you are present. Your breathing slows, relaxes. You expend very little energy; you surrender. You see.

The surrender Terry taught was not the western version: the giving up, waving a white flag, a movement to weakness. He taught the eastern version: giving over to something greater (the power of the ocean), a joining, a movement to power.

I’m still incorporating his lesson ten years later. Get neutral. Surrender. Participate in the power.

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Truly Powerful People (195)

Posted on September 22, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

195.
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 sunrise today was glorious. The sky exploded with pink, purple, blue and orange. It took my breath away and it brought my mind to creation stories and mythologies. When nature moves me to awe I often go right for the story!

Someone once said that a mythology is someone else’s religion. If it is not yours you read it as story, if it is yours you still read it as story but you invest the story with power, you look to it for guidance, you consider it to be a source. Even if you think you are an atheist, even if you have no investment in the metaphoric or literal interpretation of any story, it would still be worthy to recognize that mythologies matter. They are more than dusty tomes sitting on library shelves, stories from another time and place. They are living things and impact how you perceive and construct your world.

Consider this: if you live within a culture that worships the controlling, angry god, your mythology – whether you embrace it our not – is based upon the notion that nature is corrupt, particularly your nature. Nature (your nature) is to be controlled and transcended; thus the emphasis on reason and the denunciation of body, emotion, intuition, the feminine,… and all other aspects of your self that smack of nature. Compartmentalization is a notion that only has traction in a people needing to divide the head from the heart. Mythology gives context to your perception and provides your orientation to the world. Seeing the world as a resource to be used, a possession to be claimed, moving through life looking for what you can get out of it, trying to distinguish yourself as separate from the rest (while dressing to fit in) are all expressions of this basic story – this mythology.

In this mythology I can appreciate the sunrise, I can feel awe, but I can never truly believe that I participate in the sun’s reappearance.
There are other mythologies and therefore other orientations and some are stories of participation. I often wonder, when nature shocks me into silence with its beauty, what it might feel like to be part of the beauty instead of a witness to it.

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Truly Powerful People (194)

Posted on September 21, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

194.
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 one comes from Diane and our conversation about sugar. I’m not sure how we got from food addiction to playing the Victim but here it is none-the-less.

The role of Victim is like an addiction to sugar. If you eat a lot of sugar your body craves it; you need it. The same can be said of The Victim. It is an addiction. The notion that things happen to you, that you are buffeted by the winds of time and the tides of circumstance affords a remarkable abdication of responsibility for the world you inhabit and relieves your from all recognition of participation. Life happens to you. “It’s not my fault,” is easy and comfortable. Above all, it is safe (saying, “this is mine to do” is dangerous. You might be seen. You might feel powerful).

The verb at the center of The Victim is “to blame.” Spend ten minutes in any coffee house, bus stop, lunchroom, etc. and listen to the stories people tell. You will mostly hear stories of blame. Once in a blame cycle, like sugar, you need to keep eating it to fill the craving. Once in the cycle you will feed off the blame stories of others – everyone will share their candy with you because it validates your craving and gives you a tribe.

And, if you break the addiction, clean your body of the need, a small amount of sugar becomes too much – it no longer tastes as good as you remember. The same applies to The Victim role. Once you break the addiction, it no longer feels safe (because it is ultimately powerless). You just can’t stomach it, anymore. Everyone will want to share their blame-candy with you and you just won’t be able to stomach it. You will have to walk away because instead of blaming you are choosing.

Recognizing that you are in choice every moment of your life is a powerful addiction treatment program.

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Truly Powerful People (193)

Posted on September 20, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

193.

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 thinking a lot about a book Paul Watzlawick co-wrote several years ago called Change. This is one of the few books I’ve read that required me to map the discussion so I could follow and comprehend it. There are plenty of books written beyond my grasp but this one was important enough to evoke my inner cartographer. The book is built upon two theories:

Group Theory – concerned with what happens within a group.

Theory of Logical Types – concerned with what happens between groups or systems.

The relevant distinction for this post, the thing that brought me back to Change, is that Patti and I are currently focusing our work in education and the education system in America is a fantastic study in Group Theory (no real change is possible). Oh, if only I were interested in pursuing doctorial studies (I’d have to learn to write dense tomes but my status would surely rise). Here are the defining characteristics of Group Theory:

a) Grouping is the basic, necessary element of perception (true enough!)

b) Altering the order of members within a group brings change-ability in process but invariance in outcome (rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic will not keep the ship from sinking).

c) A member may act without making a difference: Action does not equal change (this is called “first order change”).

d) New combinations produce change but the result is still within the group. So nothing really changes.

A system is a living thing and will fight to the death to stay intact even if it is irrelevant, archaic, destructive to its members, and serves as the impediment to its stated purpose. Group Theory is the way a system fights to stay alive! It provides the illusion of change, action for the sake of action: First Order Change. Standardized testing is First Order Change. No Child Left Behind is First Order Change. Tying teacher pay to performance is First Order Change. Shuffling a deck of cards is First Order Change, talking about content as separate from method is First Order Change, imagining that the purpose of education is to provide a better batch of consumers or workers for a factory floor that no longer exists is First Order Change.

Action does not equal change. Rearranging the order of things within the existing system will continue to bring change-ability in process but invariance in outcome. It will certainly provide the illusion of change for a while, at least until the next election cycle or until the next generation of students dulls their minds enough to survive the system (and learn to say to their kids, “If it was good enough for me, it is good enough for you.”).

I wonder what it will take for us to desire more than “good enough.” The world has changed considerably since 1850 (seriously changed, not rearranged); we continue to swap the furniture in the factory and wonder why it is failing in our new world order.

I can’t help but use this quote again:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

R. Buckminster Fuller

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Truly Powerful People (192)

Posted on September 19, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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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 I think it is helpful to look at the world through the principles of design, as if all of life was a composition. Principles, in this sense, are the overarching truths of this profession called “design.” They form the “code” that we point to when we say, “that was a great design!” They can also help identify what makes a great life. They are useful principles in identifying and making life’s compositional choices.

Listen to these words as principles for a life well lived: Balance, Rhythm, Proportion, Emphasis, and Unity. These tasty words are ripe with promise! Balance asks, “Where do you place the weight?” It is a question of distribution that can be symmetrical or asymmetrical. Where do you place the emphasis in your thinking? Are you seeing the hardship? Do you focus on the obstacle or the possibilities? Where do you choose to place the weight of your thinking?

All of the principles are descriptions of relationship. For instance, the concept of unity describes the relationship between the individual parts and the whole of a composition. Rhythm creates a sense of movement, and establishes pattern and texture. We story ourselves according to the patterns we create, patterns that are regular, organic, or progressive – all are questions of relationship.

One of my favorite principles is “The rule of thirds.” This rule recognizes that the most interesting compositions (lives) are those in which the primary element is off center. Divide any visual frame into thirds and place the compositional element on one of the dividing lines. What is it to compose a life that is intentionally off center? It is to create movement. I work with lots of people seeking greater meaning in their lives and inevitably they need to leave their seat of safety (stasis), they must step out of the secure center to create movement, and walk into uncertainty.

No one awakes in the morning and says, “This is the day I will knock myself off center.” However, if you are feeling stuck in your life or that there must be something more, you might remember the rule of thirds. Leave your comfort zone for an hour and see what happens. Movement and relationship are at the heart of good design and a good life. The good news is that symmetry (balance) is available even when you are consciously moving off center. It’s a paradox, to be sure, just as stillness is available while you are in action. Paradox always makes for good design!

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