Day Two of Recovery
Today needed an hour less sleep than yesterday. Must be recovering.
If there was a single thing, just ONE THING I learned in that writer's room…if I could choose only one…
I think I'd choose something that related not just to the "room" but to my daily life. Here it is:
The Mastermind. Also known as Brainstorming. Or a Think Tank. Or writer's room.
That's the external aspect: "two or more people working in a spirit of harmony to accomplish a common goal."
The INTERNAL aspect would be Mindstorming, or the "Parts Party."
I'm going to see if three lessons from the CRYSTAL LAKE room can be connected to my daily actions.
The first three that come to me are:
The room needs leadership, or it will devolve to chaos.
"Serious Play" is a tool for maximum creativity.
Timing is everything: right idea, right time, right person
The point here is to find a model that explains what happened, prepares me for the next instance (which will hopefully be actually running such a room, with proper support), but is also useful when just by myself.
I'll try the first one today. "The room needs leadership, or it will devolve into chaos."
This is why human beings evolved hierarchical societies. Everyone at that table had a different agenda. Different life experiences. Different skills. Without leadership everyone just does their own thing. No series.
So…someone has to say "this is why we're here. I need your creativity and focus. We will generate thousands of ideas, and from them, I will choose the ones that apply to the series I sold to A24 and PEACOCK. Here are the rules."
Given that, we can move forward. Without that, we could have spent six weeks just deciding on the RULES. But that leader needs IMO to be a natural Alpha in that space.
He or she needs to LEAD, and to inspire the trust of everyone in the room, because we were all strong people with strong opinions. I am 100% sure that writer's rooms have devolved into a power struggle. The best leader simply knows everyone's job better than THEY know it, but trusts you to do your stuff while they handle the big picture.
A good enough leader can attract people who are BETTER than they are at individual things, but can continually help you course-correct if you are heading off in the wrong direction. And the best employees? The ones who might become leaders themselves? Are happy to submit to the leader's authority. Learning to be a good follower teaches you to be a good leader…if for no other reason because the leader will one day ask you to lead someone else. A good follower does it!
Now…let me relate that to my internal life. The "Parts Party" is an hypnotic tool where you imagine the different aspects of your personality as separate people. The Pixar film "Inside/Out" used a similar notion, adapted from Basic Emotions Theory. So for instance, someone who craves adventure but has been locked into a security-first lifestyle might be dropped into a trance and the hypnotist says "security, meet adventure" and let the two aspects talk it out.
What aspects might we expect to find? Well, Body, Emotions, and Intellect would be good guesses. Survival, Sexuality, Power, Emotion, Communication, Intellect and Spirit could also be Chakric choices. Many different ways to look at that.
Here's the theory: that
There are certain universal desires: avoiding pain and increasing pleasure.
There are near-universal desires, in the sense that 95%+ of people want them. Money, relationships, children, sex, and so forth would be in this category.
Intelligence is problem solving.
Wisdom is knowing which problems to solve
As wisdom is gathered by observing the cycles of life, intelligent but naïve kids can grow into being intelligent, wise adults. IF THEY OBSERVE.
And let's try another one, the Hawaiian Huna notion that the body is like a "black bag" where we store our unprocessed emotions. I don't know about you, but I boil this down into the notion that a smart adult, without internal conflicts, would accomplish all their goals.
Why? This isn't an absolute truth, but it IS genuinely my starting point. And the reasoning is:
There are only two things to really understand in life: "who am I?" and "What is true?" IN other words, who and what human beings are, especially yourself, and what reality is.
If you know who and what you are, YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE CAPABLE OF. Simple.
If you understand reality, you know the "game board" you are dealing with. And in any given situation, the more cycles of action-response you go through, the more you should understand.
If you have a goal, and simply study what those who accomplished it did, you have a basic recipe. If you can find people who started where YOU are, you get a more precise recipe. That's understanding the world: "if I do X, I will optimize my chances of this."
Next is to look at the price, and ask if you are willing and able to pay it. That's self-knowledge.
Then, you have to DO THE THINGS day after day, for the required period of time. That is also self-knowledge: how to motivate yourself to do something. Anyone who has held a job, or graduated school, knows how to motivate themselves IF THEY LOOK DEEPLY ENOUGH.
The trick to motivation is to FEEL the pleasure of accomplishment, and FEEL the pain of failure. Let yourself FEEL it deeply enough, and you'll act. In fact, you can turn this around: if you ain't acting, you don't feel it enough. "How do I know when I'm feeling it enough?" When you take action.
You might need to break the process down into smaller and smaller bite-size chunks, but eventually you'll have something that can be accomplished within a single Pomodoro 25-minute chunk. Bingo. Then increase the pleasure on one side, and dial up the pain on the other until you act.
If you don't act? Some of your emotions are fighting. YOU DON'T BELIEVE YOU CAN AND SHOULD TAKE THESE ACTIONS.
So your internal "mastermind" is NOT ALIGNED. The parts are fighting rather than cooperating.
So some part of you has to take control. For the sake of communication, lets call this your soul. The core goals of your life, which MUST connect to the most basic realities: body, heart, mind, must be clear, strong, and inter-connected. You have to feel how your physical relates to your heart and mind. How your relationship goals relate to body and career. How your career/mental goals relate to body and heart.
All three. As expressions of your being, your soul, your essence. "This is who I'm committed to be."
Visualize the "Golden Man/woman". This is the idealized version of yourself, the one who can do the daily minimums effortlessly. The more clearly you can feel his/her presence, see them, hear them, the easier it is to follow them.
And this is what the disparate parts of your personality need. They are ALL there to help you move away from pain toward pleasure. SURVIVAL.
When you have that handled, feel secure, opening the heart becomes safe. That tends to be a maturing experience, and most will begin to find and consider things more important than their own lives: building a legacy, protecting those you love, teaching what you have learned and so on.
Each part of you is trying to contribute to the overall process of your life, your maturing. BUT THEY HAVE TO DO THIS AT THE RIGHT TIME.
IMO, that would be getting your survival wired tight BEFORE sex and love. That means you pick a partner without fear, and can walk away if things go wrong, with the resources to live comfortably and take care of any children you have created. Do things in this order (approximately. There is always overlap and messiness. That's life.) and your desire to understand life accelerates: problem solving to increase security and escape pain. WISDOM takes you to putting those basic lessons at "unconscious competence" so that you can focus on JOY. And then…service.
That order. Survival. Joy. Service. The saddest most bitter people are those who gave love and service before they had really handled their survival. Meat for predators.
OK…that's the overall. My soul, the Golden Man, represents and sets the most basic goals. The other parts of me negotiate my daily/weekly/monthly activities.
Let's zoom in. In the arena of writing, I have various aspects: creativity, discipline, flow, ambition, love, fear, strategy, tactics, philosopher, and so on. They sit within me like people around the writer's table.
There is also the "Mentor Table" aspect, the people I give thanks for who represent leadership. If Tananarive, Octavia, Larry Niven, and Shakespeare are sitting around my mental table, they are clearly and obviously capable of solving any writing problem I can have. I have to use them as ways of exceeding my limited self image. So my ego-self isn't big enough to lead them. But my "Golden Man" is: and has the self-confidence, the absolute clarity, to LISTEN TO THEM. One at a time, in proper sequence, let these titans express their opinions about the project, and life itself, and the process of mastery.
If it is something new and risky, then create a bite-sized experiment, no more than a week of effort, to test: does this work? Yes? Double down. No? Try something else, keeping your eyes on the ultimate goal, just like keeping your eye on a distant tower as you hack your way through the jungle.
I want to double my energy
I want committed love and passion, a life of joy and service.
I want an abundant, exciting career
Those as a basic three are pretty damned good, and diving into them will teach me a LOT about myself. But every day will have challenges that must be faced not just with specific actions, but actions taken at the right time.
If, for instance, I resolve to exercise after work every day, and discover I'm not doing it, then the simple, painful solution is to exercise FIRST. Before you work. Before you EAT.
Right action
Right timing
Right emotions
A little "Eightfold path" there, right? The right parts of me, acting together in the right timing to create the right rhythm, the right vibration, the right momentum. Pick your metaphor.
Daily activities either advance our cause, or teach us about the game. When they succeed, they take us closer to a goal that serves our souls and higher purpose, while simultaneously anchoring DEEP in survival. If your food, shelter or basic relationships are unstable, you will react to life with fear rather than love.
And love, fun, play, is the best route to creativity. Creativity produces ideas. Testing those ideas eventually produces the right answer: which will be the right actions, in the right combination, at the right time, with the right people.
I'm going to stop here, because I don't want to lose anyone. Does this make sense? Can you see how mastering the internal world can help you master the external? And mastering the external will teach you about the internal? If you have ANY questions about any of this, please let me know.
You should also listen to the Lifewriting podcast at www.lifewritingpodcast.com, and our weekly brainstorming, every Saturday, on the Firedance Live! Show. You can get on that mailing list at www.stevenbarneslist.com
See you there!
Steve
