Theatre of the Mind Podcast Episodes

Learn the Art and Science of Manifestation
Kelly Howell: Welcome once again, to Theater of the Mind, your host, Kelly Howell. Our show today is on creating. How to create anything you want; a work of art, a relationship, a career, or a better life. We're going way beyond the Law of Attraction, to explore the practical mechanics behind the process of bringing your visions and dreams into reality. My guest is Robert Fritz, creator of the DMA course you've all been asking me about, and the founder of Technologies for Creating. Robert is a composer, artist, filmmaker writer, and entrepreneur. He is the author of several books, including the International Best Seller, The Path of Lease Resistance; Your life is Art, Creating, and Corporate Tides. Robert has developed one of the most powerful and practical systems for understanding the mechanics of creating anything you want, and his revolutionary audio book, Creating, is available for download right now at TheateroftheMind.com. Hey Robert, welcome to the show.
Robert Fritz: Thanks. Good to be here.
Kelly: Yeah, I'm happy to finally speak with you because I took your DMA course in the early 80's.
Robert: Where?
Kelly: In New York City.
Robert: Oh really?
Kelly: Yeah!
Robert: [laughs 01:53]
Kelly: I still use it to this day. I have my manual, I don't really look at the manual anymore, but it's been a big part of my life.
Robert: Oh, that's wonderful. Good to hear.
Kelly: Yeah, it really works. So what happened to that course?
Robert: Just like computer software, there's new generations, so now it's actually part of the work we do. We still have a training company and a consulting company. We work all over the world. A lot of my books are in a variety of languages; Chinese, Swedish, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and we have trainers all over the world that are offering courses that I've created.
Kelly: If somebody wants to take one of your workshops now, what would they be looking for on the Internet?
Robert: Yeah, you can go to www.robertfritz.com and our schedule is there.
Kelly: OK, great.
Robert: Yeah.
Kelly: Well should we start with some background of how you got started in this work? Was there a defining moment, or a teacher that inspired you?
Robert: There have been a lot of teachers that have inspired me in my training, particularly in music. I went to the Boston Conservatory, got a Bachelors and Masters there, studied composition in Europe, played in New York as a studio musician, played in LA as a studio musician. I came back to Boston and taught at Berkley College, taught at New England Conservatory. I began to wonder if the same principals that we use in the arts can be used in people's lives in exactly the same way, except as applied to people's lives, rather than a piece of music or a film, or a painting. In 1975, which seemed like 100 years ago...
Kelly: Doesn't it? I know.
Robert: I started the course, and began teaching around Boston, and training some teachers to teach it. A lot of folks around Boston did it particularly around MIT, Sloan school management. I got invited to join and form a company with Peter Senge, who wrote The Fifth Discipline, and began to become interested in organizational issues, as well as personal issues. The real question was, "How do we create what matters to us and how do we organize our lives around those things that matters most to us?" One of the major discoveries that is unlike most of the things we hear about and see is the impact that the structures in our lives have on what happens to us. There's one of two types of behaviors that we see typically. One, we call oscillation, and the other is advancement. Oscillation is: you create something, you have it for a period of time, but then there is some kind of reversal, and at the end of the story you no longer have it, the great relationship that didn't last, the business success that turned into a financial loss.
About five years after I started the original DMA course, I started to see longrange patterns in people's lives, and the pattern was at first, a lot of them would create the goals they had and began to organize their lives around things that really mattered to them. There would be some kind of reversal, and when I started tracking the pattern, I realized that there was something going on beyond what met the eye and that's when I got really interested in how underlying structures impact our lives.
Kelly: Maybe we should back up a little bit and you can explain what you mean by structures.
Robert: It sounds a little bit technical, and I don't mean it to, but it just happens to be. A structure is always an entity made up of things. If you think about the structure of a chair, it's got certain things that combine to give it the stability, or the structure of a building, it has a certain reason it stands up and doesn't fall down. In our lives there are also structures, also by the way, in a nonarchitectural structure is a screenplay. The certain way the films move, and music works by structure, whether it's the song form, or blues. There are certain things that have to happen. There are certain things that we have, like our aspirations, our values, our appetites, our impulses, our concepts, and objective reality itself that combine, and when they combine, the combination of ingredients creates a structure.
In some structures, the nature of the structure is such that when you succeed, it is the point in the structure, where the dynamic is going to make you move away from that success, and it's nothing personal. This is the interesting thing; you can take it awfully personally because it's your life. One way to see this principal is if you go into a company, and you see a certain position, where somebody is not working very well, and they've tried everything they can to try to improve their person's performance, but nothing works, and then they replace that person with a different person, and if you come back in six months, you see that that person, that new person, is behaving exactly like the previous person, and many people have had that experience in companies.
Kelly: Mm hm.
Robert: Somehow the position itself is generating a certain predictable pattern of behavior. Now, what's the implication of that? This is what's really interesting. What do we say is so important in terms of human motivation? We say its people's genetic code, it's their educational background, the cultural background, and it's their age group, in other words their generation, their astrology, their numerology, whatever you say is important, that makes a person behave the way they behave. In this particular situation, we replaced one person with a completely different person that might have very different factors, and yet here they are performing and behaving the same way. It's got to be something more, than simply all the things we always say it is. There's psychology, there's karma, you name it and suddenly it doesn't count anymore because here we are seeing a person perform true to form.
In our own personal lives, we have structures; all of us have various structures. As I started to say there are two types of structures, and if you've had the experience of, if you look at your longrange pattern. If you've had the experience of first accomplishing success but then having it somehow be reversed over time, and it's not a good ending to the story. That's one type of pattern.
The other type of pattern is advancement, in which, when you create things they become the platform for future success and so that kind of life becomes a series of creations. First you create one thing, and because you have it makes it more possible for you to create the next thing and create the next thing and create the next thing. It's not by accident that some people's lives are filled with oscillation.
Kelly: How do you recommend that people get out of the oscillating pattern then?
Robert: Well, first of all I'm going to describe this in a couple of different ways. Over the last 30 or more years, this is what I think is the biggest discovery. If you can really create a clear outcome that you're after, what is it that you want to bring into being? What do you want to create? And if you can also simultaneously understand current reality, where are we now in relationship to where we want to be? That creates a tension. Now that tension is called structural tension. It's not psychological tension. It's not emotional tension. It's not stress. It's not pressure. It's not anxiety.
Let's say if I were a painter, I would have in my mind the final painting that I want to produce. I have the canvas in front of me. That's current reality. I keep taking actions to move the current state of the painting up to the desired state of the painting.
That's basically what we teach people. How to formulate, understand, describe what it is they want, how to honestly describe where they are now in relationship to that outcome, and begin to take strategic action steps to help you move from where you are to where you want to be. Now that's the advancing structure. That's the one that you want to learn.
Kelly: Learning how to internalize the structural tension of current reality with the vision of what you want.
Robert: Yeah, and externalize it as well basically. For example if you're writing a novel, the whole time you're writing a novel you have the outcome of the novel. You have the current state wherever you are in the writing of that novel. Do you write books, by the way?
Kelly: No. Just audio.
Robert: I think most writers are like this. I certainly am like this. When I'm writing a book, I have the book in mind. Here's what I want the reader walking away experiencing, reading, understanding, and here's where I am now in relationship to that. I keep taking actions to little by little by little bring that book into being. That is the essence of the creative process. In every form in the arts, that's the essence of the creative process.
Kelly: I liked what you said. You look at what you want your readers to walk away with, so that's your starting point.
Robert: Yeah. That's another aspect of this. To really be adequately clear in the beginning about what it is you want to create. You don't have to be perfectly clear. You just have to be clear enough that you can organize your actions around it.
Kelly: What are the most common misconceptions about creating?
Robert: That it's about creativity is the most common misconception. Because I wrote a book called Creating, I used to get booked on all of these conferences on creativity. Then I realized I had nothing in common with the other folks that were there because first of all, none of them were artists. They were all mostly psychologists. Secondly, they weren't talking about the creative process. They were talking about idea generation. So it all became about brainstorming, and freeing the mind is the biggest notion they have. Somehow what they do is they romanticize the notion of when we were children we were very creative, so called. Therefore, when we got older we began to censor ourselves.
This is the psychological theory about why people are not creative. And if we can only get back to that childhood nature, then we'll be creative.
Kelly: Yeah. We do makebelieve. That's what we do when we're kids. We...
Robert: How many children do you know that write symphonies, make buildings, make films, write...
Kelly: Everything.
Robert: ...epic books?
Kelly: No, they make universes.
Robert: Sorry?
Kelly: My son, when he was two and three, used to build universes. [laughs 14:08]
Robert: Yeah, but he actually didn't realize them like Beethoven does. I think the only one you can say that was [laughter 14:15] able to do that was Mozart because he was such a genius. But then he got better when he was in his thirties than he was when he was 10.
Kelly: I guess the point I'm making is that it seems that people are innately creative. Creativity is there. It's our nature.
Robert: Oh, yeah, but not the creative process. Not mastery of the creative process. So there's very few tenyearolds, eightyearolds, twoyearolds that design buildings and make them happen. What we find in the real arts, and when I say the real arts I mean music, film making, the discipline of the arts, is focusing the mind not freeing the mind. If I create focus, then what's going to happen subconsciously is I'm going to begin to generate all kinds of connections that are tailor made to my creation.
I'm not trying to be nonjudgmental and free associative. I don't want my mind to free associate. I want to give it a better job because if I give it a better job, it's going to generate more interesting connections and unity. That's probably one of the biggest differences.
For example, most of the people that I respect like Stephen Spielberg, Quincy Jones, people who have deadlines, people who handle million of dollars worth of budgets, people who have some kind of real mastery of the artistic domain don't sit around freeassociating. They don't have time to. It was what amateurs do, not what professionals do.
So the consummate professional creator really does exactly what I'm describing. Step one: What is it that I want to create? Step two: Where am I now? The level of honesty that it takes is I think the thing that is also most different because if you're really honest, you have to tell yourself the truth. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
You can't spin it in any particular way because the moment you do, you create a disconnect with yourself. You're breaking down your relationship with yourself.
Secondly, you have less ability to see how to correct, how to adjust, how to change the actions in the future because if the creative process is anything, it's a learning experience. You're learning how to move from where you are to where you want to be.
A lot of times at the outset, you just don't know how to create. You don't have the technique. You don't have the chops. You don't have the awareness of how to do that. So in a way, you have to experiment and teach yourself the process of doing that. But that's a very focused process, not a free associative one. Does that make sense?
Kelly: Yeah, it makes perfect sense. I think I read in one of your books that you were surprised to find when you first started teaching this work that one of the things that people had most difficulty with was being able to see current reality...
Robert: They hated it. [laughs 17:26]
Kelly: ...objectively. So let's talk about that because I think it's a sticky point for...
Robert: Well, I call reality an acquired taste.
Kelly: [laughs 17:34]
Robert: But like a lot of acquired tastes, once you have acquired the taste, it's really hard to give it up. So once you get a really good feeling for telling yourself the truth, it's really hard to go back to whining to yourself or spinning it. Look, in some of this stuff that we see generally, like positive thinking and affirmations and all those things that are designed to somehow program the subconscious, many of them in order to do them you have to really distort reality. You have to tell yourself something that is not true and that you have no way of knowing at the point that you're making the claims.
Kelly: The key to your system is structural tension.
Robert: One component of it is to be truthful.
Kelly: And to be able to hold both current reality, the blank canvas. Although current reality is not blank. There's a lot of good, bad, ugly stuff. Right?
Robert: Yeah. [laughter 18:32]
Robert: Sometimes I call the creative process adventures in frustration. [laughter 18:37]
Robert: Because a lot of times your aspirations are so much higher than your ability to create.
Kelly: It's called having your reach great...
Robert: A lot of times, I'm up against software. [laughter 18:49]
Kelly: I know.
Robert: I have a music studio, and we do a lot of video. I make films and so on. Sometimes the writing of the music's really easy, but I have to figure out how to get the program to work. I'm looking for a 14yearold kid to ask, and I don't happen to have one around. [laughter 19:07]
Kelly: I know. You're scratching your head. Well, I think what's difficult is to be able to hold current reality without having a negative emotional charge or upset about it. Frustration...
Robert: ...one would have a negative charge is because of the concepts they hold. This is the factor you asked me before. What is it in the oscillating structure that's different than the advancing structure? And it's the various concepts that we hold. For example, you have to be a certain way. You have to live up to certain ideals. That the world has to be a certain way. That you have to adhere to certain standards. Or all of the things that, when you put on yourself, concepts that are steeped in complete invention, and not steeped in reality.
For example, if you're going to create, and you have really high aspirations, at first, there's a good chance you're going to fail. You may have to do it a number of times. But if you connect your success or failure with your own identity, then the next thing you know, you're burdening your ability to do this experiment, to try something out. And it either makes it or doesn't make it.
You're burdening that with how you see yourself. In fact, you're exactly the same person whether you succeed or you fail. You're not a different person because you succeeded, and you're not a different person because you failed, no matter what you tell yourself.
So, what we're trying to do is help people disassociate or disconnect their concept of how they're supposed to be, or even how they're supposed to feel, with how well are they creating what matters to them?
Kelly: That's one of the keys. Not getting personally identified with "it" whatever "it" is.
Robert: Yeah. In fact, I think if there's anything radical about our approach, it's that, in fact, we don't subscribe to the selfesteem approach.
Kelly: Yeah, and you also don't subscribe to the idea that you have to change your beliefs.
Robert: No. But we do think that you have to make your beliefs independent from the observation of reality and the aspirations you hold. In other words, what you believe really has nothing to do with the fact that you want to create a nice house or you want to have a good career, or you want to have a good family life. What do you have to believe to want those things? Nothing in particular, by the way.
Kelly: Right.
Robert: So, if you thought it called for belief, than what you have to do is you keep having to sell yourself a bill of goods where you're trying to convince yourself that you believe something that, in fact, if you don't happen to believe it, every time you tell yourself, "I'm wonderful, " your subconscious chirps in the back of your mind and says, "Oh no you're not."
Kelly: Oh yeah, right. [laughs 22:34] OK, listen. Let's do an example. Writing is a perfect one, because let's say you have a vision for a book, and you've got nothing written yet, you start writing, and then you don't like what you write, and the step that you're talking about that you teach people is to not criticize it...
Robert: Well, actually...
Kelly: Or not take it personally that you don't like it.
Robert: You do want to acknowledge that you didn't like it. But it's nothing personal. You know, my original writing I had to learn how to write, it's not a natural talent for me.
Kelly: I don't know if it is for anyone? Well, maybe it is for some.
Robert: Well, I think I know a person or two that really likes writing. But I like writing music. I can sit and write music all day. And so when I'm writing, when I'm working on a book, I actually don't write music, because it's so easy for me to just go write music. And it's much harder to write words. But my original writing looked like translations from German. [laughter 23:35] Terrible. And I had to learn. I learned by practicing, I learned by studying the writers that I really liked, "How did they write this sentence? How did they write that? How did they make this? How can they say so much in such a compressed amount of time? What's the length in these sentences? Where are the verbs?" All of that kind of stuff, in a way, technical stuff, I just practiced and studied that. Over time, I really got better and better at writing.
Now I actually feel a degree of confidence in being able to say what I want to say verbally. But it was a real struggle over the years.
Kelly: Well maybe what you continued, a lot of people might stop.
Robert: Right. And what would motivate them to stop?
Kelly: The oscillating pattern. I don't know. [laughter 24:29]
Robert: Well, because somehow either it's just not worth it to them. Or more often, it is worth it to them, but they're taking it kind of personally that they're not there yet. And they have an intolerance for discrepancy. They have an intolerance for not being at the point they really want to be at. This is, again, from the arts and from sports, we practice. You don't get good by just sitting there hoping to be good. You actually have to practice. And a lot of times when you practice, like if you're playing music, you just sound terrible. So eventually you can play well enough to sound good.
Kelly: Back to the structural tension, it's embracing two polarities. What's happening now, what you want to have happen? And people are uncomfortable with that, you've found.
Robert: Well, not once they get used to it. It actually becomes second nature after a while.
Kelly: Well my personal experience of your work is that synchronicities happen when I do that, when I'm able to look at where I am, where I want to be, hold them both together, simultaneously, it's almost a phenomena, kind of experience.
Robert: Where there is some phenomena connected to it. Let me describe that and my feeling about that. There's often two ways that the creation happens. One is, you work bloody hard [laughter 26:10] and you hate to, there's no way around it. And the other way it sometimes happens, and it's almost invariably a combination of these things, so it's not one or the other, that miracles happen. In fact, the right person is on the phone, and you happen to run into a book that's just perfect, or you talk to somebody, and the next thing you know, an opportunity has arisen that you wouldn't have been able to plan or expect, but is consistent with what you want to create.
So, those kinds of things happen in life. We can actually, to some degree, help organize that through the structural tension. I think it's really important not to glorify that when it happens in some miraculous way, not to glorify it. Just understand, "Well, that was great that that happened, and now I've got to also roll up my sleeves and do the work."
Kelly: Well, I often wondered, though, was it because I held that tension so well that that caused the phenomena or the synchronicity or the coincidence?
Robert: I think it is, but I have to say, I have no idea how that tension gets resolved in favor of what you want, when it's these kinds of synchronistic events. None of us know, really.
Kelly: Can you explain...?
Robert: Well let me just say it this way: We don't know why sometimes that works. I know people have incredible theories, because it's easy to come up with theories about it [laughter 27:48]. But we actually don't know, technically we don't know why it works, because in a way, it shouldn't. It's a real phenomena.
Kelly: Yeah, it is.
Robert: But if we glorify it, the next thing we know, we're making it into a kind of superstition rather than understanding it as a legitimate and normal part of the creative process, and it's just as valid as doing all the work, and doing all the work is just as valid as having some unusual event happen that helps you along the way.
Kelly: And we can get addicted to those phenomena, and if they're not happening, think, "Oh, I must be doing the wrong thing."
Robert: Exactly. We begin to get the wrong standard of measurement.
Kelly: OK.
Robert: Like, is a baby who is the product of a hard labor better or worse than a baby who just came falling right out of the womb? You just take the process as it comes, and you still love the baby no matter what the process was that gave it birth.
Kelly: Mmhm. So embrace the process, no matter what it is.
Robert: Well, when you say embrace it, it is what it is. And there's no reason to fight against it. I'll take what comes. I personally would love it if it were easier, always. [laughter 29:15]
Kelly: Yeah, wouldn't we all.
Robert: No question. Sometimes, it's just a lot of work.
Kelly: Yep, you're right about that. Why don't you explain to our listeners the whole rubber band effect so they get a visual of the structural tension. I have that image in my mind.
Robert: OK. The basic unit of structure, the reason why it's a dynamic, the reason why it moves, is because, technicallyand I hope I don't lose anybody with thisbut technically, whenever you have a tension, it will strive for resolution. Tension comes from the difference between one thing and another. So, in a movie, for example, the tension might be boy meets girl, boy loses girl, and we want to see them together. And that's the tension. And the resolution is in the end when they get back together, and we all go, "Yes!" [laughter 30:12]
One of the ways I've illustrated this tensionresolution principle is by imagining a rubber band, and imagine you're holding your hands, and one hand is above, maybe around your forehead, and one's maybe around your chest, and you're holding this rubber band stretched. That tension that's structured into that wants to move towards resolution. So the tension here would be caused by the difference between my desired state, the outcome I'm after, and my actual state, my current reality, what I have now.
Whenever there's a difference between what I want and what I have, that creates a very useful tension. That tension is what motivates or causes or generates energy that enables us to start to more easily take the actions we want to take in the creative process.
Kelly: Do you find that people move into anxiety or the feeling of pressurized desires or just have difficulty holding that tension?
Robert: Well, when they're not doing what I'm describing, they're doing something different. And then it looks like they're putting pressure on themselves, and they're having anxiety. And let me explain that from the standpoint of two rubber bands. So, no imagine that I'm in a room, and around my waist and to one of the walls in the room, let's say on my left, is one rubber band. That's my current state connected to my desired state. I want to be over on the wall. I'm in the middle of the room right now. Also imagine a competing tension resolution system, another rubber band, and this one is tied around my waist, but to the opposite wall. And on that was, it's all of the concepts that I have about how I'm supposed to be, and how the world is, and various world views and so on. All of those things now are connected to that rubber band.
If you can take this imaginary trip with me, as I begin to walk toward the wall that says what I want on it, the rubber band in front of me is relaxing, is resolving. But even as that's resolving, the rubber band behind me is becoming more tense, more stretched. And at a certain point, it's going to be easier for me to move away from what I want than to sustain and maintain what I want.
This is what I mean by the path of least resistance, which is the title of two of my books. Energy moves where it's easiest for it to go. I'm not using the term in the colloquial sense "easy way out." I'm really talking about how energy works. So the condition that you describe where people have anxiety and they put pressure on themselves and so on, and they have trouble being objective about reality, and they make it all about them, that's when there are two rubber bands versus one rubber band.
If we get rid of that second rubber band, if we disconnect the beliefs and concepts and various ideals and so on that we have, and now all we have left is this one rubber band, we can then move quite easily from where we are to where we want to be. And we won't take it personally whether we succeed or fail. We will only be glad if we succeed because the motivation is to create the thing that matters to us.
Kelly: Mmhm. How do you get rid of that other rubber band? [laughter 34:07] The world view, self concepts, how do you drop that?
Robert: Again, it doesn't show up in reality, those things.
Kelly: It's all in your head.
Robert: Yeah. And if we're really focused on reality, there's not a lot of place for that. In the sense that you may have beliefs about yourself, but they're irrelevant, they don't count, they don't show up in reality. If you start to say, "Well, why does it matter whether I succeed or not? Yeah, it matters in the sense that I really care about this thing I want to bring into being, this thing I want to create, this life I want to build, but how is it personal? How does it say anything about me?" In fact, it doesn't. People are convinced that it does, or should say something about you, but actually it doesn't say anything about you, it just says something about what you like. So I think that's the quick answer, not necessarily the best answer, by the way. Because sometimes people really have to do a little soul searching.
Kelly: About...
Robert: Also, people have paid a lot of money to adopt these various world views, and they think, "If I adopt the right world view, then everything will turn out." Because that's the promise.
Kelly: What do you think about this live attraction thing?
Robert: I wrote an article about that because a lot of people asked me to say something about "The Secret, " when it came out. Ironically, two of the people that wrote "The Secret" studied with me. And when they studied with me, I actually believed the same thing that "The Secret" says. So I used to think that was true. That you should hold positive beliefs and think positively and et cetera, et cetera. Now, what I found later, when I said I created DMA in '75.
Kelly: Hey what did that stand for?
Robert: 1980, I saw that they wereand that's what we were teaching in '75, by the way, to 1980. And in 1980 I thought, "Wait a second, most of these people weren't able to sustain what they created, how come?" And that's when I began to realize the structural nature of it. But I also am not one of the people who would say there's nothing to the law of attraction. I think, in fact, sexual tension is one of the best ways to create a situation in which, as we were talking about before, somehow the universe helps you, cooperates with you, it's like the law of attraction in that sense.
But it's not the law of attraction based on believing in your vision, it's the law of attraction based on creating this tension between your aspiration, which, after all, is something you love enough to bring into being, and truth, telling yourself the truth. The more you're able to do that, the more that becomes even more readily available to you.
Kelly: So, the desire, the creating what really matters, what advise do you give people to determine whether what they want is what they really want, or if they're avoiding something they don't want?
Robert: That's a really great question. First and foremost, I think, is to think aboutRobert Frost said it this wayall of the great things are done for their own sake. And a lot of the things that we want in life are done for their own sake. Those of us who have children, for example, we do a lot of things for our kids, but not to call attention to ourselves, or to have them succeed and make a million bucks and then take care of us in our old age. But just because we love them. This is a kind of generative love that we see in the creative process. Generative love in the sense that we love something before it exists. And I'm not saying you try to pretend you love it. The filmmaker loves the film before the film ever existed. It's that kind of love.
Secondly, some people who are not clear about what they want to create in their life, I would suggest that they start small. Little things. Food. Learning how to create a meal you like. Something in your home. Creating a little area. Small projects. Because it's a warmup. It's like anything to give you a sense of practice.
If the projects are small enough, you'll have a chance to go through the entire creative process, from beginning to middle to end. Because if it's so big and you haven't done a lot of creating it's hard to calculate where you are int he process because it takes so long to produce the results. So, lots of little creations give you practice, set up rhythm, teach you a lot of lessons about that and in the mean time you are producing more and more things that you want, and lets say it turns out that you didn't really want them after all, big deal.
Kelly: Move on to the next thing.
Robert: A meal that you didn't happen to like. You can change the way the couch looks. See what I mean?
Kelly: Mmhm.
Robert: It's not a life or death kind of situation. Now the bigger point though, I think the major idea around this is, your life itself can be the subject matter of the creative process. Your life is made up of many components. Your work, life and career, a lot of people spend a lot of their time at work or in their career and certainly you might start to think about what is it that I want to spend my time doing? Your family life, your relationships are parts of how one creates his or her life. And so, if you begin to think about it, like here's this canvas and I'm going to build this life. Now I'm not going to try and put everything on all at once but, I'm going to really get clear about what it is that I want this thing to look like. And then I'm going to look at my current life, how close am I to that right now? You know, where am I really close, where am I not so close?
And then the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to maybe even write that down. This is called a structural tension chart, to write down how I want it to be and how it currently is. And then I'm going to write down some obvious action steps, you know? What actions can I take to move from here to there and start to organize actions on behalf of that outcome. And then the less and less it becomes mysterious, in other words, more and more becomes clear and actually pretty approachable. "Look here's a systemic way that over time I can have more and more of what I want."
Kelly: It works. I've done my whole life that way.
Robert: So have I and so have a lot fo people.
Kelly: You trained a lot of people. How many people have you trained?
Robert: There's tens of thousands of people around the world that have had the same experience and it's not something, it doesn't call for Belief. It's not a cult and it doesn't make you jump up and down and say magic names or whatever. You can do that stuff if you want but it's not necessary and you can take it from however you want to live your life. And just because, you know something? Every art, every culture rather has the arts. Every culture has a tradition of the creative process from the most primitive to the most advanced. We all have in us the instinct to create.
Kelly: What do you say to people that are looking for desires? That are not sure about what they want?
Robert: I think, start small.
Kelly: Start small.
Robert: A lot of times the desires they are looking for is not exactly the desire they are looking for. They are thinking about what will I have to do in order to, it's second hand already. What will I have to do in order to be happy, you know? So then they are looking for the magic thing that will..
Kelly: Yeah. I'm kind of remembering now from the manual, primary choice and secondary...
Robert: This is the key to discipline. Primary and secondary choices and what that's about is, if I have a primary choice, lets say to play the cello, I may have to make a series of secondary choices. Things that I don't necessarily want to do but will do on behalf of the primary choice and I don't have to manipulate myself into doing these things. I just have to understand the relationship between what is primary and what is secondary. Primary means first. So if that choice to learn the cello is first than the secondary choice might be to go practice and go take lessons and so on and so on.
Kelly: So those are your action steps.
Robert: If I don't want to practice, I don't have to say to myself, "I'm gonna really want to practice" because the truth would be that I hate to practice. But if I want to be a cellist...
Kelly: You've got to practice.
Robert: I've got to practice.
Kelly: You have choices, those are your action steps.
Robert: Yeah and a lot of times people for example, want to create health in their life and there's a whole series of secondary choices. Things they may not want to do. I don't particularly like to exercise but I exercise because it's a secondary choice on behalf of the primary choice which is to create health.
Kelly: Now when you write about desire coming in different frames, is that what you mean?
Robert: Yeah. Actually desire is an interesting thing. Some desires are short term like impulses and appetites. Driving by McDonald's and suddenly you have the impulse and appetite to go and fill up on junk food, so that desire demands short term gratification. It wants gratification now. If we back up and have a larger frame, a larger time frame for example. We move from impulses and appetites to true aspirations and values. Aspirations are larger things that we care about. Things that take and do take time to create and for example, lets say we had two conflicting desires. One was impulsive, eat at McDonald's everyday, and the second one was longer range like the aspiration for health, then these two are competing choices. How do I make my decisions? And if I didn't make a decision, there is a good chance that the impulse would always win because the immediate demand for gratification would dominate that structure.
But, If I understood, "Wait a second. Yes, I could go to McDonald's everyday but the thing I really want here is health and if I really want health, then going to McDonald's everyday is not going to support that health. So, I need to make a series of secondary choices to that primary choice." And sometimes secondary choices are to not do things we might otherwise want to do and possibly that may not be good for us.
By the way, the third in the frames I have created based on describing desires, the third one, is so big and long and vague that you can't organize around it. So we move from appetites and impulses out to aspirations and values but even further out to vague hopes and longings. And this is like the person that is always going to write a novel or go to Tahiti and paint and so on. And you know that they're never going to do it. They have, it's not that the desires are not authentic but it's that they don't have it enough that they can organize around it and create things.
Kelly: I like what you said in one of your books, I think, "Your life is Art". You said something about desire. It finds you, you can't find it.
Robert: It's like love, I mean the thing is...
Kelly: If something grabs you enough...
Robert: We have a lot of choices in life and one of those choices we don't have is who we fall in love with. We have a choice about how to act once we fall in love, and you can't pretend to want or love what you don't love. You can't pretend to not love what you do love. And that may or may not work out, I mean, there's unrequited love for sure, you know? You love somebody and they don't love you back but one thing is if you could choose who you love, there never would be unrequited love. You would only choose to love people who loved you back.
Kelly: Right, right.
Robert: And so a lot of times, desires, you know our real truth desires are things we fall in love with and there's really no explanation for it.
Kelly: Yeah, I keep wondering why I love doing Theater of the Mind but I do. There's no answer for it, I just love it.
Robert: You don't need an answer.
Kelly: Right.
Robert: You love it because you love it and you know that's what society does though, "Explain yourself."
Kelly: Why?
Robert: Come up with some justifiable reason that you love what you love.
Kelly: Well, this also gets back to the point you were making about it, it's not really personal.
Robert: No.
Kelly: It just is. It exists.
Robert: Yeah, I mean what is personal of course is how we choose to organize our lives around those things that matter most to us. I would say that we found is so many people do not really organize their life around things that matter to them. Rather, they look for the right thing to believe in or the right response. They try to adopt the right philosophy with all good intentions. Then they try to live the proper way. The prospect that they've been told is if you adopt the right worldviews, then everything will turn out.
So you have to then go and try to find the right worldviews, which is very different than the notion that we have, which is your chances of creating what matters to you are better if you learn how to create them.
Kelly: How do you work with someone who says, "Well, if you just saw my astrology chart, I can't have wealth, or I can't have success"? That's a belief system. Right?
Robert: Yeah. Well, maybe the chart says that, but in the meantime start small...
Kelly: [laughs 50:00]
Robert: ...to create a series of successes. None of us really know what we can or cannot produce. But I know that if you don't practice at producing or creating things, then your chances of success are a lot less likely than if you are creating all the time. In this sense, it's almost disgustingly practical. [laughs 50:26]
Kelly: It is. That's what I love about your whole system because if you want to be a good...
Robert: If you practice a lot, you get good at it. If you don't do it, you don't get good at it.
Kelly: So you're saying practice at creating things that matter.
Robert: Right. Even small things. What a great warm up! What's wrong with creating a nice meal or creating a lovely setting, a nice garden, or a beautiful picture?
Kelly: Yeah. Well, what are the four main principles for creating your life long term?
Robert: Do you have something in mind that I've written?
Kelly: [laughs 51:06] I think I do, but I can't remember it. But it was four principles.
Robert: [laughs 51:11] Well, let me first of all tell you the three principles. I don't know. Maybe I've written four principles someplace, but...
Kelly: I think somewhere you have, but I know there's three.
Robert: The three principles that I write about in Path of Least Resistance are these. One is that energy always moves where it's easiest for it to go. That's all it can do. So you have structures in your life. And whatever's happening right now will tend to continue to happen if nothing changes. The second principle is the underlying structure of anything will determine the behavior. In other words, what happens. So it's the riverbed that causes the water in the stream to flow the way it does. The riverbed is the underlying structure, and our lives have underlying structures.
The third principle is that we can change the underlying structure. This is really important because if we change the underlying structure, we change the patterns. So that if you've had patterns that have not been as successful as you'd like them to be, you can change the underlying structure and therefore change the path of least resistance.
Then, energy now will move in the direction you want it to. The best structure for that is what we call structural tension: knowing what you want and knowing what you have in relationship to that, and then taking strategic action to move from where you are to where you want to be.
At first it could be seen as a technique, which it is. Here's focus on what you want and also focus simultaneously on what you have. And that could be a technique. But after a while, you assimilate that principle. It becomes a way of life that generally you are aware of what you want to create, and generally you're aware of where you are. Then you begin to embody structural tension. You internalize it.
Kelly: Yeah. I think I've done that over the years because I've just used it so much.
Robert: It becomes second nature.
Kelly: But then, of course, you hit up against a hard wall or an obstacle. Then you have to get your mind out of the way and not be berating yourself thinking, "Oh, I've done the wrong thing. Maybe this isn't supposed to happen."
Robert: That's the superstitious part.
Kelly: Right. The superstitious...
Robert: Well, maybe you're not as [laughs 53:54] good at it at first. A lot of times people won't admit that, "You know, I'm not so good at this. I need to get better at this if I want to do it.
Kelly: Yeah.
Robert: So somehow they think I should be able to be a master of whatever they're trying just because they're sincere. But in fact, sometimes you've got to do the work. Who's more capable of coming up against an obstacle and using it as a point of learning? The person who is not taking it personally and is in a learning process? Or the person who's very superstitious about it and sees every obstacle as symbolic rather than what it actually is, which is your ability to accomplish what you want is not as great as you thought it was. Or reality is different than you thought it was.
Kelly: That's beautifully put. Robert, tell me about your Life Is Art training that you've got.
Robert: We've got a couple of different trainings. Your Life Is Art is a training that happens in Vermont. We also do it in Europe once a year. It really takes my book, Your Life Is Art, and introduces you to the basic tenants of it. Then once a year we do another course, which is the deep end of the pool called The Living Art. That is a sevenday course. I lead that along with my wife and a staff of folks. In that course, you really learn the deepest principles of the creative process that you then can apply to your life under any circumstances.
Kelly: Is that an evolved version of DMA?
Robert: It's sort of DMA on steroids. [laughs 55:45]
Kelly: Wow. Hey, what does DMA stand for anyway? [laughter 55:49]
Kelly: I've never known.
Robert: ...in one's life, and my own mistake was naming the company DMA.
Kelly: Yeah, really. [laughter 55:56]
Kelly: It was some Latin root.
Robert: Robert Fritz, Incorporated.
Kelly: Yeah, that would have been good. [laughter 56:02]
Kelly: So what does DMA stand for?
Robert: It doesn't really. Originally, I was thinking about some cabalistic letters.
Kelly: OK.
Robert: But there weren't any.
Kelly: Yeah, because nobody knew. [laughs 56:14]
Robert: It's one of these things that was a real mistake. [laughter 56:18]
Kelly: Well, you're not doing that anymore. [laughter 56:22]
Robert: If I had it to do over again, I'd never get asked that question because I would have named it something else.
Kelly: Right. [laughter 56:29]
Kelly: Yeah, even our trainers in my group didn't know what it meant. [laughs 56:35]
Robert: You need to say it doesn't mean anything.
Kelly: Oh, that's perfect. It doesn't mean anything. OK. So that's DMA on steroids. It's called...
Robert: The Living Art. We also do one other course that is for coaches, consultants, and managers. It's called Fundamentals of Structural Thinking. That's a professional course. That's a course for people who go into companies, work with executives, or do consulting or counseling. It helps them understand the underlying structures that the clients are under. By virtue of that, it helps them create new patterns of success for those folks.
Kelly: That's great. Well, Robert. It's been great talking to you.
Robert: You, too.
Kelly: And tell us your website again?
Robert: It's www.robertfritz.com.
Kelly: Well, Robert. Thanks so much.
Robert: Thank you. Good talking to you and thanks again for having me on your program.
Kelly: Oh, yeah. I loved it.
Robert: Great. Thanks.
Kelly: Take care.
Robert: Byebye.
Kelly: Bye. Robert Fritz's audio book, which covers everything we spoke about today and more, is now available for download at theatreofthemind.com. Check it out. It's called Creating. Hey, everybody. Thanks for listening. Until next time, be well.