Tag: expression

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Deepak Chopra and the Meaning of Life

Your consciousness constructs the expansion of facts

I’m a dreamer and a skeptic. As a teenager, I remember being fascinated by the Amway promotional materials given to my parents, dreaming (like so many MLM victims) of the good life, then sitting at my desk and doing the math. When I walked to the living room and shared my findings during the pitch to my parents, the Amway visitors were not pleased at all.

My skepticism continues around gurus, the fortunate few who have built lucrative businesses around their products and ideas. Deepak Chopra is a big one, and my impression was always that his teachings were hollow.

Imagine my thrill when I stumbled on Wisdom of Chopra, a website that generates Chopra-esque quotes. They sound like science, sounds like sage wisdom, but do the words actually mean anything?

The Role of Skepticism

Inspirational words are intended to help us dream, but wistful dreaming can lead to trouble.

Skeptics have a bad reputation. They are the Debbie Downers in our lives. The stubborn naysayers. That’s not all skepticism is.

Skepticism helps us sift the good from the bad. It helps us test hypotheses, to really unearth what works. And in the case of gurus, it helps us avoid expensive folly.

Let’s sift through some of the gems and folly from the quote generator:

Innocence is the womb of dimensionless success
It certainly is a womb of success for those who prey on innocence. And yet, while we have our guard up for the charlatans of the world, it becomes ever more important to retain innocence and wonder and creativity and love.

Your heart experiences positive experiences
I certainly hope so. Both my anatomical heart and my metaphorical heart thirst for the positive.

Making tea expresses visible creativity
Tea anyone? I can imagine a guru rolling out a bespoke line of teas using quotes like this. If you’re not drinking enough of it, you won’t ever reach your creative potential.

Information is the path to the progressive expansion of truth
Um, as long as that information is not corrupted. There are too many sheep following dangerous leaders. Folks whose brains have been infected with false facts often peddled by the right wing. We need more skepticism around sources of information.

The secret of the universe exists as exponential positivity
All I imagine when I read this is alarm bells ringing louder and louder as a nuclear power plant melts down. Or someone stubbornly insisting on “looking on the bright side” in the midst of his life falling into tragedy. It’s not just positivity, it’s exponential!

I’m more into insightful positivity than exponential, thank you very much. I’ll take empathetic mourning in the service of healing over the nuclear meltdown positivity, please.

Unleash the Dreamer

What do fake Chopra quotes have to do with peak performance and taking on ambitious goals?

Everything.

For all but the most privileged, life is about overcoming setbacks. Our mental game is what keeps us moving forward. We become powerful by being able to transform the weird into something useful or even inspirational.

We’ve all seen the inspirational photos and quotes that champion athletes put on their walls leading up to big competitions. In the end, though, the inspiration is not in the words but with us. We give the words power, and the power changes with each reader of the words.

One of the reasons we partner with coaches is that they help us find the words and keep us connected to what inspires us. They remind us that we are greater than we believe. They hold us accountable to our words. They strengthen our skill at getting through discomfort in order to generate velocity toward what matters.

Therefore…Your desire is reborn in visible potentiality

Skeptics have a bad reputation because we perceive them as being only skeptical. We imagine them having no capacity to dream. As we navigate a tough and often brutal world, it’s important to stay connected to inspiration.

Words mean things. And we can create meaning out of anything we encounter, including words. So while these fake quotes might be funny or scary or even insipid on their surface, they also offer an opportunity to interpret them for our own purposes. My cynical takes on the fake quotes could have been inspirational instead.

Maybe “making tea unfolds through nonlocal actions” has nothing to do with tea for you. Maybe it shakes you out of dwelling on neighborhood gossip and reconnects you to a larger purpose.

Maybe “greatness illuminates the flow of happiness” is not about traditional ideas of happiness or greatness but simply finding a way to happily go grocery shopping and get the laundry done

What if “nature is inside the light of fulfillment” has no other meaning than reminding you that there’s a park nearby and it might be nice to take a silent walk on a cold winter night, or feel leaves ruffling past your feet as you walk, or hear birds chirping as spring unfolds?

We get to use words as we please. We get to be fueled by a word or phrase even if no one else understands it.

We get to remake each moment, transform the tough ones to our purposes. We’re not always as skilled as we’d like, and sometimes it feels like an impossible goal. But, the possibility is there, even if it is to chuckle at some fake Chopra quotes during a rough day at the office.

Don’t take it from me. Be discerning and intelligent. Be blindly loyal to no one. With healthy skepticism AND an openness to imagination and dreaming. And, just as I share a bit of myself here in the hopes that you will be skeptically inspired, please share a bit of yourself with those around you.

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Creating Deep Mastery from Repetition: Expression

Repetition Creating Expression

In this series, we are exploring different ways repetition can lead us to mastery. So far we have looked at discipline and expertise. This time we go one step deeper, to expression.

LEVEL 3 – REPETITION CREATES EXPRESSION

Level 2 of DEEP mastery – expertise – is about fixing flaws. It’s about pursuing perfection. Learning new facts. Acing the test. Putting our skills to work in different circumstances.

Level 3 is where we set aside perfection.

By the time we get here, we know we can be nearly perfect. We also know perfection is not where the real growth is.

In the hands of masterful talent, flaws can be magical. Listen to the best violinists. Their precision is so amazing that they can create intentional imperfection in the performance. Waiting a fraction of a second longer for one note. Rushing another. Stretching the tones. Their imperfection has another name: interpretation.

Our Level 2 repetitions let us perform perfectly. And we don’t want that. Perfect is boring. Perfect is sterile. Introducing variations or flaws makes our creation more compelling.

The aesthetic of wabi-sabi is about appreciating the beauty of the imperfect.

The beauty in imperfection

A basketball player might notice he has enough airtime to dunk the ball with style instead of make a utilitarian score.

Athletic Expression

A project manager might be so versed in timelines and process that (s)he can find quality, cost savings or efficiency by refocusing on the individual strengths of the team.

Casting Perfection Aside

At first, it’s about doing it right. Am I showing up? Am I doing my reps? Am I performing this skill well? Perfection matters. And then it doesn’t.

In Level 3, we put our personal touch on the skill by letting it stray from perfect – and in doing so we might just redefine perfect. Here, creativity is paired with repetition. We add personal expression, and our distinctive style emerges. We become memorable.

The biggest learning comes from failure. We can refine and refine through repetition, but it only gets us so far. We might become perfect, but we lack distinction. We might be consistent but perform far below our potential. We may even be seen as the best in the world but be sacrificing an opportunity to expand what’s possible.

I struggle with that borderline between expertise and expression. While my team has won the last two world championships in the Pairs division, I would love for there to have been even more risk and expression in our performances. We nailed the consistency we needed to win, and in doing so sacrificed expressing ourselves through a wider variety of catches. I am proud of both performances, and the level 3 part of me yearns for more expression in each performance.

When repetition is in service of expression, we pursue perfection so we can embrace chaos.

The errors, the goofs, the rough sketches, the failures. Those are where bigger breakthroughs lurk. In fact, the farther we take our skills, the more we scoff at perfection because it holds us back. Being exceptional happens by finding the spaces that invite expression and in seeking out chaos.

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Creating Deep Mastery from Repetition: Discipline

Repetition Creates Discipline

There’s a leap from having raw talent to doing something about it. That’s where repetition (aka practice) comes in. Raw talent will lead to incredible peak moments, but the practiced expert is going to win out in the long run. Natural brilliance is no match for strong skills developed deep and wide. It’s why the wily veterans are able to overcome the cocky upstarts so often.

When we look at practice in terms of training vs working out, we look at our experience of the activity in the moment and how it connects to what matters to us. Another way of thinking about it is repetition. Through a lens of repetition, we can see all the strikingly different ways we can be in the moment.

Repetition is a core component of practice. If we are doing something about our raw talent by practicing, we might assume there’s a simple relationship. Put in the reps. Get better. Turns out there’s more than one way reps help you get better. Some give you moderate payoffs. Others transform you and expand what was thought to be possible.

I see a four level model of the payoffs from repetition. I call it DEEP Mastery. In this series, we will explore how each level transforms repetition into different flavors of mastery. Level 1 is Discipline.

LEVEL 1 – REPETITION CREATES DISCIPLINE

Level 1 is counterintuitive, a bit of a paradox. We need discipline to do our repetitions. We can’t even start shaping our raw talent without it. It makes us show up and be focused toward completing the mission.

That’s not the discipline of Level 1. We need to flip it around to see discipline really driving us toward mastery.

Mastery emerges when we use repetition to build discipline.

When we repeat, we get bored. In that moment of boredom, one of our choices is to bail. I do that often with running. Only a few minutes into a run, I can’t wait for it to be over. That’s why I am not moving toward being a masterful runner.

Another choice is to keep practicing. If we make this choice, we expand our commitment to the goal. We build our capacity for discipline. We skew our reaction to boredom from quitting toward continuing, we can apply that discipline throughout our life.

“There are no traffic jams along the extra mile. – Roger Staubach (or Paula Abdul, depending on who you believe)

Your breaking point is where you set yourself apart. At the moment you’re bored or exhausted or out of ideas, being willing to go one more step gives you the edge.

I was confident at this year’s world championships. One important reason was that my team had put in reps. We had often chose to go more rounds of practice than we wanted, sometimes in laughably poor conditions. We knew what our performances felt like when we were physically and mentally exhausted. Great training for a mentally demanding world championship held in the thin, mountain air of Medellin, Colombia! It paid off. My team won, and I was rewarded with my 16th world championship title.

You know what repetitions look like when you’re fresh. Looking at it from the point of exhaustion is a different level of discipline.

Next time you have a choice to continue or bail, make a conscious choice. Another repetition may just create the discipline that takes you to your next victory.

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Innovation is in the Flaw

Innovation is in the Flaw

Tonight I flew up to Portland to train for the world championships. This evening flight is always scenic. I looked out the window at magnificent views and wanted to take some photos.

The problem was, the plane windows were scratched. Any beautiful vista I saw was obscured by blurry smudges.

I tried to move my camera lens around the smudges, desperate for a crisp image. Then I imagined something different. What if the scratches weren’t a problem? What if they were the point? What if the photo were focused on the scratches?

My photo shoot immediately transformed. Once I figured out how to tame the primitive focusing abilities of my mobile phone camera, a new kind of image emerged. A more authentic Arthur image. My photographic style straddles the super formal and the worship of imperfection. By letting scratches be not only okay but the reason for the image, I let my creativity loose and reconnected to the kind of art I like to create.

Then a funny thing happened. The flight attendant, Lori, saw me trying to focus and took pity on me. She thought, “that poor guy is struggling so hard to get a nice sunset photo.” She asked for my phone and offered it to the passenger in front of me, hoping he could get a clearer image.

I thanked her and let her know my crazy-looking refocusing was on purpose. I could tell she didn’t quite understand. At the end of the flight, I showed her my favorite image and thanked her again for looking out for me. Not quite sure she believed my appreciation, but I think she got a better idea of the unconventional image I was trying to create.

The flaw – those damn scratches and smudges – were the key to innovation. I’m sure others have taken images like this before, and I’ve used this technique in the past of focusing on an unexpected foreground to create a different composition. Guess I had forgotten. I know I got better results tonight than if I clung to the rules.

It’s a good reminder. When I see something assumed to be a flaw, I’ll be looking for opportunities to innovate.