Amplifiers of Your Capabilities

Discovery

You are committed to many things in your life, but you must now consciously channel your powers and inject commitment-RG4 to the challenge-RG7. Any challenge poses a risk, and your commitment personalizes that risk unambiguously. The only thing standing between success and failure, apart from luck, is your capability.

But, you do not know what you are capable of. That is one the reasons that the project is a challenge for you. You discover yourself through working on it. Commitment amplifies your capabilities at the same time as it reveals them to you. That is why being reflective is characteristic of the commitment that is related to creativity.

Each manifestation of commitment leads to a different discovery: 

• Only by surrendering do you discover the extent of the demands on you and how far you will go to meet them.
• Only through passion do you discover how deeply involved you and your various supporters are.
• Only by play can you discover the new and engage with what is alien.
• Only through learning do you discover what you needed to know before you took on this particular challenge.

Fortunately, the inner personal processes involved in injecting commitment reveal and amplify your capabilities. In each Tetrad, the 2 lower Levels provide the basics, while the 2 higher Levels generate stress and benefit. Taking each commitment mechanism in turn, see more details of what the internal structure demands and enables.

Manifestations of Commitment

RG4⁴: Surrender

Surrender is about putting yourself wholly in the service of the challenge. It therefore allows and encourages you to draw deeply on your own resources, personal and tangible. These resources include your capabilities and also your means to nourish and strengthen them.

The internal structure shows how this occurs:

RL7: g4:  Being fully willing, so characteristic of surrender, allows and pressures you to do whatever is required by the challenge. So long as willingness is handled reflectively, it is beneficial to remove all natural barriers to the vulnerability that the challenge demands.
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RL6: g3: Surrendering requires a shrewd definition of values and purposes in the challenge, to ensure that you can maintain them over time and even under stressful conditions. This is stressful.
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RL5: g2: Intensifying communication sensibly allows your surrender to generate a special world that is evident to others. It also reassures them that your willingness (g4) is full and unforced, and allows you to explain your goals (g3) convincingly.
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RL4: g1: The sense and state of surrender comes from meaningfullyintensifying experiences that occur in relation to the project and your efforts.

RG4³: Passion

Your passion for the project translates into an intense caring for its progress and ultimate successful conclusion. The intense attention leads to an emotional engagement that brings to the fore your capabilities to nurture, protect and advance the project.

The internal structure shows how this occurs:

RL3: g1: Being passionate is grounded in a concern to progress via meaningful stages that relate to the challenge. These targets for change provide something tangible with which passion can engage.
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RL4: g2: Passion develops by sensiblyintensifying your emotions so that you deeply feel the significance of the challenge and your responsibility for it.
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RL5: g3: The most stressful component of passion requires you to intensify communicationsshrewdly. Support takes on a new meaning as others—family, colleagues, superiors, investors, friends, journalists—become aware of how much this project means to you and what you expect of them. You, in turn, can discover their capabilities and how supportive they really are.
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RL6: g4: There must be no doubt in your own mind about what you are aiming for. Goals within the project, identified reflectively, reveal that your passion is not an impulsive state, but is deeply and intelligently driven. This is the prime benefit.

RG4²: Play

Play is crucial for our creative energies and capabilities: it is fun and counter-balances the seriousness of surrender and passion. New ideas and perspectives that are relevant but inherently threatening, counter-intuitive or alien cannot be entertained and explored other than playfully. Play offers comfort and a sense of safety. It occurs most easily within a dialogue and is often used in small groups.

The internal structure shows how this occurs:

RL2: g1: Play must focus inquirymeaningfully so that it can deliver its benefits. Just monkeying around or joking at another's expense is not creative play.
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RL3: g2: Play must sensiblytarget change because entering a new situation is what is hardest for everyone. The uncertainties, risks and unknowns of the future demand that imagination should infuse thought.
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RL4: g3: Activation of imagination within play involves intensifying experiencesshrewdly in accord with the issue. Be realistic about the individuals involved and the group dynamics. It may be necessary to increase humour or sharpen fear or diffuse tensions or protect sensitivities. This is the stressful element, so a structured method and a helper can be useful.
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RL5: g4: The benefit from play comes from reflectivelyintensifying communications e.g. by using whiteboards, mind-maps and other tools for expressing, capturing, organizing, seeing and reviewing ideas. Criticism is often prohibited here, at least during idea generation and explanation, because it is inhibiting. In a safe group, reflective criticism should be beneficial.

Creative play may be difficult in teams, so facilitators are often useful. Their tasks are to focus inquiry (g1), get targets identified (g2), diffuse or heighten tensions (g3), and capture the output (g4). The facilitator also typically seeks a balance of participation and contribution.

Albert Einstein said:  "Play is the highest form of research."
and: "Creativity is intelligence having fun."

RG4¹: Learn

Learning at work must deliver what you need to know now. In most personal matters, you «learn by experience». So learning is about extracting and retaining relevant knowledge from both successes and failures. Mentoring and mutual-help groups may be useful, while conventional book learning and conference attendance is somewhat less important.

The internal structure shows how this occurs:

RL4: g1:  Learning is based on taking action that is meaningful for you, especially in relation to the challenge. It is from these actions and their consequences that you must learn.
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RL3: g2: To learn in practice, you must focus inquirysensibly on whatever is going on as you pursue the challenge.
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RL2: g3: The stress in learning is about taking what you know, believe or think on the one hand, and shrewdly setting targets for change. Poor staging results in minimal learning.
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RL1: g4: Learning depends on reflectivelyintensifying experiences that emerge as you work. This is how you learn from experience. It allows the resulting knowledge to be given enough weight and self-relevance to stay with you as a lifelong benefit.

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Next

By this point, your creative energies have been released, fostered, demonstrated, enhanced and applied. That certainly does not mean that you are going to succeed. Not at all. At most, it means you deserve success. The next challenge within creativity is to create a context which maximizes the likelihood of getting what you deserve. That is the best that anyone can do.

• The first step in that direction is positioning yourself for vantage.

Originally posted: 31-Jan-2012. Last updated: 10-Jul-2013.