The Direction of Intention

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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Truly Powerful People (251)

Posted on November 17, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

251.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Each week in class we do a review of peer calls – coaches coaching each other – and we talk about what they learned from each other. One of the coaches was unable to connect with her peer but came to class very excited to tell us of her experiences in life during the past week. She said, “I think I’m more conscious!” Her excitement was palpable.

What do you mean by that,” I asked.

“I’m connecting with people in a different way.”

“How do you know? What feels different?”

She paused for a moment and offered, “I am less guarded – no, I am not guarded at all. I don’t feel the need to protect myself all of the time. I am much more available. And, here’s the thing, I am listening to people at a much deeper level. What people say is not always what they are saying.” And then she added, “It feels like life is an invitation.”

Extend an invitation to the world, and the world will extend an invitation to you. It is how things work. It’s the same notion as empowered people empower others simply because they step into the world as truly powerful.

I’ve suspected all along that life is really as simple as a Beatles lyric: The love you take is equal to the love you make.

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Truly Powerful People (250)

Posted on November 16, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

250.
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 had a huge revelation last week helped along by two experiences.

On a walk around the park, Megan and I bumped into Amy who had a new iphone. Amy was delighted and a bit mystified by her phone. She showed us how she could ask the phone (Siri) any question and the phone responded: Siri, a lovely female voice, gave her the answer. “So what,” you might say, “Everyone will have one soon, it’s the newest, latest, best-est, craze.” Yes. This technology is incredible and already ubiquitous; and it is not going away. In fact this technology, like all technologies is doing more than impacting us, this technology is changing us. What is it to have a device in your pocket that can answer most questions that pop into your noggin the very moment the question pops in?

Megan is in college, all of her classes are on-line, her connection to peers and teachers is virtual, she does research through Google, the entire experience is about access through technology UNTIL it is time to test what students have learned. The test is about the knowledge retained or contained in the noggin of the student even though the student, up to the moment of the test, has never needed to contain/retain or be the source of information anytime during the process.

The concept of “student” has for centuries been defined as a receiver (container) of information; we know how much knowledge has successfully made it into the container by testing the memory of the student. Memory has high value in the student-as-container paradigm. The role of “teacher” has for centuries been to pour the information into the student’s head. Teacher as source made sense until recently.

These roles and definitions have bugged me for a long time; I knew it was old world thinking but couldn’t put my finger on why or what the new world notion is or could be. Megan and Amy helped me see it. We live in the age of interconnectivity. The internet is greatest connector ever invented. The web is the greatest source of information in the history of humanity and anyone can plug into it. In fact, to work and live in the modern era you NEED to plug into it. Knowing how to access information and determine if it is relevant, substantial and useful is now the most necessary skill to master. Student’s can’t be passive receivers and no longer need to be containers. Mostly, they don’t require a teacher to pour information into their heads; they need a teacher who can guide their pursuit and help them learn to discern substance from blather. The teacher can no longer be the source (they can be a source). Student-as-container is the old paradigm; student as the “pursuer” of information is here to stay. The way we educate needs to catch up to the realities of life in this century.

As an educator said to me last year, “The kids are going around us. We’re standing in the way.”

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