story | The Direction of Intention

Change Your Mind

Posted on November 7, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

I used this quote by Friedrich Nietzche in The SEER:

“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well as the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be a mind.”

A few days ago I asked myself this question: What if I never painted another painting or wrote another word? What would happen? Who would I be?

The first question, what would happen, is much less interesting to me than the second question: who would I be if I simply put down my brushes forever? When I was younger, I felt driven, as if I had to paint. I needed it. In asking the question I recognize that now I choose it. I don’t have to paint; I want to and consequently I am a much better artist. It’s a paradox: I am a better artist because I don’t need to be an artist. In other words, I don’t need to be, I am.

I’ve been revisiting The SEER. My initial team of wise-eyes unanimously voted the first draft to be “too much.” The book that I published is comprised of the first three chapters of the original draft. I deconstructed them and broke the steps into smaller bites. There were six more chapters outlined and, in my latest revisit, I recognize that I have a trilogy if I want it. So, book two is in process. I’m going to release the first draft in daily snippets as I write it. Everyone gets to be my wise-eyes this time around.

Here’s the launching pad section for book two from The SEER. It’s from the second cycle (story):

You can change your story. That is the sixth recognition. Doesn’t it sound simple? Say it this way: changing your story is the equivalent of changing who you know yourself to be. Changing your story often requires the loss of your illusion, a lot less armor and nothing left to lose. Who are you when you don’t know who you are or where you are going? This was the heart of Virgil’s question to me. Who are you distinct from your circumstance? Who are you when the mask comes off? More importantly, what are you capable of seeing when you are not looking through a [knight’s] visor? No one is immune to the stuff of life. Everyone lives a unique version of the story cycle. It too is a pattern, a natural process.

Go here to buy hard copies (and Kindle) of my latest book: The Seer: The Mind of the Entrepreneur, Artist, Visionary, Innovator, Seeker, Learner, Leader, Creator,…You.

Go here (to Leanpub) for all digital forms of The SEER

Canopy by David Robinson

And, for fine art prints of my paintings, go here.

Filed under: Pattern, Possibility, Seeing, Story, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: change, process, seeing, story | Leave a comment »

Enter The Castle

Posted on October 30, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

[continued from Tell A Good Story]

Shuttering the business, closing down my coaching practice, ending all corporate work, cleaning out the metaphoric closet – created quite a void. Standing solidly in a void of my own making I found myself once again enrapt with the Parcival tale. I’ve told this story dozens of times to audiences of all sizes, in performance and in facilitation. I wove it through The Seer as the main character’s stalking story (the story that follows you throughout your life and only opens when you are ready for it). It continues to open for me, a flower with many petal layers.

The Parcival story is woven throughout The Seer

It’s a grail quest story. Because every human being is in search of his or her personal grail (their true selves), once the metaphors are understood, it is a very useful story for navigating life. At one point in the story, after years of trying to prove himself worthy and save the world from becoming a wasteland – something that he is personally responsible for causing – believing himself to be invincible, he is defeated. A “nature warrior” knocks him off his warhorse and his magic sword shatters into a thousand pieces. Parcival strips off his armor (his role) and weeps. He lets go. He shutters his business. Despite his best efforts, despite fighting every dragon and ogre, despite defeating every dark knight, the wasteland still happened.

As is true in life, in the moment of greatest defeat, the second master appears and for Parcival it is a hermit. Parcival follows the hermit back to his cave and retreats from the world. He waits impatiently for the hermit to teach him, becomes frustrated, and finally resigned to the absence of any useful lesson, all the while, each day, chopping wood for the fire, carrying water to the cave. Over time he forgets that he was ever a knight. He forgets that he felt broken. He forgets his quest. He becomes present to the moment and is no longer invested in a role or purpose. He chops wood. He carries water. He feels the sun on his face. He appreciates his moment.

And, as is true in life, that is the moment that the grail castle appears for the second time. To re-enter the grail castle, to become the grail king (or queen), we must see ourselves as we are, beyond the role we use for armor, beyond the mission we use for meaning making, beyond the things we think we need to say, or do, or be. We have to recognize that we are enough, just as we are created, sacred and beautiful and complete. We are not broken. Nothing needs to be fixed or changed or achieved. Parcival, enters the grail castle (life) in this consciousness, speaks his truth, and the wasteland, in a single moment, disappears.

[to be continued]

Go here to buy hard copies (and Kindle) of my latest book: The Seer: The Mind of the Entrepreneur, Artist, Visionary, Innovator, Seeker, Learner, Leader, Creator,…You.

Go here (Leanpub) for all digital versions

Filed under: Metaphor, Seeing, Story, Transcendence, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: life lessons, metaphor, sense making, story | 1 Comment »

Tell A Good Story

Posted on October 29, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

The Storyteller emerges from the forest. Lucy & The Waterfox

Over the years I’ve tried countless marginally successful ways to define for others what I do. It would seem obvious: I am a painter. I am a writer. Oh, and a theatre artist. And a consultant. And I’ve maintained a coaching practice. I’ve worked in education, the corporate world, with non-profits, and with entrepreneurs. So, in conclusion, I do too many things.

Well, that’s not exactly true. I do one thing. I deal in story.

I speak the language of story and that is confusing in any arena. What does it mean? Such a simple word, story, and yet it can mean so many different things. For instance, a truism in effective, transformational coaching is that the story doesn’t matter. By story, coaches mean the circumstance; in transformation, in the fulfillment of potential, the details of what happened – the story – are not useful. The circumstance story usually equates to blaming or endless attempts at self-fixing. The circumstance story gets in the way of growth. It is an anchor in the sea of dysfunction.

I don’t work with circumstance stories.

By story, I mean inner monologue, the-story-you-tell-yourself-about-yourself. By story, I mean the language that we use within ourselves to articulate belief. I work with the orientation story, the personal and communal mythology. Rather than get in the way, the orientation story defines the way. It defines what we see. It defines our relationship with time, with nature, with god, with community: it is the lens through which we make meaning. I help people change their lenses. Try explaining that to a CEO!

Last year, when Skip and I shuttered our business, I also shuttered my coaching practice. I ended my corporate work. Much of it came to feel like wearing an ill-fitting shirt –or a host of ill-fitting shirts – so I decided to clean out the closet. I wanted to drop all the definitions, the old forms, to make space for the new.

Last week I decided it was time to peek into the empty closet. And, as serendipity would dictate, I happened to be reading Frank Delaney’s engaging book, The Last Storyteller. On page 99 of this fictional tale, this is what I read:

“…every legend and all mythologies exist to teach us how to run our days. In kind fashion. A loving way. But there’s no story, no matter how ancient, as important as one’s own. So if we’re to live good lives, we have to tell our own story. In a good way. A way that’s decent to ourselves.”

I threw my head back and laughed. There is no story as important as one’s own. To live a good life we have to tell our own story in a good way. And then, there was this:

“…I don’t give anybody advice. All I do is release the good thinking that’s already inside of you. You’re the one who acts on your own advice, and I have the pleasure of helping you reach those thoughts about yourself. So it’s not me helping you. It’s you helping you.”

Ask me today what I do and I will say, I write. I paint. Ask me for more detail and I’ll open the book to page 99.

[to be continued]

Go here to buy hard copies (and Kindle) of my latest book: The Seer: The Mind of the Entrepreneur, Artist, Visionary, Innovator, Seeker, Learner, Leader, Creator,…You.

All digital forms of The Seer can be found here

Filed under: Art, Awakening, Identity, Seeing, Story, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: definition, helping, life lessons, myth, story | 2 Comments »

Live Your Sequence

Posted on October 14, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

Michelangelo’s ‘Awakening Slave.’ photo from academia.org

Metaphors abound and are all around us. Since all language is referential, all language is metaphor. Every experience we relate, every story we tell, every thought we think, is metaphoric. It is a pointer to something experienced, sensed, felt.

Just as letters are sequenced to make words, metaphor is sequenced to create story. It is in the naming and the stacking of metaphor that we make meaning of our lives.

Today, hanging out in the choir loft as Kerri played a service, I heard these metaphors that, linked together like cars on a train, make a universal story; if you are human you’ll live this sequence: Slavery. Wilderness. Promised Land. This is both the ancient story of a people and it is a story common to the human experience. The first, the ancient story is biblical. It’s big! It is the scaled up version of the personal, more human scale variation.

We hold ourselves captive. I’ve yet to meet anyone, myself included, that doesn’t place limits on their capabilities. Michelangelo sculpted a brilliant series of human figures trying to escape the marble from which they were created. Figures struggling to emerge, he called them the Prisoners. I think of the Prisoners every time someone tells me that “they can’t.”

Once we take the scary step out of captivity, once we say, “I can,” a necessary lost-ness ensues. “I can’t” is an orientation. Leaving it behind is akin to leaving the known world and striking out into the wilderness in search of a new orientation. “I can” requires a host of new experiences, a new trail blazed to the point of normalcy. Orienting to possibility is more than a choice; it is a practice.

The Promised Land is a place of mastery. It comes when we forget, for just a while, that we are on a journey. It comes when the painter forgets that they once did not know what happens when red meets green. It comes when the sculptor no longer needs to impress but can play with the stone and delight when the stone plays in return. It is comfortable and safe and known.

And, every Promised Land comes with a gift: one day it will become a prison, a place of captivity. And the cycle will begin anew. The struggle of “I can’t,” the scary step into the wilderness, and the arrival “home” with mastery, deeper knowledge, and new eyes.

Go here to buy hard copies (and Kindle) of my latest book: The Seer: The Mind of the Entrepreneur, Artist, Visionary, Innovator, Seeker, Learner, Leader, Creator,…You.

“As both an artist and an entrepreneur, who adores the works of The Artist’s Way, I am liking where this book is taking me.” Tom Ellis

Go here to support the kickstarter of my play, The Lost Boy

Filed under: Metaphor, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: captivity, metaphor, promised land, story, wilderness | 1 Comment »

Make An Appeal

Posted on October 12, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

Tom and me a long time ago.

Horatio wrote and said he hoped my kickstarter campaign picked up steam soon. Me, too. It looks like a long hill to climb with less than 10 days to go and less than a third of the way to our goal.

In his email, Horatio asked a great question and also gave me some good advice:

The question: why should anyone care?

The advice: make a direct appeal.

The question (why should anyone care?): To be honest, I’m not sure why anyone cares or does not care about anything. I have lots of cerebral reasons why I think this play should matter but to expound the list feels somewhat like one of the many times I’ve stood in front of a school board telling them why the arts matter. What I know in my bones will bounce off because it is not yet personal to my audience. I know it has to be personally relevant for people to engage or invest in any thing, not just the arts. For instance, the people raising money for breast cancer research and awareness are the same people who’ve had breast cancer or know someone who has. It’s personal. It matters.

This is personal for me. I spent hundreds of hours over several years listening to Tom’s stories, taking notes, recording him. We walked through graveyards. We drove through the fields and stopped at places where his ancestors lived and played out their lives. It’s where he played out his life. He took me those places and told me those stories because he feared they would die with him. He wanted to keep alive the family story and, at the time, no one in his family was present to listen. I was present. I wanted to listen. I wanted to spend time with my friend and mentor and that time was a great gift to me. Tom is chief among the patriarchs of my artistic family. I am his artistic descendent.

Last week as I travelled back to the San Joaquin Valley to work with The Chili Boys to integrate the new music into the play, it occurred to me that I’ve poured more energy and time into this play than any other artistic project in my life. It’s been a decade of development and attempts to get it to production. We let it sit fallow for a spell after Tom’s health collapsed. Oddly, it was Tom’s passing that made it ready, necessary.

One mistake I made in setting up the campaign: I thought people would join the kickstarter because of Tom. It has been somewhat of a mystery to me but also a great delight that the majority of people supporting the play never knew Tom. I thought the legion of Tom’s students, peers, and friends would be the primary donors. Instead, the folks throwing in their support are my peers, students, and friends. They know me. They are supporting me. So, the only answer I can come up with that may make this relevant for you: because I care, because I need to bring this play across the finish line. Because I am now on the front line of an artistic legacy: I carry the stories, the teaching, the value-set, the vision as I inherited it. Making art (performing this play) is the way I serve as conduit to the next generation. It’s how I (like all artists) pass it on. Kerri continues to remind me that there is more to it than that. It’s not just the passing of the legacy to me. It is the reminder we all need in this busy world – the reminder that family story needs to be told and needs to be heard. And everyone has a family story to pass on. Period.

As for Horatio’s advice: make a direct appeal. Here it is: I have 10 days and need your help. Pass on the link. Give $10.00..or $1,000.00. Mostly, I appreciate your correcting my mistake. Thank you for supporting me.

Go here for The Lost Boy Kickstarter campaign

Go here to buy hard copies (and Kindle) of my latest book: The Seer: The Mind of the Entrepreneur, Artist, Visionary, Innovator, Seeker, Learner, Leader, Creator,…You.

Filed under: Art, Play, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: appeal, descendent, fundraiser, legacy, mattering, story | 2 Comments »

Open The Box

Posted on October 6, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

JIm Marsh of the band, Mom’s Chili Boys, tuning up for rehearsal.

It is often the simplest of actions that rock the world. I had one of those moments yesterday. It was a threshold moment. Its power took me by surprise. It changed me and all I did was open a box.

We flew to California to work on a play. I’ve worked on dozens of plays and performance pieces in my life but this one is special because it’s not an abstraction. It’s not a made-up story. I’ve lived it and lived with it for nearly a decade. The event, the catalyst of the play was the discovery of a box, a time capsule plastered into the walls of a ranch house over 130 years ago. Tom found the box. It held the possessions of an ancestor, a small boy who died in 1885. The boy’s mother, Isabelle, put his clothes and toys in a small trunk, wrote notes, some brief anecdotes about the boy, and then hid the box in the walls of the house.

Nearly ten years ago, we began creating the play when, late one night during a visit to the ranch, Tom asked me to help him. He asked, “What am I supposed to do with this box?” At first, much of the body of the play amounted to organized transcription. During each visit I recorded hours of conversation with Tom, hours of late night storytelling, and then flew home and transcribed the recordings. I wanted to catch the cadence of Tom’s vocal patterns. I wanted to catch the rhythms of his extraordinary voice and gift of storytelling. The play was his to perform; my work was simply to craft it, to draw a clear story-path for him to follow. The play, a one-man show, was ready for production when Tom’s health failed. He died a year ago.

During Tom’s decline I rewrote the play so that I might narrate the story and added another character to the piece. The Chili Boys had a battery of new music for the play so we gathered in Stockton to integrate the new music with the new text.

When we arrived in California, we visited Tom’s widow, Marcia. She gave us the trunk so we might photograph the clothes, toys, and notes. I’d seen the artifacts many, many times. Tom and I wiled away many nights unpacking the box and reading the notes, talking about his family stories. When our rehearsals were finished, sitting with Kerri and Jim moments before driving back to the airport for our return flight, we decided to open the trunk. Kerri had never seen the artifacts. As I lifted the lid, as I opened the trunk, I realized it was the first time; Tom had always opened the box. Tom had always reached inside, removed the shoes, the tattered coat, the hobby horse, the diary that contained the tracking notes of a fever that killed the boy. This boy was not fiction. Tom would say, “Look at this. Look at what she wrote on this.”

I opened the lid, for the first time, reaching inside, pulling out the shoes, the jumping jack, saying, “Do you see this? Someone must have made it for Johnny. And here, this is the notebook that Isabelle kept of Johnny’s fever. Look at what she wrote.”

Invest in THE LOST BOY. See our kickstarter campaign

Go here to buy hard copies (and Kindle) of my latest book: The Seer: The Mind of the Entrepreneur, Artist, Visionary, Innovator, Seeker, Learner, Leader, Creator,…You.

Filed under: Art, Awakening, Play, Surprises, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: catalyst, fund raiser, funding, performance, story, theatre | Leave a comment »

End And Begin

Posted on September 3, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

Some fragments of thought on common story phrases (and life):

Once upon a time. It started. The Big Bang! Movement from a single point, a center. Adventure requires a movement from center, a venture away from the known to the question. Moving from center implies imbalance and opens the possibility for a more expansive center. Here’s the paradox of moving from center: balance is everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. Every person is the center of their unique story. That will always be true: who else could star in your personal movie? Yet stories, in order to move, require imbalance. You know who you are, you lose who you are, you find who you are. Cells divide and divide again. The division is necessary for new forms to take shape. The encoding is already in there somewhere. The same is true of stories.

This is like that. Comparison. Simile. Metaphor. Analogy. It is why stories work. We compare ourselves to the protagonist. We are like him or her. Why do we tell the same stories again and again? Because we recognize ourselves in the story. Stories are like glue that binds a community. It’s why marketing works. To be more complete, you must buy this or wear that. Be like…. It’s all a story and in that way it is all made up, every category, every interpretation (see Once Upon a Time, The Big Bang, etc.).

And so the story goes. Chaos to order, order to chaos, generation to generation, winter, spring, summer, fall, winter, spring,…. This morning on our walk we watched parents take photos of their children as they returned to school. Backpacks, new clothes, and packed lunches; it’s the first day back. “Do you remember doing that for your kids?” I asked Kerri. She said, “It seems like yesterday.” It seems like yesterday when I was wearing new clothes and walking to school.

The End? An End? “The End” is definitive, singular. The Big Bang was a beginning but was it also an end? The end of one form is usually the beginning of another. Endings always lead to Once Upon A Time, don’t they? It depends upon where you stand or who’s telling the story or how you define yourself.

Go here to buy hard copies (and Kindle) of my latest book: The Seer: The Mind of the Entrepreneur, Artist, Visionary, Innovator, Seeker, Learner, Leader, Creator,…You.

Go here for all digital forms of The Seer.

Eve, by David Robinson

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Filed under: Story, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: beginning, connection, endings, metaphor, story | Leave a comment »

Choose Your Label

Posted on August 27, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

The second recognition in The Seer is that your language matters. It is a curiosity to me that of the nine recognitions in the book, this recognition is the one that causes the most conversation and generates the most questions. My latest theory is the notion that the moment we tack a word onto an experience we are defining the experience; we are making a choice. Owning that we have the power to define our experiences through the way we think and talk about them means taking responsibility for our lives. Ownership of your happiness and power and thought might seem overwhelming or, as someone once said to me, “That’s pie in the sky!”

As the storyteller of your life, the language you use to tell your story matters. Try this exercise for a single day: express gratitude for everything – even if you don’t feel gratitude. Tell yourself in the middle of the traffic jam that you are grateful for the jam. And, if you are really bold and brave, take the next step and assign a reason for your gratitude: the traffic is slowing you down so you can breathe a bit amidst an otherwise hectic day. Express gratitude for everything: the meeting you will attend, waiting in the doctors office, the dishes you wash. By the end of the day, if you have been diligent in telling the story of gratitude, you might just feel it. You will certainly have no more doubt that you live life labeling your experiences. It is only a short hop from knowing you have the power to label your life to choosing the label.

Go here to buy hard copies (and Kindle) of my latest book: The Seer: The Mind of the Entrepreneur, Artist, Visionary, Innovator, Seeker, Learner, Leader, Creator,…You.

Go here for all digital forms of The Seer.

And, for fine art prints of my paintings, go here

Filed under: Language, Power, Story, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: language, power, story | Leave a comment »

What’s The Story

Posted on August 24, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

This is a very old watercolor that I called The Inner Monologue

All the ladies were talking about how their bodies have changed with age. My body has changed, too! You’d never know it now but I used to be less than two feet tall with really pudgy knees. Kerri punched me when I offered my perspective on my body change. Apparently there is a statute of limitation for how far back in time you can go on the my-body-has-changed conversation.

When I was studying acting we were taught to write backstories for our characters. The play script was filled with clues but we learned that a character is not 3 dimensional until it has an articulated history. This was always problematic for me. I had no problem creating a backstory – that was easy – and I could justify my imagined story happenings in the script – but I couldn’t see how my imagined story led to more specific actions in the performance. If anything, the backstory got in my way. Like all young actors I got lost in the backstory, trying to “tell” it rather than pursue my clear action. Acting, like life, is about the pursuit of desire. My backstory muddied my ability to act. Acting is an art form of the present moment.

When I was teaching acting I came across the same problem. The young actors would spend hours telling me the details of their backstory which only served to diffuse their present action. They’d try to perform their history instead of pursue their current target.

The backstory was interesting but functionally useless in the present moment.

I’m finding the same challenge off the stage as I found on it. In one form or another I’ve coached a lot of people. I hear a lot of backstories. Our backstories are interesting. They do what they are meant to do: they give us identity. We spend hours and hours telling each other about our past adventures and abuses. People are storytellers, telling the story of their lives all day, everyday. Most of the storytelling concerns the past. What we did or did not do, what was done to us or justifying what we did to others. Most backstories are about limitation. Most backstories have a root in fear that show up as “reasons why I can’t” stories. Do you remember the famous Richard Bach quote? Argue for your limitations and sure enough they are yours. As interesting and informing as it is, very little of the backstory is functionally useful in the present moment. I don’t want the person I was a decade ago defining the choices I make today.

It’s become something of a mantra for me, something I find myself writing or saying a lot: The actions we need to take are usually very simple. The story we wrap around them make them difficult. What’s the story?

Go here to buy hard copies (and Kindle) of my latest book: The Seer: The Mind of the Entrepreneur, Artist, Visionary, Innovator, Seeker, Learner, Leader, Creator,…You.

Go here for fine art prints of my paintings:

This painting is called Icarus.

Filed under: Perspective, Story, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: backstory, creating, history, inner monologue, liberation, limitation, perspective, story | Leave a comment »

Use Your Key

Posted on August 18, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

Photo by londonstreetart2

The other day I received an email from a long lost cousin. She spent some time on my website watching old interviews and contemplating my assertion that through our inner monologue we story ourselves. The idea was disturbing to her. How could she be the teller of her story and yet feel so powerless? So many things have happened to her! How could she possibly be responsible for the twists and turns of her life? She asked, “How exactly is one to find empowerment when the door is locked and the key wasn’t left under the mat….”

I’ve been slow in responding to her questions because my impulse to respond was so immediate. I wrote and then deleted, “If you do not have the key, who does?”

Her metaphor is perfect. There is door to life and it is locked. Someone else has the key.

And, to make matters more cruel, there is a mat, a tease, a place where the key should be. The mat is a constant reminder of the absence of the key. Her metaphor gives structure to a very specific story, does it not? It defines the actions of her life, the role in which she has cast herself. In such a story frame there is no access to life, there is no possibility of personal power.

I wonder what she might see if she held a different metaphor? I wonder what she might see if she recognized that she is the keeper of the metaphor and in that way the giver of meaning to her life and not the seeker of meaning? I wonder what she might experience if she saw herself as a locksmith or an opener of doors? I wonder what she might experience if she recognized that life is available on both sides of the door? Life knows no doors. Life needs no key.

Her confusion is also perfect. She has mistaken her circumstance for her story. None of us has control over our circumstances. Cancers come. Hurricanes happen. Empowerment comes when we recognize that we have infinite control over who we are within our circumstance. Empowerment is not given, it is chosen.

The Buddhists recommend joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. No one sails through life without difficulty and hardship. The difficulty and hardship are the very things that bring growth and illumination. Participate joyfully. Or, participate painfully. The sorrows of the world will always be there; how we participate is the story we choose to tell. If there is a key to life, if a key is necessary in your story, in her story, it is simply this choice.

Go here for my latest book, The Seer

Go here for fine art prints of my paintings.