One hundred posts to this blog as of today.  Sheesh.  All lined up like a collection of shells gathering moss.  Collections are endearing, and a helpful way to focus thinking.  They are also useless, in a sense, and just sit around taking up space.  But a creative viewpoint will explore their quirks and wring them for their hidden sparkle.  Collections remember the past with fondness, while holding infinite hope for the future.

One more post about business and drawing.  It’s strange even to look at those two words together.  Our society makes easy connections between business and writing or speaking, business and science or math, business and research or analysis.  But referring to business and drawing sounds to us like combining seriousness with play, and how can that be a valid endeavor?

At this time of global shifts in everything, it’s appropriate to change up all our assumptions: to play with our seriousness and to be serious about our play.  Marketing’s concern is the whole person of its clientele, the heart and soul of customers as much as their intelligence.  Using traditional tools and approaches in marketing and problem solving limits the choices unacceptably:  our perceptions must widen far beyond  technical parameters and encompass factors that seem at first glance to be only distantly related to our issue.  Allowing ourselves to perceive this wider and more detailed picture brings us into contact with possibilities heretofore hidden from us. 

Using drawing - or shall we just call it making marks - puts us directly in touch with possibility, and a way of perceiving that makes accessible a new kind of objectivity and analysis.  The practice can be applied by the individual to dissect an issue or meaningfully use down time; it can be used between two people to assist in finding common ground and to clarify communications; and it can be used in groups to boost engagement and simplify teamwork. 

Though radical, this concept is not at all fanciful.  I picture people routinely slipping into mark-making as they converse, having become habituated to accessing this non-linear way of perceiving.  We have been imprisoned by our left-brainedness, and we will discover new worlds of possibility by loosening those bonds through drawing.

David Armano talked on Logic + Emotion a couple days ago about brand as Facilitator, as opposed to brand as Broadcaster.  The implications of this distinction are manifold, and I can’t begin to dissect them here, so go to David’s blog if you want to explore.  For now, I want to point to this distinction as a reason to use visual expression in business.

By nature, some of us are broadcasters and others are facilitators.  Translated to a higher level, we are moving currently from an age of broadcasting to an age of facilitating.  This is not to say either can be dispensed with, but one or the other tends to hold sway in any given era.  If a nation is a world power and a champion broadcaster for a couple centuries, over the following few centuries it is likely to morph into a facilitator role as a different nation takes power. 

In the US of A, major change seems imminent, and we wonder what the role of facilitator involves.  So far it seems to manifest in such phenomena as higher fuel costs, an increase in political involvement, and the creeping “free” economy.  It seems we are being challenged to face the music: to account for our immense energy consumption, for our leaders and their mistakes, and for our commercial recklessness.  In business today, it’s necessary to give generously before you can get.

I’m abbreviating here, but it’s time to get to the point.  If facilitation is what’s required for our country and our businesses, consider how it translates to your daily work and communications.  Consider, for example, how to run your meetings as a facilitator rather than as a broadcaster.  If you have any faith in your staff, facilitating their interactions should bring nothing but satisfaction and success.

And if you’re unsure how to facilitate your facilitating, use drawing!  Keeping in mind that you’re using drawing for the benefits inherent in the activity, and not in order to produce a pretty picture, approach issue discussions in meetings by asking staff to draw, individually, in small groups, or as a whole group.  Practice using the language of drawing in place of the spoken word, at least for short periods of time.  Get a roll of newsprint and tape long pieces of it on the wall, and put a hefty supply of markers within reach. 

As manager or group leader, you’ll want to absorb and analyze the drawings that are produced, and as a group you will draw conclusions from the activity.  There’s no need, however, to save these creations.  Make a few mental or written notes, be sure the group senses they have made progress, and then move on.  After a month’s worth of meetings that include drawing, notice your group’s morale and energy levels as they enter the conference area.  Because you have opened for them the doors of perception through visual communications, it’s very likely that the pervading mood will elevate and a can-do attitude will prevail.

See, the thing about drawing is that since we have so totally neglected it, when we put it to even the most tentative use now, we open floodgates.   On a very hot summer day, if you jump into a pool the shock of the coolness jettisons your awareness to another dimension.  Drawing can be like that. 

Very often when we seem to have issues they are actually not issues at all but limitations in our awareness.  New technologies prove that by imagining aides to everyday work - things that simply remove limitations - we can and do create them.  The same applies to lifestyles, beliefs, goals and concepts as well.  If any of these seem disjointed, out of whack, not-quite-perfect in whatever way, consider whether refreshing your awareness is what is required. 

Something’s wrong, hard to put your finger on it; or maybe it’s easy to name the problem but you’re stumped on its solution.  Rather than pronouncing the situation impossible, the factors unworkable, and the frustration of it all more than should be asked of an honest human being; rather than leaping to the conclusion that you’re being dealt with unfairly, take a small step back and sit down with a clean (or not-so-clean) piece of paper and writing tool, (pencil or pen or lipstick if necessary) and without forethought apply the writing tool to the paper and let it move.

Here’s a hypothetical example:  you have an appointment with a potential buyer whose interest in your product is lukewarm.  You wonder how to present your company in a way that will make this buyer take notice.  In addition to all the usual preparations (research them, prep irresistable informational materials, etc.) you also take five minutes to draw, to put your thinking in visual terms, to move your consciousness to a higher vantage point so you have more awareness at your disposal.

What do you draw in those five minutes?  The range of possibilities is infinite.  Perhaps you scribble aimlessly, just following the whims of intuition while thinking about your upcoming appointment.  The result will reveal where your concerns lie.  Or maybe you make a picture (and remember, this is not art!) of your potential buyer, and this will reveal your assumptions (which may or may not be true).  Or possibly you diagram the relationship between you and the customer, and include present and future schematics.  Looking at this product of your five-minute drill will most likely send you back to the drawing board with several brand new ideas.

It doesn’t matter what you draw.  I repeat, it doesn’t matter one iota what you draw.  The miracle is in the drawing.  The discovery is in making one mark, which leads to another, and another.  That’s all, but it’s enough to leverage your awareness to new levels of power and inspiration.

Are all you business leaders, managers, and salespeople out there aware of Dan Roam’s new book, The Back of the Napkin?  I listened to a panel discussion with this author and several others, though I’ve not yet read the book.  Today, I’m suggesting that anyone involved in commerce who could use a new approach should pick this one up.

The nugget of brilliance at the heart of Roam’s manifesto is that we are visual beings and that we respond with unprecendented engagement to pictures.   If this seems an obvious notion, why is it that our adult world traffics so little in pictorial communications?  We may surround ourselves with visuals, pictures on the wall, cool screensavers, movies.  But we seldom if ever use our human capability to draw. 

It’s one of my main rags in life, that we so rarely cultivate our natural gifts: our abilities to move, and sing, and draw.  So it’s truly heartening when the urgings of so many creativity experts are ratified in the business world through vehicles like Roam’s book.  Future civilizations will look back at this time as one when humanity at last began to realize its full potential.  The progress made possible by the wheel’s invention is minor compared to the evolution we will achieve through full use of our natural capabilities.

Roam’s idea, in a way, is a simplification of the mind map; it’s not a new concept, but it’s presented in a nicely accessible form through the book.  Would you like your business challenges to be a little easier to handle, your relations a little deeper and more fun, your communications more clear, your progress more obvious?  A great place to start is with your own visualizing; just pick up a pen and start making marks.

Dream, by Henri Rousseau

Here’s a fun way to take a peek at your inner self, a way to practice focusing for your own entertainment.  It’s especially helpful if you suffer from insomnia.

When you lie down at night, go to the “moon pictures!”  That is, close your eyes and relax your body and quietly watch the pictures you see on the inside of your eyelids.

At first, your mind is buzzing, and you are trying hard to see the pictures but all you get is abstract shapes or colors, at best.  It’s like those patterned 3-d images (what are they called?) that look like nothing until your eyes properly adjust and reveal the scene hidden in the swirling morass.  It doesn’t help to try hard; you just have to stay with it, and relax.

Don’t think about the moon pictures, or label them, or even try to recognize them.  Just let them float by in all their wierdness.  After you’ve calmed your thoughts, the shapes begin to naturalize and you find yourself observing a strange, disjointed movie - as if you are watching your dreams from a waking state.  Which is actually what you’re doing, of course, and the process soon leads to snores.

Try it this weekend!

Yesterday’s focus on focus raised a big topic, which I’ll continue just for today.  We human beings struggle mightily with the question of focus.  Inasmuch as we have private rights to our own thoughts, we like to think we each individually decide where to place our focus.  To some extent this is true, and by applying stern discipline, we can select and cultivate focus that brings rewards we seek.  We can focus on work, and see some profit increase.  We can focus on losing weight, or building muscle, or learning a new skill, and earn rewards for our efforts.

Indeed, we have tremendous power to achieve through intense focus.  The difficulty surfaces when we see, however, the limitations of focus.  The tool is only as useful as the choices we make.  We may chose, for example, to focus on increasing business profits through hard work.  And while we may achieve our goal to some extent, we suddenly realize that by focusing intently on working harder, we have been blind to new methods that provide shortcuts to the same success.  Focus, in other words, can obstruct clear view of opportunity.

Maybe you focus hard on losing weight, and indeed the pounds drop away.  But in the process, you turn a deaf ear to your soul’s lonely outcry and ignore the oppression you feel from dieting.  You end up thinner, but now there’s a new problem: chronic depression.

So focus is a handy tool, but it can be deceptive.  It can trick you into thinking you’re in charge and invincible.  Which is a great feeling for the short term, but simply untrue in reality. 

Focus is like the drugstore magnifiers we aging boomers all use to boost our fading eyesight.  It’s a wonderful tool that lets us pretend we can see with accustomed clarity.  We do well not to forget, however, that the larger truth is that we’re slowly going blind, no matter how powerful the tool makes us right this instant.

In the end, practising focus and learning to use it intensely and well is a seriously helpful way to achieve your goals.  And then, letting your focus go, dropping it completely in order to open to new information supercedes your focus.  Focus, like the rules of a game, is best practised and then forgotten.

“I’m convinced that this is how the “Law of Attraction” really works. Great stuff doesn’t show up because you focus on it. You’re just able to suddenly perceive all the great stuff that’s always been right in front of you, because you focus on it.”

Sonia Simone  penned these words a few days ago.  It’s an excellent interpretation if you ask me.  The wildly popular Law of Attraction teaching is far more subtle than its preachers would lead you to believe.  The idea is often presented as a souped-up wish upon a star when it’s in actuality an intense discipline for mature adults only.

Focus is what it’s all about, and we’ve been working at developing our individual focus since we started kindergarten.  Surely a great many of us die without ever attaining powerful focus, having been distracted by ten thousand things.  We focus variously on making the grades, finding a lover, securing a job, making more money, and all those expected life achievements.  We focus when we need to and otherwise dabble.  When immediate needs are taken care of, focus glazes over.

Focusing on opening, on getting past your assumptions, prejudices, and fears, on constantly widening your perspective to include much more in your awareness than is habitual — this is the kind of focus Simone refers to.  It’s the same practice yogis and contemplatives have espoused for ages.  It’s about getting out of your own way so that you have access to all the wonders around you.

You may use the Law of Attraction to organize your thinking so that your business is more successful.  Understand, though, that this discipline of thought organization - i.e., focus - leads far beyond mundane materialism.  Opening to the gifts that are everywhere available if you can perceive them is doing business with eternal life.

I had the technical nightmare from hell ALL LAST WEEK.  Not a few hours, not a couple days, the entire week.  Apparently my satellite company doesn’t believe in overnight delivery.  And about four days into the computer outrage, our phones gave out as well.  Now, I live in a rural area, and when there’s neither phone nor internet, helplessness is magnified.  My reaction is rage, since vulnerability isn’t in my vocabulary, but I actually did a decent job of it keeping cool if I do say so myself. 

Mostly, I wanted to know why me?  Why now?  What’s this about?  Understand, I make my living by being available digitally, and when my machine closes down, so must my work to all intents and purposes.  I was particularly geared up to get a heap o’ jobs accomplished, especially after the lazy 4^th of July daze, and here my partner, my buddy, my mainstay, my web connection decided to take a holiday.  It was inscrutable to me, and the stars said nothing.  I contemplated, and drew cards.  I stared at the wall, and thought of the practical list someone gave me, with tasks to accomplish when business is slow.  Perhaps one of these would be productive use of this oh-so-excruciatingly-unproductive time.  I considered working in the garden, writing articles, practicing Adobe or php. 

What I ended up doing was far removed.  A few days ago, four boxes arrived for me.  They contained the daily journals of my grandfather, which he kept for many years during the first half of the 1900s.  I have only read one random notebook so far, but I know this reading is as complete a reason as I could ask for my technological breakdown.  If not forced, I’d never have opened those boxes anytime soon.  It had been my intention to read them when less pre-occupied with making a living, some years hence.

But the experience of living vicariously with this man – of whom I have no memories, though in fact I was about four years old when my grandfather died – through his diary, has already opened up huge doorways of possibility in my little old mind.  It is moving, and awesome, and just plain significant that he lived those eighty years ago in such a different way from anything we know now; that I am descended from such a man as he.  If this sounds egotistical, I assure you I mean this in a universal sense.  Others my age who are informed about the intimate lives of their grandparents surely know this realization: how fragile our dreams, how limiting our perceptions.

For now, let me mention just one aspect of his life.  The man worked like the devil.  He farmed and shepherded in a steep Vermont valley, laboring through months of sub-zero temperatures and then other months of nothing-but-haying, with a bottomless list of chores and repairs and innovations in between.  Work was slightly relaxed, but not abandoned on Sundays, and otherwise constant.

Now here’s the thing:  his writings tell me these facts of his life, but they do not in any way mention what it was like to work, and to work so hard all the time.  The journal is not without emotion, and careful thought is given to several subjects, but he did not consider his attitude towards work to be worth noting.  He cut wood, he did the haying, that’s all.  A simple report.

Maybe such a cavalier attitude towards the way one spends the majority of time is common to masculinity everywhere.  Nonetheless, what a contrast it is to me and all first world civilizations, who seek the best expression of self through work.  We expect, eventually, to achieve a satisfying, well-fitting occupation that allows us to achieve personal goals without undue drudgery.

Was my grandfather deficient in the intelligence necessary to escape such hard work?  Not a bit of it: he was well educated and many of his notes are about the books he’s reading.  He worked hard because it was natural to him, like gathering nuts is natural for squirrels.  Most of our ancestors – save, perhaps, those of the ruling classes - worked much harder than we do. 

The fact that my grandfather worked so diligently inspires thought about how that impulse is translated to me, and that’s why I’m telling this story.  Gramp was a farmer, and I’m in business, but in general terms, the two are both about work.

In your business, the straightforward work of it often causes stress or depression, because we have a self perception these days that demands we take care of our dreams.  We know that ignoring mental anguish is unhealthy.  We no longer respect mindless rote labor.

But we also know that our level of satisfaction in work depends chiefly on our attitude towards it.  If our ancestors worked without questioning the labor, we can too, if we are confident it will advance our goals. Much more, we can love the work; we can respect the health it gives us, we can use the time productively in one way or another.

A deluge of orders, or meetings, or petty crises, or whatever else demands going the extra nine miles for your business can be an opportunity, if you take it.  For the human frame and condition, work of any sort is a legacy and also a blessing.  We may have learned how to manipulate it more finely, but the ability to untiringly set to and accomplish work is always ready and waiting.

And then there are those of us who feel best when working, who enjoy our work to the point of obsession.  Had I been complaining about drudgery in my work?  Not at all.  To the contrary, work thrills me every day; I happily spend long hours at it.  Yet the technical failures around me last week, and the subsequent reading in my grandfather’s journal brought home the acute dependency on the internet I seem to have developed.  Work is an urge with me.  When my primary tool is broken, what can I work on?  What good am I unless I’m hard at it? 

So, for me, to be forced to lounge on the chaise and flip those old pages from 1933 was surrender to cosmic dictate, for once ignoring my tearing urge to be productive and Johnny-on-the-spot with clients and all that jazz.  This time, letting go of that ancient compulsion to work was the techno-storm message.

In my last post, I recommended bringing back to work with you some of the sweetness of the holiday.  Keeping close to the heart the small joys you experience when your time is your own will greatly ease the pressures of work life.  The little treasure I am cherishing today is singing.

Yes, singing.  Do you remember what it is to sing a song?  Some of you practice music daily, but the vast majority most likely never sing.  Maybe you listen to music all the time, but that’s still entirely different from making your own music.  If you go to church, perhaps you sing once a week, which is a whole lot more than most.  

Considering that using vocal chords to produce musical sounds is a human birthright, it’s pretty amazing how rarely we Americans exercise this capability.  Ask almost any adult to sing a ditty and they will refuse for fear of embarrassment.  Singing, it appears, is going the way of poetry - relegated to the refuse heap of all things impractical, profound, and mysterious - the saddest waste of our civilization.

But let me not dwell on this shameful loss; rather I propose a counter-revolution.  Consider dedicating to the rediscovery of your soul’s music.  There are ample opportunities for singing in daily life, and you don’t have to sing loudly.  Start out with a quiet whistling if your vocal chords seem dormant.  Or just hum.  Sing the tune that’s in your head, or the last song on the radio, or anything you just make up note by note.  As you become more used to allowing this expression, you’ll even find it possible to sing out loud in front of others.

And please note: you do not have to have “a nice voice,” or be able to sing on key.  Singing in order to improve your quality of life has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of your voice.  It’s only about using the abilities with which you were born to define and appreciate your ultimate purpose in life.