The Direction of Intention

265.
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 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.

Filed under: Power, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

264.
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 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.

Filed under: Power, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

263.
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 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.

Filed under: Power, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

262.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

[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…]

Filed under: Power, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

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.

Filed under: Power, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »