Podcast MDM Academy Conference

EP 167 You loved your child before they were born

Years ago I read a book by Robert Fritz that taught me something that has changed my life: that often we think we know what we want, but when we actually ask more questions and get down to our true motivations and intentions, we are really just reacting, not creating! 

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AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Episode 167: Robert Fritz on What Creation Actually Is

Introduction

AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. I am so excited for us to spend a few minutes today with Robert Fritz, who I greatly admire and am very honored to have with us. Thanks for being here, Robert.

ROBERT: My pleasure, thank you.

AUDREY: Let me tell the listeners a little about him. His bio is technically three pages long and thick with worldwide influence. Here is a summary of some of the highlights of his life’s work. He is an acclaimed composer, filmmaker, author, and management consultant, best known for developing the theory of structural dynamics, which explains how underlying structures shape human and organizational behavior. Educated at the Boston Conservatory of Music and in Germany, Robert has spent decades helping corporations, government agencies, educators, and nonprofit organizations create lasting change through his principles of structural thinking and the creative process. His work has influenced leaders such as Peter Senge and has been applied by organizations including IBM, Blue Shield of California, the US Department of Defense, and educational systems worldwide. He is also an award-winning composer and filmmaker whose films have earned more than 250 international awards, and the author of several influential books, including The Path of Least Resistance and The Managerial Moment of Truth.

AUDREY: Today we are going to focus most of our attention around my favorite book. This one right here, and this is probably an old copy. Creating. The subtitle is A Practical Guide to the Creative Process and How to Use It to Create Anything, a Work of Art, a Relationship, a Career, or a Better Life. Robert, thank you for being here with us today.

ROBERT: Thank you. I am delighted to talk to you.

How the Book Came to Be

AUDREY: This book has shaped some of my thinking. It has corresponded with other things I have studied and experienced in life and proven itself over and over again. Many of the principles and concepts you teach in it have borne out in the real world and proven to me to be very, very important. So I am just curious personally how this book came to be.

ROBERT: I had a two-book contract with Ballantine Books. The first was The Path of Least Resistance, and then there was time for a second book as part of the contract. I thought the major focus should be on creating. Because creating, or the creative process, is the most successful process for accomplishment in history. It created all of the arts, science, commerce. And yet mostly we do not learn how to create.

ROBERT: We learn in school how to react or respond to circumstances. The major difference between the creative process and what we learn is that what we learn is to think about the circumstances first, and then what do we do about that. If you are rebellious as a kid, you react. If you are cooperative, you respond. But it is still the circumstances that are the driving force. The creative process is really different. It is your choices. And one of the major choices the creative process always begins with is, what do you create?

ROBERT: My background, as you said, is the arts, and particularly composition. I have a bachelor’s and master’s in composition from the Boston Conservatory. What we learn in music in particular is that it is the underlying structure of music that determines how music goes. We have things in music called form and analysis. If you are in a conservatory, you go to these classes and you analyze Beethoven or Chopin, a number of different types of pieces. And it is not a matter of how does it feel and what do you think of when you hear the piece. It is, how did the composer get you to feel that? What are the elements in play that give rise to predictable patterns of behavior?

ROBERT: When I was teaching composition at New England Conservatory, I began to wonder if that same principle could apply to everyone, not just composers, but everyone in creating their own lives. And that led me to developing the principles that are in the book you really like.

Self-Esteem, Ego, and the Focus of the Creative Process

ROBERT: What do you like about it, by the way?

AUDREY: If you are out looking for answers, as I was, there are a few different camps. There is the camp that focuses entirely on the self, on self-esteem. What do you want to create in relationship to this ego? What will service you? It is all about you.

ROBERT: I wrote a book with Dr. Wayne Andersen called Identity, and the subtitle of the book is that it does not matter what you think about yourself, which is ironic. It seems like the self-esteem people have never read a biography of successful people. They would see none of them had high self-esteem. But the difference was they were not focused on themselves. They were focused on what they were up to, what they were doing, what mattered to them, what they were creating.

ROBERT: It is always on how am I doing, and how does it make me look, and do I like myself. Totally irrelevant in the creative process.

AUDREY: It is interesting, because we are building an event this fall called Mothers of Creation, and it is all about the creative process and how mothers can engage in it. We start the day by having everyone write out a problem story. What in your life are you feeling upset about or stuck in? In preparation for that, our team was writing out problem stories and picking them apart, trying to figure out why this is a problem for me. There were a few different reasons, but we were trying to find what was in common. Ironically, one of the core components for all of us was that our intentions were wrong and our ego was right in the center of it. That is why we were bumping up against life in that way, unhappy about something happening to us because of what it was going to cost, what pain it was going to cause us, how it was going to make us look, or what other people were going to think. That was so enlightening and clarifying.

AUDREY: It is such a great insight to understand the shift of focus from how am I doing and how do I look, to what is this outcome I am trying to create, how close am I to it, and what do I need to do to create it. And is it worth my precious life energy? Because there are a million paths we could choose, and it needs to be worthy of the few minutes we have here.

ROBERT: That is a principle called hierarchy. What is more important, what is less important. A lot of people spend their lives on things that are less important to them, because they have not really sorted out that value system of hierarchy.

AUDREY: I read The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy a little while ago, and that is the theme of that novella. He spent his life on what was not important, taking direction from everyone around him, being a subject of his environment, thinking that was what he wanted, thinking he was arriving. Ego was so deeply entrenched in everything that was going on, because it was all reflective of that. Is this now servicing the identity I want to have of myself?

Obligation and Choice

AUDREY: So to answer your question, I would say there is one camp saying get what you want, but the underlying message is to service the ego. And there are other camps I lean more toward that say, no, actually take responsibility, have discipline, show up, fulfill your duty. The conscientious aspects of life. I think there are some powerful, good, solid principles in that camp.

ROBERT: I am sure, because what you are describing is obligation. But really, we are not obligated to do any of that. Often what happens is people turn what they want into an obligation. For example, let us say you are caring for an adult, your parents. And you say, well, I really have to do it. Well, no, you actually do not have to do it. You are making a choice that is really quite altruistic, and you do not even have the benefits of knowing the altruism of it, because you are manipulating yourself into obligation rather than seeing, I could do this or not do this.

ROBERT: Obligation means you have no choice. You have to do it. Choice means you can do it or not.

AUDREY: That is what I was getting at. What you are talking about is the best parts of both of those camps. It is the middle ground that says it should not be all about me, even if for no other reason than that as soon as it is all about you, it will not even service you best anyway. And you choose it fully. But then you commit yourself to it. There is this component of responsibility, but it is responsibility you have chosen. It is a commitment you have made.

Why Commitment Works Against You

AUDREY: That dovetails into something you say at the start of the book. I cannot remember the exact phrase, but basically that creating is an act of love. I wanted you to speak to that love component of creation, how you would define creation and creating or being creative, and what the connection with love is.

ROBERT: Before I do that, I want to be with you a little bit on the commitment. If you think about choice, you can do it or not do it. When you do a so-called commitment, what you are doing is turning the choice into an obligation. The reason you are doing it now is because you were committed. Which puts you out of touch with the actual motivation, which is your true aspiration to accomplish whatever it is.

AUDREY: So would you say that is where the component of vision comes in, rather than commitment? You would say vision instead?

ROBERT: It is more a matter of being in touch with the reality that you still want it. Personally, I do not like to exercise. I have a primary choice of being healthy. A primary choice generates a series of secondary choices. Secondary choices are choices you may not really, in and of themselves, want to do, like exercise. But you do them because they are motivated by a hierarchically higher choice that they are serving. A vision or an outcome that you want.

ROBERT: Now what happens if you lose touch with your primary choice? You lose motivation. You do things like commitment, because then you are forcing yourself into doing something you have lost touch with the actual desire for. But if you stay in touch with the outcome, you are never needing to be committed, because you are always making the strategic secondary choice in support of the outcome that you want.

ROBERT: In terms of love, by the way, Robert Frost said all of the great things are done for their own sake. Why do we do what we do? Sometimes we actually do it for return on investment. Especially since you deal with mothers. A lot of times mothers do this thing about turning what they want into an obligation, because it is really tough to be a mother. I remember when I became a father, and sometimes my wife would go off to work and I was the house husband for a while. How much work it was. This is not nothing.

ROBERT: But we love our kids. So we do a lot of things for our kids that otherwise we would not do. And we do them really for an altruistic purpose. All the great things are done for their own sake. But a lot of times it is so frustrating and so hard that people begin to manipulate themselves into their secondary choices, losing touch with the primary choice.

ROBERT: It looks like you are doing something you do not want to do. But in fact, you are doing something you want to do. Not that you like the secondary choices. Sometimes we hate them. But the motivation is not that, it is what it creates. So I think it is important that people understand their underlying motivation. Why are you doing this thing?

Generative Love

AUDREY: You say here, in the creative process, love is generative rather than simply responsive. Can you explain what you mean by that?

ROBERT: This is the difference between professional creators, let’s say filmmakers and composers and actors, and the rest. We usually think of love in the romantic version of it. You meet and you fall in love. So the situation first, the love second. Now, in the creative process, in terms of it being generative love, you love the creation before it exists, which is your motivation to create it. So the filmmaker loves the film before the film exists. The novelist loves the novel before it exists. It is generative love, a different kind of love, because you are doing it before it even exists.

AUDREY: When you are loving your child before it exists, before it shows up, you are already thinking about it and caring for it and buying things and making plans and having a vision for how this family will look and who you will all be and how they will grow up. It casts a lot of vision when you are planning parenthood.

AUDREY: So this generative love, one of the ways you put it is that you love the creation into being, or you love it enough to create it.

ROBERT: No, you do not love it into being. You actually do a little work. But the love is the motivation, meaning the love is what is driving you to create it. For example, when I am doing a film, I know the film I am making before I make it. I do not know every aspect of it, because you get to the set and it is raining that day, and you have to do different things to make it work. But there is a way that you have this relationship with the film you are making before it even exists. Or writing music, or writing a song, or writing a show, or writing a book. That is a different kind of experience.

The Love, Hate, Love Cycle

ROBERT: It is an interesting thing, because often in the real creative process in the profession, particularly in the arts, there is a love-hate-love relationship. It goes a little like this. You love the thing as you are creating it and making it. Then it is done. And then there is a period where it did not quite live up to exactly what you imagined, and you kind of hate it for a while. And then you rediscover it, because you become audience for it rather than creator of it. You start to see it in its own terms and have a love for it again. That is a very common experience creators have.

AUDREY: I like how you point that out in the book. So often whatever we are creating falls short of the vision we had for it and what we thought it could be. And accepting that the path was still worth it, that the process was regenerative, that the process was an important part of becoming, that you still do it anyway. You do it even though you know it might not live up to the standards you have for it.

ROBERT: And if you did not like it enough, you would stop. You would destroy it. You really do not destroy it, because you like it enough. And then later you rediscover it and go, oh, that is pretty good.

AUDREY: It is funny, because I was recently doing a little class with some youth. We decided to do a Bob Ross painting night just for fun. We all had our little canvases and we turned on the video. I am not a painter. Mine turned out awful, but it is still sitting there on my nightstand. I passed it this morning. I know it is awful, but I did it. I painted it. So I cannot bring myself to throw it away, because even though it is far below what I would like to be able to create, I created it, so it is hard to let it go.

Van Gogh, Asimov, and the Myth of Talent

ROBERT: What happens, though, is if you really wanted to become a painter, you would practice. Of course, some people have more talent than other people. But it is just a starting point. Think about Van Gogh. He turned out to be one of the greatest painters of all time, but he was not naturally talented. It was not easy for him to draw, to really see perspective and so on. But independent of that, he understood how to learn.

ROBERT: I always hated that Kirk Douglas film, Lust for Life, where he is playing Van Gogh and talking about, I have got a feeling. You read Van Gogh’s letters to his brother. He is sharp as a tack. He is incredibly structural. He understands perspective. He discusses things from a completely artistic point of view, in terms of mixing colors and so on. He really knew what he was doing. He was not just feeling some kind of explosion of emotion. He was very calculating.

AUDREY: That reminds me of what I read about Isaac Asimov once. The number of books that man cranked out. People say, oh, he is such a genius, but it was just a schedule. It was just his lifestyle. He was at his desk at eight or nine every morning, and he sat there and wrote until five. I am sure there were bursts of inspiration now and again, but he just was a creator, and he chose to create, and he showed up for that creation every single day.

ROBERT: Yes. The difference between a professional and an amateur is that a professional can do it no matter what the circumstances. An amateur can only do it when they are inspired, when they feel like it. But a great actor, a great director, a great playwright, a great writer, they can do it at the drop of a hat.

Structural Tension

AUDREY: One of the things I talk to moms about that has been super helpful for me is to remember, when we think about creation, and in the case of moms creating a family culture, creating balance between their needs and wants and those of their children, there are many things they long to create and to have that are very good, beautiful, worthy things that will bless many people. But the process to get there, like you said, has not been taught to them, and it can be a huge stumbling block. One of the things I remind them of is that love is not just a feeling. It is also an action. You are welcome to hate being on the treadmill this morning, but recognizing that getting on the treadmill is actually an act of love toward yourself, through the desire to have something bigger than being on this treadmill, an outcome that is bigger than that.

ROBERT: In all of my books I write about structural tension. Structural tension is a structure. Whenever you have tension, it strives for resolution. So that is a force in play. Structural tension is the essence of the creative process, where you have a desired outcome, and you are aware of what you want and where you are in relationship to that, and there will be a difference. That contrast, that difference, creates tension. Not, by the way, anxiety or stress, but structural tension, like a rubber band. A rubber band has a tendency to want to resolve. And that motivates actions that help you move from where you are to where you want to be. So there are two data points. One is what do I want, and where am I now in relation to it.

ROBERT: Now, let us think about generally what people want. Usually they want good health. They want quality of life. They want meaningful things to do. They want good relationships. These are worthy things to want. Plus, I want them anyway, whether they are worthy or not. The question is, how do you create those things? If you think circumstantially, you end up problem solving, which is not creating.

AUDREY: Pause right there before you go on. What do you mean, if you are thinking circumstantially, you get stuck there?

ROBERT: The circumstances are driving the action. You are reacting or responding to circumstances.

AUDREY: Like other people’s expectations, or things that come up in your life, or just situations. Situational, scheduling, time. Okay, go ahead.

ROBERT: But if I start with, here is what I want, here is where I am, already I have got a structure that wants to move in the direction of the outcome. Because we want that tension to resolve. And then, what actions do I need to take? Now these actions are motivated by this structural tension. So the tendency is not only to take the actions, but to take them in the context of the focal point being the outcome we want to create.

You Can Solve All of Your Problems and Still Not Have What You Want

ROBERT: That is very different in life than problem solving. A lot of times people think of their lives as a problem to solve, and the idea is that if you solved all your problems, everything would be okay. But here is the actual truth of the matter. You can solve all of your problems and still not have what you want. Creating is different than problem solving.

ROBERT: So the question is not how do I solve the problem. The question is what outcome am I trying to achieve. Where am I now, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And what actions can I take to move from where I am to where I want to be, to accomplish the outcomes that I want. And this is a cumulative skill. The more you create, the more you can create.

The Color of the River

AUDREY: One of the things you talk about that is so profound, but also such a huge stumbling block, is that in order to create appropriate structural tension, in order to actually move well toward this new outcome, you must be able to properly assess reality. You talk about this a lot in the book, the huge problem people have with that. Why do you think that is such a big problem, and what tools or advice would you give people who are striving to do it?

ROBERT: Understand that the reason they have trouble seeing reality is because they have various concepts that they impose on reality. I have this example in that book and in other books I have written. It is from a book by Arthur Stern called Color: How to See and Paint It. It is about teaching artists how to see color and paint it. You have got to see it before you can paint it.

ROBERT: So he takes a group of his art students to the shores of the Hudson River, and he points across the river and says, what colors do you see? The students said, well, the Brook building is red, and the tower is white, and the other building is yellow. And then he handed out what he calls spot screens, which is basically like an index card with a hole in it. He had the students hold the card up to the background. And he said, okay, now what colors do you see? They all got very quiet, until somebody finally said blue. Everything over there is blue.

ROBERT: Now, Stern said, first of all, the reason it was blue is that on hazy days you do not actually see the color of the objects. You see the atmosphere between you and the objects. The color of the water and the color of the sky created a blue atmosphere, and those were the colors they were actually seeing. But then he went on to say, why did they think they were seeing red and yellow and white and all these other colors? Because they were imposing a concept of reality on reality. They were painting what they expected. They were seeing what they expected to see, versus what was really there.

ROBERT: So to be able to really see reality, you have got to be objective and truthful. And that means a lot of times your fixed ideas are wrong. It is hard for some people to see reality because of the beliefs they have, the ideas they have come to conclusions about, the concepts they hold up in front of reality instead of looking at it objectively.

What Do You Want, and Why

AUDREY: There is a short section early in the book with three quick examples that I think are so helpful. You basically deconstruct it. You ask, what do you want to create? Then they say it, and then you ask, why do you want to create that? And then you highlight for the reader, you see, they are trying to solve a problem. They are not actually thinking about what they want instead. They are responding.

AUDREY: So discovering that this is something you actually really want to create, and choosing it freely, is harder than you would think. And then assessing where you currently are, so you can see reality and build appropriate tension, can also be a challenge.

ROBERT: Well, it is an orientation. You can get better at it. It is not hard for me, by the way. It would be easy for everybody in a different orientation than a responsive one. In a more creative one, your general modus operandi is just to think in terms of, what is the outcome I want? Even in difficult situations, what is the outcome I want? What is the best thing that can happen here? What do I want to see happen? And where am I now in relationship to that? And then that generates ideas about how to get there.

AUDREY: It is funny, because so often I work to use these tools and principles as a mom, and so often I am upset or frustrated or worried about something situational. But then I go back to, what do I want? And it is almost always simply relational. And that is something I can actually do something about. That is actually what I want most, for us to just be close and talk and love each other and give and take.

The Deal

ROBERT: Can I tell you what we did when we were raising our kids? We had something called the deal. Now, here is the deal. Our job is to take care of you until you can take care of yourself. And our job is to teach you how to take care of yourself, so that you can start to make more and more of your own decisions. When we think that you know how to choose in a particular area, you can do it. But until then, we get to choose. And it is a fair deal. It is not a manipulative deal. It is a fair deal.

ROBERT: So our daughter, for example. There was a certain point where the main thing about dressing for school was that she was dressed warmly enough. She did not know how to do that at first, so my wife would choose. And then when she knew how to do that, she got to choose what she wore. Sometimes she chose the silliest things, but they were warm enough, which was the criteria. Good enough.

ROBERT: The thing about it is that what we were allowing her to do was learn how to make choices. And the more choices she made, she could see when consequences worked out well. This was for my son as well, the same kind of thing.

ROBERT: I wrote a children’s story once called The Baby’s Job. In this story there is a young child, and the mother brings home a baby. At one point the baby starts to cry, and the child says, what is the baby doing? And the mother says, he is telling us it is time to take care of him. What do you mean? Well, the baby’s job is to be taken care of. And then our job is to teach the baby how, when they get older and older, to take care of themselves. That is what we do. Parents teach our children how to take care of themselves over a period of time. So in a cumulative way, the more choices they are able to make, really able to make responsibly, the better it is, because then they get to see the consequences of their choices in relationship to taking care of themselves.

AUDREY: That vision, that this is actually at the heart of what we are trying to do as parents, is really centering. It really helps us get rid of a lot of nonsense that we otherwise tend to focus on.

Identity Is Not Your Actions

ROBERT: One thing most parents do, and I even caught myself doing it from time to time, is inadvertently giving your child an impression that their actions have to do with their identity. You are a good kid, good grades. You are a bad kid if you do not. You are a good kid if you keep your room clean, and not a good kid if you do not. What that does is teach them that their identity is tied to their actions, versus their identity is not tied to their actions.

AUDREY: You have a really great chapter on that as well. You were talking about how human instincts can be ignored when identity is made to seem a matter of survival. You talk all about this first-person orientation and how unhelpful and unhealthy it is, off the back of talking about Nazism and Stalin and those kinds of ideas. Here it is. There is no relationship between your opinion of yourself and your ability to create what you want. And you also said your thought is not your mind. So in a lot of different ways you are parsing out what is you and what is not you. Your actions are not your identity. Your thoughts are not your identity.

ROBERT: Let me add one dimension to that. Who cares? I think I told in that book the story of having dinner one night with somebody who had written a lot of books on identity. And he said, the most important question you can ever ask yourself is, who are you? And I said, that is really an easy question to answer the way you answer it. Who wants to know?

ROBERT: It is not a very important question at all, because it does not matter. First of all, how do you even know how to define yourself? We say, well, I am a this, I am a that. In fact, you cannot be what you have. The you that is having the thing.

AUDREY: But it makes the focus inward versus outward. How am I doing? What does it make me look like?

ROBERT: This thing happens a lot to creators. While they are creating, they seem to disappear.

When Time Disappears

AUDREY: I was reading a lot more about Michelangelo lately, and his submersion into his projects, like nothing else in the world existed when he was in the middle of something massive.

ROBERT: Exactly. That is the theme. Particularly professional creators, you can go on for hours.

AUDREY: In this moment in my life, this season of my life, I am so caught up in creating this program for moms and building this business and the people I get to work with and the team we have built. It is so rewarding, but I do not know its potential. I just have a vision for where we can get first, and then I hope that as I approach it, that vision expands and gets bigger for what we can do after that. There are so many days or moments where I am just head down, so caught up in thinking about it, and people in my life will say, why are you not more attentive to this thing? Well, first of all, you are an adult. But also, I am in the middle of head-down creating something I really care about, that I really feel is important, that I want to exist in the world, that I want to outlive me.

ROBERT: In a way it is a bit hard to describe that experience. But one of the ways of experiencing it is the way time passes. It passes in at least two dimensions. One is, you are right in the moment. And the second is, time does not exist.

AUDREY: It is the experience of working on something that felt like a few minutes, and many hours have passed, and you look up at the clock and are shocked.

ROBERT: That is absolutely the experience when you are really creating. These dimensions of time happen simultaneously, and that is quite common in the creative process.

Involvement, Not Commitment

AUDREY: Do you find that there is a sense of intensifying, like a sense of, I will do whatever it takes, the more you are in it? I know you do not love the word commitment, but to me there is something like, I am committed to what I want.

ROBERT: Can I give you a better word? Involvement.

AUDREY: Oh, that is right. You do talk about involvement. So my question is, as creators, when people start to get it and become involved in a project, what is it about the creative process that separates the people who say they want it, assess reality, and start moving in that direction, from the ones who do not? Because the tension wants release. That rubber band can go both ways. You can diminish the vision to alleviate the discomfort, or you can move toward it. So what is the difference between the people who stay involved, who seem to speed up, who seem to accelerate?

ROBERT: I think I get your question. Let me begin by this answer. It is not attitudinal. It is about your skill. If you have created a lot, you do not have any kind of weird stuff going on. It is like another creation. It is another meal. So you make another creation. But if you have not done a lot of creating in this particular area, it is different.

ROBERT: For example, funnily enough, even though I am a composer and have written a lot of music, I had never written songs. So about ten years ago I started to collaborate with Dennis Smith, who is the head of a band called Party on the Moon. I did a documentary on them, by the way. You can get that if you look up Party on the Moon, the film. That is one of the films I have made. His band plays for presidential inaugurations and celebrity weddings and things like that. He and I started to work together, and eventually we wrote a show together, a Christmas show. So I started writing songs with him.

ROBERT: It was completely a new genre for me. I had never done it before. It is a very different way of working than writing film music. I did not know how to do it at first, but I know how to create. All of the years of my experience of creating let me learn how to do this new thing. It was not a big deal in a way, but it was an exciting learning experience, a new territory I had not really worked in before. If you are a really masterful musician, you may not have played certain music before, but you will know how to do it.

Learners, Performance, and School

AUDREY: That reminds me of something I love. You talk about the two kinds of people, and the other kind of person is a learner. Learners develop an ability to grow. The lesson is that you can learn. You are talking about Van Gogh here. He knew how to learn. It reminded me of my husband, who has been in sales for a long time and is picking up the sales in our little business to help it grow. He has been immersed in Brian Tracy recently and cannot stop talking about this one key theme from Brian’s life, that everything shifted for him when he realized he could learn everything. That was his life mantra from that point on. I can learn anything. And because he could learn anything, in the framework we are talking about today, that shifted him to being a creator all the time.

ROBERT: See, that is the attitude. No. Now, I cannot learn everything, because I tried to learn Japanese and I could not. There are a lot of things I can learn. But I realize some things are beyond my learning at this point.

AUDREY: For Brian Tracy, maybe it meant, I can learn everything that is important for my vision. That is a different statement.

ROBERT: In that chapter there are a couple of things I talk about. One is that often when you are learning, you look terrible. So if your identity is involved, it is hard for people who have their focus on themselves to learn, because they do not want to look bad. The other thing I go into in that chapter is how traditional education is not about learning but about performing.

AUDREY: I wanted to ask you about that. How do you feel our idea of creation and being creative has become so distorted to mean this little niche group? The kids in school who are talented. They are creative, I am not, and they make pictures.

ROBERT: It is really quite interesting that the reward system, if you have not learned a thing but you get all the answers right, you get an A. If you have learned a lot but you do not get all the answers right, you get less than an A. So the reward system is not rewarding learning. We are rewarding performance and parroting. From that you get the wrong idea, that life is about performance.

AUDREY: You say here, your vision and desire for the creation can far outshine your current level of ability to create what you want. I have had that experience over and over and over.

ROBERT: When this is the case, you have a choice. You can either learn or you can quit.

AUDREY: I think that principle is harder to grasp, largely because we have been a little indoctrinated about what creativity is. It can be harder when it does not seem like it is creative. Sure, I could take an art class. Sure, I could get a Japanese tutor. But how am I going to create this relationship with my child? How am I going to create a home that is more peaceful? What can I learn, instead of quitting, that can get me there? So I think that can be a stumbling block even for mothers who start to get it, who have a sense of the structural tension, who understand why it is important to create instead of react, and are starting to get a sense of what they would rather have or experience or create. What things have worked in that scenario?

I Hate You, Mom

ROBERT: One time our daughter, when she was young, had a friend who was very manipulative to her mom. So she came home, and her mom asked her to do something she did not want to do. Her name is Eve. Eve said, I hate you, Mom.

ROBERT: Now, normally in the other household, that would be a point of manipulation, from the mom’s point of view, to say, oh no, you should love me. Rosalind said, well, it is up to you how you feel. I love you. You can feel whatever you want. In other words, you still need to do this thing. And that is the last time she tried that out.

ROBERT: Because think about it. Rosalind was not trying to prove that she was a good mom. And she actually did think, it was not a manipulation on her part, she really did think Eve could think whatever she wanted. It was up to her what she thought, what her opinions were. She was not trying to control her opinions. Of course, she knew it was just a ploy anyway, but that is not even the point. The point is, the greater principle was, it is up to you what you think. We are not trying to control your thinking. We have suggestions, or recommendations, or ideas about what is more important and what is less important. But it is up to you whether you agree with it or not.

How Creators Hold the Tension

AUDREY: So how do the great creators we have pointed to a few times hold that tension? How do they maintain the vision? Is it as simple as being learners?

ROBERT: No, it is none of that, because what motivates the learner is the creative process. It is not trying to be a learner. You end up having to be a learner because there is stuff you need to know to create stuff. One of the action steps is to learn. I want to do this. Current reality is, I do not know how to do this action step. So, learn how to do it.

AUDREY: So how do they do it? Because they just want it badly enough?

ROBERT: Look, it could be the simplest thing. I just really want that. The intensity of wanting it is irrelevant. It is a simple choice.

AUDREY: But how do you stay there? Is that not difficult? How do you keep it going?

ROBERT: Well, did you change your mind about wanting it?

AUDREY: People do, right? All the time. They say they want things and then they do not go create them. I think it is mostly because they do not know how.

ROBERT: But if you ask them the question, do you still want it, and it turns out they still want it, the fact is they still want it. They may not know how to create it, so they have given up. But their desire, their aspirations, went underground.

AUDREY: What can they do to resist the temptation to give up?

Start by Creating Little Things

ROBERT: Learn how to create. And the way I am going to describe this is, start by creating little things. Just build up practice. My son has a company called Creator Tools, and there is a three-month course that I created that they offer on creating your life. It is like music lessons, really, about creating your life. You do a lesson every day, and then you practice that lesson during the day.

ROBERT: At a certain point in the course, you make five-minute to fifteen-minute creations. This is not improvising. These are things. It is practicing structural tension. You have the idea, you have current reality, and you create the thing within five minutes, or ten minutes, or fifteen minutes. By doing that every day, you are building up stamina for the creative process, because you have gone through the entire cycle from beginning to end in that short period of time. So the more you do that, the more you internalize the creative process. They also work on two-week goals, then one-year goals, and then five-year goals. It is a cumulative process in terms of creating your life. But what you are doing is practicing creating, exactly the same way we would practice learning an instrument.

AUDREY: I think I am starting to get it. So you gain the skill of creating. You become adept at this way of approaching life. And because you are good at it, it can apply in many areas of your life.

ROBERT: It is an orientation. It is a way of approaching life. It is a different universe you are living in. It is not just a different process of approaching life. In that universe, in this creative orientation, you think about, what do I want to create? And when I talk about involvement, it is not about satisfaction. It is about involvement. So sometimes you are dissatisfied. Sometimes you are satisfied. Sometimes things work out, sometimes they do not. All of it becomes a learning experience. When it works out, and when it does not work out, you learn. Over time you begin to master your own creative process, and your life itself becomes the subject matter of the creative process.

AUDREY: The way you put it is really starting to click. Because the different way is reactive. And you can spend your life being reactive, because you can react to your parents, react to your school assignments, react to your career choices. You can let the stimuli around you drive it. It is not that you are not making decisions, or that you are not an actor in your own life, because you are. You are doing things. You do have a life. And maybe you are surrounded by many things you end up liking, because you made some of those decisions in a way that was successful or according to what you would enjoy.

The Past Is Over

AUDREY: It reminds me of a woman I am acquainted with who was abused as a child. Well into her thirties and beyond, having married and having several children, this was still the most prominent part of her identity. She wore it around. She talked of it often. It was her identity. And it was difficult for the people around her to work with her in any productive way on an ongoing basis. She was constantly butting up against people who really wanted to create things with her, to be in a quality relationship with her. She was really in that reactive, problem-focused place.

ROBERT: It is an underlying structure in which she could not resolve the experience she had. And so she was constantly trying to resolve it. Here is the thing. One very different way of understanding this situation is that, in reality, the past is over. And in reality, she will never resolve it. The resolution is, it is not resolvable. You are not going to catch the plane you missed. It is over. So trying to resolve it spills over into her current life. Understanding that it is not resolvable, and it is over, can help her regain being present in life, versus being trapped in the past.

You Do Not Start by Convincing Yourself You Are a Creator

AUDREY: What we want to do is move all the way from, those are the creative kids at school, to, I am a creator. It is part of my makeup. It is moving from, I can create more of this life, to this complete other thing. I am putting that framework behind me. I am accepting the fact that I do have the power to create my life. But what you help people do is move even beyond, I am the person doing the creating, to thinking in terms of creation. It is my orientation in the world, that I am not reacting.

ROBERT: I know what you are saying, and I kind of know why you are saying it. The way it actually exists in my life is not that way at all. I just think about things I want to create.

AUDREY: Exactly, but what I am saying is, moving someone to where you are, I think they might go through a process of, oh, I could create things. That would be the first epiphany. And the next one would be the life you are living, where it is second nature.

ROBERT: It is the other way around. You start by, there is something you want to create. What is it? Is it a house, is it a room, is it a poem, is it a kitchen, is it a meal, is it a party? What do you want to create? And the cumulative experience over time of creating many things automatically puts you in the orientation of being a creator. It is not that I start by trying to convince myself I am a creator. I create a lot of things.

AUDREY: It is actually just saying, I am going to learn how, I am going to create something, and over time that orientation just becomes part of how you approach the world.

Translations from German

ROBERT: Exactly. For example, my original writing looked like translations from German. I did not know how to write.

AUDREY: You mean when writing your books? They were just clumsy, is what you are saying?

ROBERT: I did not know how to write. If I wrote a letter or anything, it was a translation from German. And for example, I have talent for music. I never had to know. I always knew how music worked. There are a lot of technical things you have to learn in the world of music, but it came easily. Writing did not. So what I did was I practiced writing. I studied writers I liked. I analyzed, how did they do that? How did they get so much meaning out of a single little sentence? Looking at how they imply things.

ROBERT: Sometimes before I would write something, I would read articles in The New Yorker, because the writing is so good. Get that in my world. So I worked at it. And finally I became pretty good as a writer. But it is because I did not have talent. I actually have a lot of skill.

AUDREY: That is interesting, because going all the way back to the beginning of our conversation, it sounds like you were doing with your writing the same kind of thing you were doing in the conservatory. Analyzing, breaking it down, looking at its components, getting to the root of it, and orienting yourself to good writing, immersing yourself in it so that it could start to come out in the mix.

ROBERT: One time I heard an author talk about Hemingway. And he said, Hemingway knew every trick in the book. And I said, what book? I want to see that book.

ROBERT: Right now I have got two book projects going. There was a play I wrote that premiered in Japan in December and then had a run in April. They just sent me the video of the play, which I am going to add the subtitles to, because it was in Japanese, of course. They are all written in English. There are so many different projects. I am doing a lot of songwriting these days. In less than a year we have written over thirty songs. And I do not think about it like, oh, I am a creator. More like, what is next? I do that even because I am the cook in the family. So I think about that when I make a meal. Do I know how to do it, or do I not? It is all the secondary choices to the primary choice.

Advice for Mothers

AUDREY: This has been a tremendous conversation. I have learned a lot. Two things before we finish up. One, what advice would you give to mothers who will be listening to this? And then, how can people follow you and engage with the projects you are working on?

ROBERT: I do not know if I have any real advice for mothers, since I am not a mother.

AUDREY: What would you want them to know about how a creator orientation can help them?

ROBERT: Well, this is the thing. It really is a secondary choice to the primary choice. Realizing that a lot of times the frustration and so on are the secondary choices to a very altruistic motivation, which is that you love your kids and you really want to support them. And this thing we did with the idea of the deal. Our job is to teach you how to take care of yourself, and then we take care of you. So we get to choose when you do not know how. And more and more, you get to choose.

AUDREY: I love that. It is a pretty good system.

ROBERT: It is a good deal. It is a fair deal.

Where to Find Robert

AUDREY: So where can people find you? How can they engage with your work?

ROBERT: There are many books. One book I like better than the one you have is called Creating Your Life. And then there is Identity, which I told you about. And www.robertfritz.com is our website.

AUDREY: We will link that below. I also saw the plays and the songwriting, and conferences coming up on your site. There is a lot going on in your world.

ROBERT: I have a YouTube channel called the Robert Fritz Creating Channel, where I have my films and songs and some other things. And then there is another channel called the Robert Fritz Structural Consulting Channel. In that channel I am doing consultations with clients. It is an entirely different way of understanding human motivation and change.

AUDREY: They are fascinating. I have watched some of those. It is good stuff. Well, thank you again. I am so grateful that I got to meet you. This has been logged away in the back of my mind for a few years now, that I would love to talk with you and meet you and learn from you. Thank you for all you do, for what you have put out to bless other people like me and others. I am really, really grateful.

ROBERT: Thank you.

Closing Conversation: Music and Early Development

ROBERT: One of the best developmental things you can do is teach kids music. There is a program called Music Together. When kids learn music, it affects their language skills, their math skills, and it also helps their social skills. What happens is they understand how to put things together relationally, in a certain sort of way. It is probably one of the best childhood developmental approaches. Maybe what you should do on your podcast is have one of the people from Music Together as a guest. They were the first and best program. There are some other programs now that do that too. They did it understanding very technical things, like certain modalities that are developmental and socially supportive. Modalities meaning scales, certain scale-type things, and certain rhythmic kinds of things. These are very musically technical things. But they understood exactly how to put them together, and they accelerate childhood development enormously.

AUDREY: It is important to note that the parent or caretaker goes with the child to the class.

ROBERT: Yes. The kid goes to a class.

AUDREY: I do not know if you have ever read anything by Shinichi Suzuki or know anything about his work. One of the things that fascinated me the most, and he is such an incredible man in so many ways, is that he would not take on a child as a student until the mother had had lessons for at least six months. The mother had to take lessons, and she had to go home and practice in front of the child while the child listened and watched. He would only take on that student when the student asked, because they had been inspired by the mother’s example, and because it was something the mother had basic skills and understanding in, and something they could do together.

ROBERT: Suzuki, of course, is Japanese. But he was in France learning music. He was amazing. You probably know this, but his basic question was, how do French children learn French?

AUDREY: Yes. The huge breakthrough. How do children all over the world learn their native tongue? They absorb it in the ether. He was amazing. And those concerts he used to tour with, with all the little kids playing with him. He had such a generous heart. He was just a beautiful person.

AUDREY: Thank you. That is a great resource that I will look into. All the things you have mentioned we will pull out of the podcast and link below. Many of our moms might want to do your creating class. I am going to go grab your other book, which I did not know about. Thank you so much. It has been a joy.

ROBERT: Thank you so much.