Commit Your Self: RsH-G4

Maximize Identification

Enthusiasm-RG3 gets things moving—but it does not usually keep them moving in the way required. However much support you gain, the challenging project is yours and yours alone, and any external support places further expectations and demands on you. The project therefore needs proper commitment. Becoming personally committed is an inner process, not a sudden event. It depends on consciously (and unconsciously) injecting commitment you identify with the challenge. You have the final say in whether or not you throw your self, into something. This makes it yours in a way that is more profound than involvement with its pressure to be sensible, and more enduring than enthusiasm with its poorly controlled ebbs and flows.

Using Willpower and injecting Commitment represented by the Tetrads in the Structural Hierarchy of Creativity in Work.

Your commitment needs to be reflective, and therefore chosen self-consciously and openly channeled into the project. The «reflective» quality is provided by adding a 4th adjacent Level of using willpower and creating 4 Tetrads: RsHG4 as follows:

  • Surrender: RG44
  • Passion: RG43
  • Play: RG42
  • Learning: RG41

The function of injecting commitment is to ensure that you discover, develop and apply your relevant inner strengths to the project. One consequence is that you need to accept implications and unexpected ramifications of the project that may be onerous or unwelcome e.g. your external resources, like money and property, may also need to be provided.

The diagram shows that the requirement to intensify your experiences-RL4 occurs in all four Tetrads. This is the basis for personalizing the challenge. The internal Level varies in each Tetrad, with the result that intensification of experience should be:

  • meaningful in Surrendering-RG44
  • sensible in Being Passionate-RG43
  • shrewd in Playing-RG42
  • reflective in Learning-RG41

Ways to Intensify Experience

RG44: Surrender

Entering a mental state of surrender to the project depends on meaningfully intensifying experiences associated with it. In this state, you put yourself wholly in the service of the challenge. You will then discover what it is all about.

Outsiders' View: If supporters, they will welcome your surrender; if not, they may regard you as eccentric, obsessive or gullible.

RG43: Passion

Becoming passionate about your project means caring intensely about its progress. It occurs by intensifying your emotions, but this must be sensible, not self-indulgent. Passion adds an overt personal force to addressing issues and obstacles and has a marked, but diffuse, impact on others.

Outsider's View: Supporters will be delighted at your energy and involvement and may expect it. Others, however, may regard you as blinded or fanatical.

RG42: Play

Play is important because it opens the imagination and safely releases new intuitions, ideas and perspectives that may be relevant to the challenge. Playing requires that you shrewdlyintensify your experiences, so that nothing untoward occurs while conceptual and social ideas are tossed about.

Outsiders' View: Enlightened supporters realize that play energizes you, lightens atmospheres, reduces negativity, and frees up the imagination. Some might even say that play is the basic mode of learning. Others may view any joking and games during work (unless tightly structured and paid for) as evidence of flippancy, irresponsibility or immaturity.

RG41: Learning

Learning here refers to learning by experience i.e. extracting and retaining practical knowledge from both successes and failures. Learning something necessary for your project requires you to intensify experiencesreflectively so that relevant knowledge sticks as you strive, inquire, fail and succeed. Challenges typically demand a broadening of perspectives and a deepening of knowledge, often in areas not evident at the outset. So learning includes reading and discussing, but reflection needs to follow to increase the pertinence of the ideas.

Outsiders' View: Supporters may not understand what or why you need to learn, and the culture probably determines if they welcome it. Some may regard you as wasting time in looking backwards or attending conferences.

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Originally posted: 31-Jan-2012. Last updated 27-Jan-2013.