We rode early today to escape the rising heat of early summer. Riding over the river I was entranced by the spiraling dance of hundreds of summer swallows who nest under the bridge. They were out in the early morning air in a frenzy of chasing. The sensation of their swift sallies and swoops, a mass of movement, dominated the river and shifted my awareness to the world outside my head. How easy it would have been to be lost in my mental chatter and missed it altogether.
Three bay horses loiter, muzzles hanging over the fence, communing with the morning traffic, trying to be sociable.
It is so common for me to be lost in my head ruminating. Sometimes I am doing useful thinking and planning. But oftentimes I am just allowing my chatterbox brain to prattle on. The rest of the world, what’s happening, is lost to me. Whatever I am missing-in-action thinking about had better be darn important if it means that I am not aware of the world around me.
The breeze is coming from the east; that’s why it is such a warm morning, the wind bringing the heat of the valley instead of the chill of the ocean.
Sometimes, of course, I am doing useful things inside my head: analyzing, planning, composing, figuring out. Sometimes though, once those things are done, I find myself using mips to try to remember them. In his book Getting Things Done, David Allen proposes that it is key for us to keep lists, to write things down, just so we don’t use our precious awareness fussing about remembering things. Writing things down frees our mind for more valuable tasks and frees it to be aware of what’s going on around us. (Writing things down is particularly challenging on the bike—therefore the recording device in the future.)
Five stark dead sycamores stand, their white trunks alight against the deep green of the willows along the river.
We can also distract ourselves from what’s really happening in our organizations with the stories we constantly tell ourselves. Are we really noticing that the sales numbers are static from quarter to quarter? Are we really aware of what is happening? Or are we so busy each quarter telling ourselves the story of why, what went wrong this time, that we don’t pay attention to what is really happening. If we are not aware of what is actually going on, there is no way we can find a resolution. A effective new path cannot be found if you don’t know where you are, if instead you are inside a story you keep telling yourself.
An elderly farmer in his ancient, well-kept farm truck grins and waves as I swoosh by, his bright cheeks aglow with recognition. He must have previously noticed us plying the valley roads.
So I’ll keep trying to pay better attention. Be aware. Live in mindfulness. Do my work in the real world, not just in my head.
The deep rattling caw of an unseen crow roils over head causing a vibration in my belly.
In the simplest case, we simply do something. We bake a cake. We answer a question. We write a chapter. Sometimes we are in touch with our process to such a degree that no outside structure is required. The full-blown creative act arises spontaneously and implicitly. Many of our basic creations come into being in this way.
We call the processes represented in the diagram ovals the modes of the creative activity. A mode is a way of relating to the creative process with specific things to do that generate specific results. Let’s decompose this mode to learn more about the practice.
As we understand more about our own creative process, we may see many of the creative modes come into play internally even if we are not engaged with them explicitly. We may use the modes invisibly as they best fit our current activity.
The first level of decomposition of the simple act of creating something is to:
- Choose what you are going to create
- Take the actions that are necessary
We call this Taking Aim and Taking Action. Taking Aim includes all the ways in which we determine what we are creating and the development of our path to the goal. We call the path the trajectory. Think of it as aiming an arrow on the optimal trajectory to hit the target. Taking Action is doing what it takes to move us closer to our goal along the trajectory.
As our tasks get more complex, or we want a greater degree of control, or we want to create with a team, we may want to further break down our modes of engagement with the creative process.
Taking Aim breaks down into two sub-modes: Discovery and Design.
- Discovery is learning about the creative environment:
- Looking outward to see what exists that could participate in or influence your creative endeavor
- Looking inward to see what ideas, intuitions, and potentials you have to inspire the ideas that are evolving.
- Design is combining your knowledge and your inspirations into a broad vision and building the mental and physical components you need to do the work at hand.
Discovery decomposes into two modes: Survey and Sense & Engage.
- To Survey we study what exists in the world that affects our creative process and feed what we learn back into the definition of what can be created.
- To Sense & Engage is to discover your creative intuitions, the future possibilities, and the potentials that can define and refine your goal, while helping to leverage it into reality.
Design has three sub-modes:
- Envision – Create an illuminated vision of the goal and its meaning
- Align – Create alignment, or congruence in beliefs, intents, and actions
- Embody – Create the capacity to physically and organizationally do the work required
Taking Action decomposes into two modes:
- Map – Make plans
- Maneuver – Execute your plans
The updrafting key here is that you define very specific planning horizons for your maneuvers and know that you will re-plan often to meet the new requirements of the evolving environment in which you are creating.
Now we can see the whole practice—moving through the modes as they are needed to create whatever your want. Remember, sometimes these things will be explicit; other times they will just happen naturally. But these shifts in awareness and engagement are always part of the process. Of course, there is a lot more detail to come in later discussions.
How Do You Actually Get Started?
So now you have a brief introduction to all the modes of the creative lifecycle, but how does an innovation cycle, or the process of a new creation actually begin?
The story goes something like this.
- You (or someone on a creative team) gets an intuition or an idea of what might be possible. Some idea intrigues you and your mind begins to fiddle with it.
- You use your intuition, and possibly the intuition of others on the team, to explore the possibilities.
- In your mind, or on a doodle, you describe what it might look like.
- You then survey the world for more information about the creation, its possibilities, and anything else that might affect the creative process.
- And then intuition plays with it again; the process will loop around in a idea form until it develops enough momentum to come into the world as a creative project.
(This post is still part of the introduction to the Practice. It discusses how attention and awareness are a critical part of success. When we discuss the practice of updrafting and its modes, we will address issues of awareness as they pertain to each mode. Alternately we could, and many teachings do, focus on the state of consciousness and the development awareness, allowing that to lead into new patterns of action. There are many angles from which we can disect and approach the discussion, but Updrafting usually begins with the things we do as the entry point.)
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Our awareness or our state of consciousness is a very important part of the effectiveness of our actions. In updrafting we call an ongoing, working state of awareness a stance. There are two key reasons why the stance is critical:
- Our awareness and understanding mediates our understanding of the world. That is, it is what stands between what is real and true, and what we can perceive and know.
- Our awareness and understanding guides and colors our decision making process and therefore all of our actions.
Both what comes to us and what comes from us is affected by our stance, our state of awareness.
There are four key facets of awareness to consider in the updrafting stance. The first two have to do with freedom—-freedom from internal constraints. (Otherwise known as bad habits.) The second two concern our ability to successfully engage with our potential.
The Practice of Freedom
1) Non-Clinging : Not constraining yourself or the world
The definition of the verb to cling from Apple’s Dictionary is the antithesis of updrafting:
cling |kli ng | verb
- l) hold on tightly to : she clung to Joe’s arm | they clung together | figurative she clung onto life.
- ( cling to) adhere or stick firmly or closely to; be hard to part or remove from : the smell of smoke clung to their clothes | the fabric clung to her smooth skin.
- ( cling to) remain very close to : the fish cling to the line of the weed.
- remain persistently or stubbornly faithful to something : she clung resolutely to her convictions.
- be overly dependent on someone emotionally : you are clinging to him for security
Non-clinging defines a preferred relationship to the existing world that is not trying to make some thing, person, or reality stay put permanently. While we can enjoy or not enjoy what is currently happening we must acknowledge that it is always changing. We cannot stop that process. Clinging is an internal resistance to the creative flow of the world that disables our creative power. We we cannot hold on to anything, we can only continually create the potential for its persistence. This non-clinging relationship is emotionally and energetically another way of being than clinging to a reality. It is participating in an act of creation, manifesting no resistance to the ongoing flow of the world.
Clinging affects our ability to create in many ways.
- It distorts our ability to see what actually is.
- It distorts our ability to choose appropriate action.
- It reflects an ongoing concept that you need something to be a certain way, which is different emotionally and energetically from wanting to create it.
Non-clinging also pertains to ideas of what is possible, for many of our limitations arise from our belief in them. Having no fixed ideas of what’s possible leaves room in the universe for new things to arise, which may be grander than you could imagine. Clinging to a fixed idea will almost always limit your possibilities to those things you think of as possible or probable.
A final but critical point: we must not have a strong attachment to our results, which is another form of clinging in which we require the world to end up a particular way. We have goals and targets that guide our actions, but the results must be surrendered to the intelligence of the world as it is arising altogether. That is part of our adventure—to see what happens next.
2) Surrender/Acceptance-Freely engaging with whatever is happening
To surrender is an ongoing process of suspending judgment and fixed ideas, and willingly and completely engaging with what happens. It can become the perfect stance for engaging creatively with the universe. We still choose. We still act. But we never resist. We see everything that flows into our space as part and parcel of our life and as part of the medium of creation that we are working in. It is all an expression of what the world has become and the working potential with which we create the future.
After Freedom, Updrafting
Coherence
Coherence is the practice of finding alignment with an arising possibility. Each of us exists along with potential events, objects, and people with whom to engage. Sometimes these possibilities are right in front of us—like a bus. But sometimes we find our engagement with them through synchronicities or intuitions, and in this practice we work to develop our skills in maintaining awareness of all the potentials arising around us. Sometimes we resist these potentials (it’s one of our ongoing bad habits) like a child resists going to bed. But sometimes we find perfect engagement with these opportunities—and that is what we call coherence. We become coherent with the arising possibility and therefore can use the existing momentum of that potential to our best advantage.
Congruence.
Being congruent implies being consistent in our actions relative to a goal that we have determined. It is part of the practice to be completely aware of our actions and thoughts to the extent that we learn to maintain congruence at all times. This is counter to many of our behaviors in which:
- We act to create a goal which we secretly believe is impossible; or
- We only work half heartedly at something because we don’t believe we are worth it; or
- We do a task all the while believing it is stupid or impossible; or
- One part of an organization (or an individual) is working at cross purposes with another.
Being congruent is how we maximize the potential of all our actions align with our goals. The practice of Updrafting will develop an enhanced awareness that will mediate an engagement with the world that is richer and more dynamic. We will be able to pick up on things that we would have previously missed and accomplish things we would not have imagined.
What does the stance end up looking like?
- Ever present awareness and interest in what is, which includes all the potentials and possibilities
- Non-clinging acceptance of (or surrender to) what has become
- Passionate interest in what might be created
- Joyful engagement with the task of creating the future
After Note:
In this model we include ideas, intentions, and thoughts in the category of actions—actions that generate real potential. We will see that these internal constructs can be harmful in that we are often resistant, negative, and limiting in our thoughts and beliefs. These thought structures, which are sometimes collectively called the ego, are often erroneously believed to be our actual selves and we use them to both limit who we think we can be, but also what we expect the world to be. We will come to view these thoughts as negative actions, or unskillful actions, and we will learn to reduce or eliminate them from our acting awareness—another step in expanding our awareness of what is possible in the world.
(Some of the ideas and language for CTU are arriving out of sequence; but the purpose of the blog is to write the book and my writing process is not linear. So here are some experimental words that came to me for a simple introduction to Updrafting.)
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Ever feel that everything is going your way, that things are easy, that life is exciting, and that you’ve got great things to do? Has it ever come to you, as you were engaged in some activity you have a passion for, that you haven’t been conscious of anything but that activity—that the rest of the world has dropped away? Ever laugh for no more reason than you were just happy to be alive?
That’s what we call Catching the Updraft. The current of an updraft is always around us but some times we really go with the flow of it; those are the joyous, creative moments when you are collaborating with the universe. Those are the moments when we are being all we can be and leveraging everything at our disposal.
The practice of Updrafting is all about maximizing those moments. It’s how we optimize our creativity, our enjoyment of what we do, and how productive and effective we are in our work and our everyday lives.
This simple approach is to be:
- Really aware of and sensitive to what is actually going on around you.
- Very interested in what you are doing and what you are creating. (And if you are not, stop doing it.)
- Focused on what you want to accomplish—the big picture.
- Relaxed and engaged creatively with whatever arrives in your life.
Of course, these things are not always easy to do. Though they seem like they ought to be easy. So the practice of Updrafting gives us some tools, techniques, practices, and tactics to help us evolve the way we live and work, to improve our odds of Catching the Updraft.
