By Charles E. Smith | Bio

Of great influence in my thinking has been The Urban Shaman by Serge Kahlili King. One of his assertions was that “energy flows where the attention goes.” My work was always shaped by where the CEO or the leader was putting his or her attention. My life is shaped by where I’m putting my attention. And with everybody I knew, their lives were affected by where they placed their attention. What I hadn’t seen before was that energy accompanied attention and that certain kinds of attention enhanced energy. In organizations, outward results can be directly linked to the energy created from where the attention flows.

I then started to work with a musician and a poet, a Taos Pueblo Indian named Robert Mirabal. He and I became fast friends and we started doing training programs and other community work together. We developed a conversation based on the contrast between the linear and the metaphorical. Robert would say that his Tiwa language was metaphorical, the way his people thought was metaphorical, and what they were interested in was metaphorical, including their religion. And metaphorical thinking isn’t very good for business. “English,” he said, “was a language made up to do business in,” and was far more linear, goal-oriented, and time-bound.

Out of our engagement with one another, and experiencing the difference between him and his people and me (a mainstream guy), I came to see that there were really profound, existential differences between how they related to time, music and dance versus results, productivity and money. It was radically different. My immersion with Robert in metaphorical conversation and metaphorical experience—whether through drumming, walks in the woods, or asking a stone what to do with one’s life—demonstrated that there were effects that were surprising, remarkable, insightful and that gave energy, vitality and new life to old situations. I also saw that introducing linear thought and the English language tended to suppress that particular kind of energy. On the other hand, the kind of energy that produces penicillin, airplanes and computers isn’t available to the metaphorical mind in its pure form. I came to see that in a world in which everything is profane and nothing is sacred, energy and human vitality are suppressed.

During the same period I read that in the Kaballah, the ancient Jewish mystical tradition, a person’s life works best when they are able to continuously integrate intellectual, physical, spiritual and emotional energies. That seemed to be the key to the contextual shift I was experiencing: energy in its purest form is in the background of everything. But it gets expressed concretely in objects, results and money. It gets expressed emotionally in relationship and caring, love and generous listening. It gets expressed intellectually in creative thinking and inquiry—in the asking of good questions and the invention of new answers. And it gets expressed spiritually in those representations that we hold sacred—our highest principles.

I saw that in companies, when things started to go awry, one of these energies was always missing. People were either not paying attention to measurement (so there were no results) and/or they weren’t paying attention to relationships (so projects got undermined). Sometimes they weren’t paying attention to principles, and the fundamental meaning went out of the whole thing and people became demoralized. Other times there was no innovation—just people saying and thinking the same things over and over again. Whatever energetic expression prevailed in a company was reinforced by the culture. Other thoughts were forbidden and people who most represented the culture became the CEO or the most important vice-presidents. People representing the type of energy most absent were often dismissed.

Some years ago I saw a video of Red Auerbach—the famous Boston Celtics basketball coach—speaking about what it means to be a coach. One of the things he said was that his job was all about team spirit. It was all about watching the level of team spirit and whenever the level of team spirit went down, his job was to pump it up any way he could through challenge, hard work, practice, counseling, affection or whatever it took to get that team spirit up. I saw then that energy is the same as team spirit in an organization. That’s what we are fundamentally dealing with—an organization whose team spirit is high, whose energy is high, will prevail, other things being equal.

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Tagged with: attention energy language listening results team_spirit vitality