The Direction of Intention

98.
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 the final few weeks of our telecoaching class. Patti and I have asked the group to do something akin to attempting to consciously create each moment of their day. We’ve asked them to place their focus on their immediate relationships (with others, with nature, with themselves) and to ask, “Is this how I want to story this moment? Is this what I want to create in this moment?”

It seems like an impossible request until you consider that it is what you are doing anyway. The pertinent question is not, “Can you do it?” rather, the question is, “Are you aware of how powerful you are at creating?”

The most potent recognition I’ve had in doing this exercise (and I have it every time I do the exercise), when I ask the question, “Is this how I want to story this moment,” usually my answer is, “No.” Usually I want to create something else. I do not want to create frustration or angst or rushing around. I do not want to attempt to control or manipulate or pressure an outcome. I do not want to invest in a fear or let loose the lack monologue to rage once again about my mind. I do not want to deflect or hide. And the moment I see it, I let go my grip on something I can only call a “story.”

I let go, my eyes clear and I become present. That is why I suspect that creating is a quality of being as much or more than anything I will ever do.

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97.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Every story has multiple layers of meaning and each layer has multiple interpretations. Stories are meant to open slowly, each layer of meaning revealing a new layer of possible meaning, each layer of interpretation giving way to a wholly new point of view. This is particularly true of the story-you-tell-your-self-about-your-self. You are fluid, every changing; not fixed.

If you doubt this, take a look back at your life. Choose any moment from your past and review it, roll it around in your memory. How do you story it now that might be different than how you saw it 5 years ago? Each time you remember a moment you are reconstructing it; memories are not fixed in time. They are not isolated and true. They are fluid and available for any number of variations. You story your past just as dynamically as you story your present.

It is trick of language that something as changeable a memory is a noun, a “thing” that exists independent of your telling. Memory is a noun like river is a noun. It leads you to believe that you are describing something concrete instead of a dynamic life rushing toward its inevitable ocean.

How might you experience your life if you weren’t so wedded to your interpretations of your past?

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96.
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 researched, wrote and performed a story to accompany the music for Beethoven’s Creatures of Prometheus. In the story, Zeus commands Prometheus to create a pair of dull crude creatures whose single purpose is to worship the gods.

Out of clay Prometheus fashioned the first woman and man. He did not follow his orders and instead of shaping crude creatures he made them beautiful. He made them to be beautiful. He hid their shapes beneath a great tree so Zeus couldn’t see them. Knowing that Zeus would never give him the spark of life to ignite his creature’s hearts, he stole the fire, racing down the mountain to reach his creatures and give them life before Zeus discovered and destroyed them.

Zeus did not destroy them. He had a plan more cruel aimed not at the humans but at Prometheus. He let them live. He let the gods teach them wonderful things like music and mathematics, astronomy and dance.

And then, just as in the Christian version (called Adam and Eve), he metaphorically banished them from their garden by making them forget their true creator, Prometheus, and forced them swear allegiance to him as their maker. Instead of being the servants of beauty (for which they were designed), Zeus gave them a different focus. He gave them the desire for power-over-others and possession, he gave them war and put limits on their lives; he gave them separation from their beauty, he gave them fear as the focus of their worship. He gave them death.

But the woman held fast to the memory of Prometheus. She knew for a time that she would have to pretend to worship the angry god. She knew Prometheus would be waiting for them when the man, one day, also remembered what he was made to be, and together they would find their way to fulfill the original design.

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95.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Truly powerful people inspire true power in others without really trying. Their focus is not power or impressing or status or winning or being right. They inspire power in others because they are not concerned about it within themselves.

Tom often says, like a mantra or a phrase tossed off to dispel the phantoms of confusion, “A writer writes and a painter paints.” The action needs no story. The admiration of others does not make you a writer. Selling paintings does not make you a painter.

Artistry in any form is an inquiry into inner quiet; it is a relationship with uncertainty. The action needs no story. A writer writes. A painter paints.

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94.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

All humans are creative; it is what defines us. We are constantly telling ourselves a story and the story is of our creation. It is the most creative thing you will ever do!

It is impossible for you not to be creative but it is possible not to experience yourself as creative. It is possible to bottle your imagination, it is possible to define yourself as too small; you are free to reduce yourself to the lowest common denominator.

A deep sense of ownership and responsibility lives at the center of every creative being. If you are not feeling yourself as creative then you have probably given over your valuation (responsibility) to something or someone else. You are trying to stand in a center that does not belong to you (an impossible task) and you have given away your center to someone that cannot occupy it – it is yours to full-fill. It is a lose-lose proposition.

No one can determine what you think or see or feel. No one is responsible for how you think or see or feel. It is a sure sign that you’ve abandoned your center if you’ve assigned the responsibility for your feelings to someone else. The opposite is also true: you are incapable of determining what others think or see or feel. It is a sure sign that you’ve abandoned your center if you claim responsibility for how others think or see or feel. You are trying to inhabit a center that is not yours.

Your center is already yours – there is no need to go looking for it. What you seek is already within you grasp and it is waiting for you in your center. It is wildly creative. All you need do is stand still and claim it.

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93.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Empowered people empower others because the story-they-tell-themselves-about themselves is one of empowerment. They have no need to tell another kind of story or participate in any stories of diminishment.

Their story of empowerment, although original (as it is to all of us), was lost beneath a default story and not easy to remember and reclaim. Empowered people empower others because they know what sparkles beneath the dull face of the default story. They know how difficult it is to scrape away the clutter and see the original story of empowerment.

Each of us has a default story. It is the false story we learn and eventually claim that splits us from ourselves. It is the story of false comparisons or false expectations. Have you ever thought that you need to do something to be perfect? That is your default story. Have you ever told yourself that you are not good enough, not as good as others? That is your default story.

It is the story you resist and, paradoxically, the story that you claim. When you tell yourself that you are not creative, you are arguing for your default story. If you feel like you have one foot on the gas and one foot on the brakes, you are telling your default story.

What would it take to argue as vigorously for your wholeness as you argue for your diminishment? What would you need to relinquish to reclaim a story of wonderment and release the story of routine?

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92.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Truly powerful people are dedicated to inspiring true power in others because they have remembered themselves as powerful. They have come to know themselves again. And so, they no longer need concern themselves with things like power or worth or value or comparison or perfection or any other story that keeps people split.

Stepping back into your self requires some comfort with ambiguity, the capacity to stand firmly within paradox. You have to release what you think you are in order to inhabit who you really are. You come to see yourself not as fixed, a single identity, but fluid, an ongoing relationship (many identities). When you are ready to cease seeking your power from others you have the capacity to see your power within your self. In fact, you cease seeing power as something possessed by one and not by another. You see power in everything and everyone. You see.

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91.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Truly powerful people are dedicated to inspiring true power in others.

Remember, it goes like this: empowered people empower others. How powerful must you be to free yourself of the need to diminish others? What if your worth was no longer in question? Why wouldn’t you choose to be power-full? What if power was not something you strive to achieve but something you allow to be seen.

It is like peeling back the layers of time to reveal a forgotten city. It has always been there. What’s the resistance to being seen?

From C. Otto Scharmer: “Resistance is the force that keeps our current state distant and separate from our highest future potential. Resistance comes from within. Resistance has many faces and tends to show up where the weakness is greatest.”

Of course, the weakness to which he refers is fear. Think about it. Resistance is a force driven by fear. What keeps your “current state” separate from your “highest potential?” Where is your highest potential located if not already inside of you? Is it somewhere out there in the distant future? Is it a thing to possess (as our language implies)? Or is it a process, a way of being in the world? What would you need to be able to reveal your highest potential right now?

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90.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

When Brother Joseph was a young man he saw a woman die. She was a wealthy woman, dressed in a fine dress, hair impeccable, her fingers encrusted with diamonds and gold. He watched the life leave her body. He watched all of her investments in her status and image and story slip away. He imagined that when she started her day that morning she had a full list of very important things to achieve and plans for the next day, too. She closed her eyes and none of it mattered. He said that her jewelry seemed so empty as to be silly. Her death had a profound impact on his life.

He was no longer confused by what matters and what does not matter. He chose a life of service.

I was young when he told me the story of the woman dying. I was too young to fully grasp that I would die someday. That is no longer true. On days that I am angry, dark, drowning in self-pity or otherwise invested in the Drama of my story, I think about this woman dying and I wonder if my heart stopped beating would this storm inside of me matter? Is this how I want to spend even a single moment of my life?

There are cultures on earth (now mostly disappearing) that know the importance of looking at your own death. The ritual passage from adolescence to adulthood is meant to make young people journey into their source place and face their mortality so that they can be of service to the community and not consumed by self-interest. One is not considered an adult until initiated into the greater story.

The idea that empowered people empower others is not so strange in traditions that understand the need for initiation, in the mind that recognizes service to others not as self-denial but as life’s fulfillment. The idea that empowered people empower others is not so strange when you are clear on what matters and what is merely passing.

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89.
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 mother pulled me aside and whispered to me, “you might want to keep your ideas to yourself,” she pulled me closer saying, “you could get hurt here.” I thought she was kidding until I looked up and saw her eyes. She was genuinely concerned! I was in Olathe, Kansas for my nephew’s wedding and most of the wedding party and guests were conservative and fundamentalist Christian; I am neither of those.

At my home in Seattle I am surrounded by people who love to debate ideas. In fact, a disagreement of opinion is, to my friends, seen as a good thing, a necessary thing. Multiple perspectives are valued because ideas are seen as fluid and not fixed, truth is relative and so a healthy, hearty debate is essential. When I leave my community, I am slow to remember that there might be a different set of expectations; one in which concurrence is the glue that binds and speaking an opposing point of view is not welcome.

My mother’s caution took me by surprise. I looked around the room and saw my family, people I love though have rarely agreed (I have always been more liberal than my clan), I saw joy and laughter and celebration. I was invited to attend and did not perceive the danger that she did. Was I welcome as long as I kept my perspective to myself? This was her danger story, not mine.

This was a wedding, a ritual bigger than politics or points-of-view. A time when a community gathers to give witness and support to those they love at the beginning of their passage into a new identity of togetherness.

It is so easy to be in the bubble of agreement. We surround ourselves with people that are similar – my community is in agreement about the need for multiple perspectives – that is the agreement that binds us. We have conversations within a community of like minds. It is easy to agree when surrounded by others who share your belief. My mother’s caution was my cue to ask questions, to remind myself not to assume that I know what anyone thinks or believes. I don’t know but I am curious to ask.

More and more I want to shout, “Step out!” “Ask!” What keeps us in this game of tug-of-war and out of creating a new identity together? Diverge a little bit. Challenging your assumptions may help you see some things anew.

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