The Direction of Intention

88.
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 story is always yours to tell and you can tell it in any way that you want. It can be a tragic tale, a tale of woe, or it can be a story of opportunity and deeper truth. It can be embarrassing, a story of shame or defeat or it can be a story of learning.

The path of mastery is always a path of learning. A path of mastery has no true arrivals because the focus and expectation is invested in the quality of the walk not the place of arrival.

In relationship, there is an equation between boundaries and the capacity to story a path of mastery. The path of mastery begins when personal boundaries are established and clear. If you are invested in fulfilling the need of another – or trying to fulfill your needs through the eyes of another, you are dancing for an outcome, a reaction or response. You are confusing your needs with the needs of the other. That is enabling, a bargain that will eventually lead to collapse. Ana-the-wise calls this “vampiring.”

Clear boundaries will shift your focus from what you get from someone to what you bring to the relationship. When your focus is on what you bring you are walking a path of mastery. Only then are you capable of telling a story of growth and learning.

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87.
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 mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work unless it’s open.”

Sometimes I think we are living in one big episode of Survivor. Nothing is what it seems; everything is a performance intended to drive ratings. As Tom once asked, “What are we pretending to not know?”

Maybe we no longer know we are pretending.

Lora watched a news opinion show and a pundit played multiple examples of political and business leaders using the word “socialism” as a label meant to scare people or brand an opponent. What became clear was that the politicians flinging the phrase around had no idea what socialism is and what it is not. The meaning of the word was irrelevant as long as fear and loathing was the result.

Language is powerful and we play with it like a child who just found the key to daddy’s gun closet.

A few years ago JP was on a chef competition show and was outraged that the producers tried to pit the contestants against each other. “It was ugly,” he said, “they did everything they could to make us hate each other.” “What did you expect?” I asked. “I thought we were there to cook!” he shouted. “Did you think you had to go on television to cook?”

We watch the car race for the crashes, not to see who first crosses the line.

When language is not recognized to have any power it is easy to confuse news with entertainment, substance with diversion. We confuse those things within ourselves, too; what you bring to life gets lost in the pursuit of what you can get. You reasons for doing things get muddled.

In fact, we are witness to what happens: conflict is common in our narrative; entertainment trumps the essential because we have trouble sorting which is which. Conversations happen within communities of thought, not between them. And then we wonder why we are so polarized, so incapable of dealing with the challenges of our time. Take a look inside yourself – are you as divided within yourself as the Democrats and the Republicans? Doesn’t your inner judge sound as rigid as the tea party?

Blame is easy and always makes for good ratings but not much else.

This culture is not happening to us. We create it again and again everyday. I often wonder if the national dialogue drives the internal monologue or vice versa?” We are not as separate as we’d like to believe nor are we as impotent as we like to pretend.

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86.
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 I was young I waited until the sun went down to paint. I waited for my parents to sleep, my brothers and my sister to settle and then I would get up and begin to work. My muse lived at night in the quiet spaces. I came alive when the rest of the world slept.

I had a wall in my bedroom that I painted with images from magazines or from my imagination. I worked in black and gray and white. I loved the limitations and the extremes of such a limited palette. I painted Charlie Chaplin and a Turkish marauder. I painted over them with a log cabin, my imaginary sanctuary in my imaginary woods. I told myself stories of living there as I painted and repainted the same scene. I loved the night and what I was able to do and feel.

The daylight always came like an assault. I could not focus with all of the movement and sound, my mind was pulled this way and back again like a game of crack-the-whip. To survive, I developed the skill of being able to disappear into drawings. I could contain the chaos in the movement of my pencil and channel it into an image emerging in front of me; sometimes I felt like I controlled the image but most times I knew it was coming through me; I was like the pencil, useful for the revelation of image and story though not the source. I didn’t think about it.

I had the eyes to see magic until I started to compare and to invest in what others saw. I had not yet learned that what they saw had nothing to do with what I created. They were creating something entirely different because their eyes were not my eyes. Despite years of evidence to the contrary, despite my love of the night and the feeling of revelation, despite knowing how to disappear and reappear, I began to think about it and so I doubted my capacity and assigned it a label: not good enough.

Not good enough always leads to a second label: fraud. Fraud is like a heavy older brother that sits on your chest until you can’t breathe. Fraud leaves you alone if it thinks you really are going to die – when your face turns read from too much doubt and lack of breathing, Fraud let’s up on you a little bit.

Fraud gets off of you when you stop trying to see through other people’s eyes. Just like an older brother, Fraud will let go when you stop fighting. Fraud has no fun unless you are resisting. This is what I learned: everyone has the eyes to see magic and your magic seeing eyes will return when you peel off the labels, let go the investments and breathe for awhile. The sanctuary doesn’t go away, you do. Choose to come back.

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85.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

“Criticizing is easy, art is difficult.” Anonymous

What holds you back? What is the wall you bump into that reminds you that, “You are not fulfilling it?” Whatever “it” is. Is it something that holds you back or something you can’t quite reach? The verb is important. Is it the idea that lives just beyond your fingertips, like the word you want to use but can’t quite call up? The play you want to write but you hold only fragments in your hands; the character who wants to speak through you but like a wild animal lurks just beyond the trees. You know it is there but cannot coax it out. Its eyes stare back at you and though you cannot see them you know they are there. You feel it.

You catch a glimpse of ‘it’ every so often, enough to tease you forward, enough to keep you reaching for it or pressing against it or listening for it to call your name. The verb, remember the verb.

Before I go through security for my flight home Patti gives me Just Kids, the book by Patti Smith about her early years in New York and her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. All the while reading it I feel “it.” I “feel” it and it makes me uncomfortable and delighted and enticed to open to “it.” Enticed. Open. Delighted. Uncomfortable. I feel it. I am re-minded.

I am reminded that to complain about life is easy. To blame is as easy a falling down. To live it, to act on it, to act in it, to act as it, to dance with it and trip with it; to love it, that is more difficult. It requires standing up. It asks you to choose. To choose it. To participate. That is art. And, if you are present to it, it will always be just beyond your capacity to grasp it. That’s what keeps you moving.

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84.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.” George Santayana

Memory is a construct. It is a story that changes in the re-membering. It is not fixed in time. It is not truth. It can be contradictory as what once seemed so difficult now is storied as the most potent learning experience of your life. What once seemed so important in the retelling is insignificant. The smallest gesture can leave the greatest mark. The sequence of events is malleable. Just as eyewitness testimony is proving to be untrustworthy, your eyewitness testimony about your past is equally unreliable. You create your past again and again and again.

Even so, we root our limitations deep in experiences from the past, experiences that we claim to be true. Some of the limitations we impose on ourselves are useful as locators: we know who we are by the rules we maintain and the boundaries we embrace. Some of the limitations are unnecessary, shackles we embrace none-the-less. We invest in our pain and argue for our confinement.

Memory is necessarily a paradox.

Change happens when you can change your story, when you can change your relationship to the story you claim as your past. Growth is not possible when you hold onto the story as you’ve always named it. Growth happens when you can open your hand and let go of the story that says, “you can’t…” or “you’ll never be….”

What if the story you tell yourself is neither true nor false? What if it is simply a story with multiple interpretations and you get to choose which version you claim? What would it take for you to open your hand and let go of the old story?

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83.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Rualdo was born in Guatemala and as a young man had to flee his country for giving voice to his political ideas. He would have disappeared like so many of his friends and colleagues had he stayed.

Recently, Rualdo and I were taking a walk and he asked me why Americans were so silent. From his point of view, when the governor of a state (Michigan) attempts to suspend the collective bargaining rights of the people, it is a dangerous precedent and all of the people of the United States need to stand up and support the working people of Michigan. He is troubled by the national haranguing teachers are subject to when there is no political will to actually address the system. His list of examples of complacency in the face of corruption and abuse was long and disheartening.

“Why don’t Americans stand up for themselves?” he asked. “Why are you so silent?”

I had two responses. I told Rualdo what my dear friend Roger once said: Americans will be complacent as long as our televisions and dvd players worked. We will defend to the death our right for distraction. And second, we are too busy fighting amongst ourselves to fight for ourselves. The Giddy Masses is woven into the national fabric.

More importantly, Rualdo’s question brought me to consider something that has a deeper resonance for me: resistance to “what is” is not very useful unless it opens your eyes to what you want to create; creation is movement toward something, resistance is movement away from something. I told Rualdo that I believe we are silent because we don’t know what we want to create. We are inert because we don’t have the experience of “we.” A common narrative binds communities and our narrative is one of division.

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82.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Generally people withhold their voice for two reasons: because of what their thoughts will reveal about them or because with giving voice comes responsibility.

I do not underestimate the difficulty in reclaiming your voice once you’ve silenced yourself; vulnerability and ownership of perspective are easy to talk about but difficult to live. Patterns of silence and suppression are wicked to address until you realize that your actions in the world are a kind of voice, a form of practice. Silence and inaction are clear statements of belief. You are giving voice all of the time by what you choose to do.

One of the major stories most of us walk into is the story that we have to be this or that for others. For some reason, meeting the expectations of others is more important than meeting our own expectations. It is safer to be silent until the silence suffocates you. I suspect at the base of it all is a variation of the “I’m not good enough” story. I remember swearing to myself, after one particularly shame filled slap, that I would never give voice to my thoughts again. I mistook the slap for a statement of no-value. It took me a long time to recognize that the slap came because what I said was honest; I said what others were thinking and could not say. The only true shame from the experience was in my silencing of myself.

Voice-less-ness comes from practice. Keeping your thoughts to yourself is a learned skill. The opposite can also be true: what would happen in your life if you began the practice of sharing your thoughts? What would you need to change to feel safe enough to make strong offers regardless of how other people perceived your thoughts and ideas?

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81.
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 have no voice,” is a statement that Patti and I hear a lot from groups. Of course, the obvious follow-up question is “Who do you believe has your voice?” Or another version of the same question, “For whom do you stifle your voice?” It is not true that you have no voice. It may be true that you are afraid to use it.

There is a distinct difference between having a voice and using it. People use their voice when they feel safe; they withhold their voice when they do not feel safe. Perhaps the better question is, “when do you feel unsafe to give voice to your thoughts and ideas? Why do you feel unsafe?”

What do you need to change in your life and within yourself to feel safe enough to speak?

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80.
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 am surrounded by books. I love books. They are like people; some are merely acquaintances while others become dear friends that I visit often. One of my favorites is Influence by Robert Cialdini. Recently, I spent the morning rereading the last chapter because it has been haunting me, sitting in the back of my mind for months. He posits that, with the pace of technological change and the explosion of information we’ve had to adjust to the way we make decisions. He believes that, although we all want to make carefully considered decisions, “More and more we are forced to resort to another decision-making approach – a shortcut approach in which the decision to comply (or agree or believe or buy) is made on the basis of a single, usually reliable piece of information.” He continues, “An isolated piece of information, even though it normally counsels us correctly, can lead us to clearly stupid mistakes….”

This is the great paradox; the tiger trap hidden in the jungles of contemporary life. We are moving too fast to see clearly. We are so inundated with information that we meet complex challenges with simplistic thinking and are dumbfounded when we further complicate the challenge. Surrounded by information, we are uninformed. Inundated with information, we cannot hear our inner voice.

It is the word, “isolate” that called me to the chapter; “An isolated piece of information,….” Most people I know feel isolated from some sense of greater meaning, purpose or community. A standardized test is nothing if not an attempt to isolate meaning from greater context. Many of the people I coach in business wonder why they are doing what they are doing. Their actions are isolated from a clear intention.

There is an old Chinese parable; an image of hell in which people sit amidst a fantastic feast, starving because their chopsticks are 3 feet long and they are incapable of getting food to their mouths.

Sometimes the change we need is counter-intuitive. Slowing down enough to get out of traffic and breathe. Standing still. Listening inside. Not buying the line that anything about a human being can be standardized. Offer a helping hand to someone so they know they are not an isolated bit of information. Offer a helping hand so that you know that you are not an isolated bit of information.

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79.

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

On the southern most point of the big island of Hawaii after leaving the main highway, several miles beyond the rows of wind mills on a road more pothole than pavement you will find a rocky spot called the leaping place of the soul. It is the place were native Hawaiians believe, after dying, their souls leap to join the ancestors.

It is a powerful area. Two ocean currents collide just off the point. The rocky cliff face has Swiss cheese erosion caves just south of a black sand beach. It is the kind of place that evokes quiet.

I like the idea of a leaping place of the soul. I like the idea of the kind of connection to something greater that a leaping place implies. The Balinese believe that they are reincarnated back into their families every seven generations. There are important rituals after a birth to identify the baby’s former identity, to know which ancestor is returning. In a sense, this Balinese belief is the reverse of the leaping place: the soul leaps back in to join the descendents.

I often wonder what kind of world we would create if we believed the ancestors were awaiting us with open arms or that seven generations from now we would come back for another go at it. What choices would we make if our consideration included more than the world we are leaving our children but also the world we were creating for our future-selves? How might we treat each other if we believed we were eternal members of the club and not merely passing through?

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