choice | The Direction of Intention

Exit The Circle

Posted on February 25, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

Mind Chatter

Jen came over today. She is taking a photography class and her assignment this week is to take pictures of people. She is working on mastering depth of field and introduced me to my favorite new term: circle of confusion (note: depth of field is also a great term but is less ominous!). I spent several minutes reading definitions for circle of confusion. This is the kind of stuff I encountered:

A lens cannot resolve a point exactly. Instead it creates a small circle of light called the ‘Circle of Confusion’ (from photoconnexion.com)

What does that mean? In my search for definitions of ‘circle of confusion’ I entered a circle of confusion! I kept digging and I learned that the term predates photography and originated in the study of optics. So, this is my stab at defining a circle of confusion for myself: my eye (or a camera lens) breaks an image into dots and the dots can never be completely focused. So, each dot is rimmed with a circle of light. In an image that appears to be completely focused, the light circle is very, very small so the dots are closer together and make a sharp image. In an image that appears unfocused, the light circle is large so the dots are farther apart, making a fuzzy image. This circle of light is called a circle of confusion, a blur circle, or a blur spot.

The greater the circle of light around the dot, the greater the potential for confusion. What a fantastic metaphor! The same concept applies to the imagination. I have friends who’ve always known what they wanted to become when they grew up. They had a sharp, clear picture of what they wanted to do with their lives. They imagined a clear, focused target-life. For instance, when I was in college, my best friend Roger knew that he wanted to direct plays and, more specifically, he wanted to direct plays at The Pacific Conservatory for the Performing Arts. Thirty years later, Roger has spent his career at PCPA directing plays. His actions were distinctly aimed at a very clear image-target. He did not spend much time wondering what he wanted to do with his life. Roger has lived with a smaller circle of confusion than most of us.

The metaphor could also be applied this way: If people were dots, the circle of light surrounding them would be their mind chatter. The greater the mind-chatter the greater the circle of light, the greater is the potential for confusion. Buck Busfield used to say of people with loud mind-chatter, “That guy has a big dog barking in his head.” The Buddhists call mind-chatter, “monkey mind.” A person with monkey mind is a person with a large circle of confusion; their dots can’t focus through the noise. Victim stories come with lots of mind chatter. So do blame stories or a fix-it mentality.

When we see and own our choices, we reduce the size of our circle of confusion. That’s how choice works. When we invest in stories like, “I have to…,” or “I should…,” stories that lead us to believe that we have no choice, we amplify our circle of confusion. Embracing our choices makes intentions clear. Embracing our choices clarifies our life-target. The noise in our minds quiets. It’s an equation: own your choices and your mind quiets. There’s less division in a mind that says, “I choose,” so there is less need for inner debate. If you want to exit your circle of confusion, start by seeing how vast is your capacity for choice.

Go here to get my latest book, The Seer: The Mind of the Entrepreneur, Artist, Visionary, Seeker, Learner, Leader, Creator…You.

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Filed under: Metaphor, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: choice, clarity, mindset | Leave a comment »

Where’s Your Safety?

Posted on February 21, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

from my Yoga series

Bill said, “People must make time to smell the roses.”

We were talking about the stories, specifically the stories we tell that become self-made prisons. “It’s never made any sense to me!” he laughed, “I’ve never been able to work for anyone because the whole mindset seems like madness. For instance, I just talked to a man who believes he must work at his job for three more years so he might have a better retirement. He hates his job!” He added, “I have a dear friend that sat down after a game of tennis and died of a brain aneurism. We never know, do we?” His question was actually a statement and I nodded my head in agreement. It’s never made any sense to me to give away this day of life for an idea of life in the future.

“Why do you think people do that?” he asked. Social norms. Expectations. Fear. Stability. There are many reasons. There are many good reasons. We have to feel safe. I used to tell groups that a child can’t play unless he or she feels safe. To the man holding on for retirement, trading today for a possible tomorrow makes him feel safe and a safety story is a necessity in a culture that has forgotten community. Without a tribe, people must fen for themselves and the sacrifice they make is their autonomy. It’s a paradox. It’s a story.

Bill and I tell a different story. I’m a terrible employee. I have too many ideas. I like to change things. I do my best work late at night or very early in the morning. The middle of the day, the normal working hours, are down time. Fog time. I feel safe by breaking patterns and changing rhythms. I feel safe when I don’t know what is coming. I value presence and feeling alive much more than retirement. I do not know what retirement means because my job has never been a thing that I do. To retire means to die. I’ll certainly do that someday but I see no reason to save up for it.

My story, my path is no better or worse than the man who gives up his today for tomorrow. We both create our idea of security and live from a set of assumptions that define a good life. We both make sense – we make it. Sense is not found like happiness is not found. Both ensue.

Bill looked at me and said, “Maybe asking why people give away today for tomorrow is not the right question. Maybe the right question is, ‘Do they know that they are making a choice?”

Go here to get my latest book, The Seer: The Mind of the Entrepreneur, Artist, Visionary, Seeker, Learner, Leader, Creator…You.

Go here for hard copies

Filed under: Identity, Story, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: artistry, choice, self knowledge | Leave a comment »

Keep Walking

Posted on May 21, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

795. 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 week, the night before the launch of my new business, 6 hours before I was to get on a plane and travel for a week, my computer died. There was not time between stops to get a fix. There was no way to put up a post. My string of consecutive posts ended at 794. After I stopped trying to figure it out and recognized that the gods of technology both grant and revoke access, I settled into a week with minimal technology. It was lovely. And a new era presented itself. Here are two short lessons that came during the week that my computer died (and have nothing to do with technology):

1) As it turns out, no challenge is insurmountable. Challenges only appear insurmountable when given too little time. They seem insurmountable when the choice is to stop. Stopping is a valid choice. In fact, stopping is to make the choice for a new challenge. Resting is a valid choice, too. I learned that I’ve been on a thirteen-year pilgrimage back to Bali. What I thought was a lost cause was really a long walk with a few rest breaks. A great teacher has been waiting for me. He asked me to return and break bread with him.

2) These past several months of wandering have been extraordinary in the invisible helping hands that have opened doors, lighted my path, and provided support, guidance and dear friendship. All of my life I thought that when the helping hands appeared, they illuminated a single path. It turns out that is not true at all. They help. They support. They guide. Within their guidance there are many choices to make. There are many possible paths. In this way, destiny or fate has many faces. It is both random and predetermined. Energy can take many forms. Choice is always available. As a wise person once wrote: there are many paths up the same mountain. What is important is to keep walking.

Filed under: Awakening, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: challenge, choice, learning | 4 Comments »

Exit The Drama

Posted on January 6, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Sitting in the Philadelphia airport I’m thinking about Drama. I watching them unfold all around me.

Drama is the first level of Alan’s elegant and oh-so-potent model, the 4 Levels of Engagement. Drama is story without a root, otherwise known as a victim story. Gossip is drama. Drama is predicated on enabling, there is a self-righteous gravity spinning at the heart of a drama story. I just heard this: “Can you believe what they did to me… Look what they made me feel.” Drama stories are easy to tell and often feel really good; victim stories are like sugar and are addictive. They are only tasty if shared and over time you will find that you need more and more drama to satisfy the need. They are hell if they dominate your thoughts. Literally. You are without power if you give credence to or invest in your victim story, “Can you believe what they did to me!” is another way of saying, “I need to pull someone down to feel powerful.” Drama creates power-over scenarios. Drama is usually carefully crafted to relieve us of the reality and impact of our own choices. Drama blinds us to our participation and that is precisely the point of all Drama stories. Life is happening to you.

You can never know another person’s story. You can never know their point of view, their circumstances or intention. You can never stand in their shoes. It is an easy game to make another’s story about you especially when you have no way of seeing through their eyes. We see their story through our filter. We distort what we can’t possibly know. There is one thing certain, a bet you can bank on with a Drama-teller: they will never ask the other about their story because it threatens their Victim status. They will accuse, they will blame, they will concoct, they will imply, they will manipulate, but they will never ever ask.

To exit the level of Drama requires some modicum of self-awareness and willingness to own your story. It requires acknowledgment of participation; an inward looking eye at your choices. It requires a greater concern for the story that you live than the story you tell about others. Assuming positive intent is great place to start. Asking others about their point of view before whipping up a Drama tale is another healthy technique. Practice challenging your assumptions. Practice listening. Practice focusing on your story more than the story you tell about others.

Being a participant in life requires surrendering your Victim role. It engenders generosity of spirit, an open mind and more importantly, an open heart.

Filed under: Language, Perspective, Seeing, Story, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: choice, drama | 1 Comment »

Honor Your Choices

Posted on December 6, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

637. 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 my drive home I listened to a story on the radio about several thousand former football players suing the NFL because they are now suffering the ill effects of repeated impacts to the head. This is confusing territory for me because I am certain that no one plays the game of football without knowing that there will be repeated blows to the head. So, who is culpable for the injury? Who is responsible for the choice to play? Part of the discussion was about the improvement over the past few decades in helmets and the attention to the rules of the game to minimize head-on collisions and the inevitable injuries that follow. The science now confirms what we’ve known (I hope) for millennia: repeated blows to the head are not good for you. So, if you choose to play, and you know the risks involved, who is responsible when you are injured or suffer the long-term effects of your choices?

Of course, there are other forces at play. The money in football is huge. Entire university athletic programs are floated on the revenues from their football programs. Sport is a route to a better life for many young athletes; the risks are apparent and the rewards are very high. Who doesn’t remember high school and the reverence afforded to the football players – especially during a winning season! Warriors in our culture are revered in all their forms and it is nice to be revered. To a young person, reverence is a high commodity.

My question is ultimately not about football players but about choices and responsibility. Despite our desire to believe otherwise, awareness does not equate into better choices. If awareness led to better choices there would not be a single smoker on the planet. We are not the rational creatures that we pretend to be. Feeling and emotion are the drivers.

Ownership of choices leads to better choices. Responsibility for actions leads to considered choices. This is hard to see in a country defined by ubiquitous litigation and that asks us not to claim responsibility. It is an expression of the separation mentality inherent in power-over stories (see my rants from the previous 2 days): no one is responsible when everyone is a victim. There is a vast difference between, “I didn’t know” and “I knew and decided to do it anyway.” Power is found in choice; power-with is available in a community that values and supports the choices that its members make.

Filed under: Perspective, Power, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: choice, community | Leave a comment »

Choose Love

Posted on September 19, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

In a recent coaching forum call, Alan said, “Choose love. No need to ask how or fret about it. Just choose it.” We were doing an imagination exercise, working with taking radical steps. The possibility of choosing love without a qualifier was revolutionary for many people on the call. No need to modify or justify your choice. Just choose it. Choosing love, as it turned out, was a radical step.

To many people on the call, choosing love as the organizing principle, as the baseline for all other action seemed so far out of reach as to be impossible. Choosing love was an abstraction, like walking on the moon is an abstraction, something that is imaginable but certainly not doable.

What is love? Is it an achievement? Like a moon shot, does it take complex mathematics and the latest technology? Is it something we find? Is it something we manufacture? There are entire industries built upon the search for love and the inevitable disappointment. Hearts are opened and hearts are broken so the choice of love must always come with strings attached, right? The strings are certainly untenable. Is this love?

Think about the implications in the lyric, “Looking for love in all the wrong places….” Yikes! Love cannot be something you choose if you believe it is something you seek. To choose it, you must already have it. How can it be that we imagine ourselves separate and distant from love?

As Ana-the-Wise tells me, “Love is neutral.” Making bargains is not love; trading pieces of yourself in exchange for attention or affection is not love. If you are giving a part of yourself away, suppressing yourself, editing yourself you are engaged in something but it is definitely not love.

Here’s my theory: to choose love is to choose yourself. This choice will move you to the top of the list. It will require you to be seen, to embrace your greatness, to stop minimizing yourself, and most importantly to drop the illusion that anyone can fill you up or tell you how it is to be done. You must love yourself to choose love and that choice has no back door; to love yourself means you give up all escape fantasies and must own your power. Can you imagine it?

Filed under: Love, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: choice | Leave a comment »

Truly Powerful People (444)

Posted on May 27, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

444.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Megan-the-brilliant, she that is far too wise for one so young (but does not yet know it – so kindly don’t tell her) takes me to task on the details of my posts. She asks for clarification, challenges me on the fine points of my rambling, and knits her brow with such ferocity of thought that it would knock the “P” off of most PhD’s. I count myself fortunate to have eschewed higher education, stopping with an M.A.; her thought ferocity has obliterated the “A” so I am left with a vapid “mmmmmmmm,” in response to many of her questions. “What does that mean?” she exclaims. I bite my lip – a stall tactic to give my synapsis a fair chance to fire. I wish my brain was better organized; clutter slows me down.

Recently I wrote something about discomfort being necessary for movement. Discomfort is a story starter. I can’t think of a single story worth telling that is about comfort. Comedy is not comedy without some serious discomfort. Tragedy is uncomfortable by definition. The Buddha tells us that the key to a good life is to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world; sorrow is the premise of the story. Stories of illumination, adventure, mystery, love, historical, pastoral, historical-pastoral, hysterical-historical-pastoral are not known for comfort.

Megan-the-brilliant cautioned me that I was too general in my assertion. She knit her brow (there goes my “A”) and asked me to distinguish between movement to get out of the discomfort vs. using the discomfort to move the story forward. They are two entirely different intentions. Mmmmmmmmmmm. Actually, a synapse fired. It was close at hand. In fact, it was so close it is the name of this blog: The Direction of Intention. Moving to get out of the discomfort is to push against what you don’t want – a negative direction of intention. Movement fueled by discomfort that propels you toward what you want – is a positive direction of intention. She’s right!

It seems we have a choice in what we do with our discomfort and perhaps that is the point of every life story. Joyful participation, denial and frustration, pushing against the cage, giving up or finding a way to pick the lock are choices. They are directions of intention. We can choose to hate what we don’t understand and plant our heads in the sand or walk toward what we don’t know – and learn.

Even with the loss of my “A” I can see that Megan-the-brilliant is aptly named. Don’t tell her. Mmmmmmmmmmmmum’s the word.

Filed under: The Direction of Intention, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: choice, discomfort, intention, story | Leave a comment »

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