Are You the Captain of Your Soul? The Choices One Makes

In the poem, "Invictus" by English poet, William Ernest Henley, the last stanza reads as follows:

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

South African President Nelson Mandela found solace and affirmation in this poem during his decades in Robben Island Prison as others controlled his circumstances and even whether he lived or died. He made a choice that no one would strip his dignity nor take away his mastery of his own soul. He would own his decisions and actions and never blame them upon external circumstance.

Just a few decades earlier in the hell of Auschwitz, Dr. Viktor Frankl had found refuge from the otherworldly hell by cultivating his inner life. He also resisted the temptation to allow circumstances to determine the choices he made for himself.

In his book, Man's Search For Meaning, he speaks of the brutality, the deprivation of freedom, sleep and food and the temptation to fall into hopelessness. Underneath it all was a fight for survival that laid open one's soul.

"The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity -even under the most difficult circumstances- to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult decision may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his suffering or not."

Who knows what the future holds. A few of us will need to face circumstances as bleak as those faced by Nelson Mandela or Viktor Frankl, but most of us will not. We will be tested on a soul level when faced with divorce or substance abuse. We will be challenged when we have an opportunity to take unfair advantage of a situation to pocket extra money. We will lower our standards, behave selfishly or be creatively unethical because of the pressures of a situation with consequences.

Just as the fight for survival or unjust imprisonment could be used as an excuse for rage and the unleashing of evil, we will have good reasons for our own failures to captain our souls. I am not writing for the evil nor am I writing for the perfect.

In July of 2002, my wife of 16 years asked for a divorce. While we had been struggling in our relationship for a period of time; I still loved her, was committed to our marriage and cared deeply about our three children. This divorce demand was a relief in terms of getting the issue out into the open but was also an internal seismic event. I began my education in divorce and sought counseling help to gain both assistance and perspective. This unwanted destruction of my marriage became the most significant opportunity for me to become and remain the captain of my soul but it was a struggle to do so.

Divorce in America is common and has become a spectator sport. Many people will take sides and then encourage the participant they are rooting for to be selfish or to dole out punishment. It is hard not to feel victimized by circumstances that you can not control. The disruption of your life and the losses to what you've built are real, even if you make it all the way through the process while doing your best to be a good person. It is even harder to regain your sense of optimism and inner peace. Inner peace is the compass, the source of bearing, and optimism for the future is the prevailing wind, the power to move forward, for the captain of the soul.

We did finally divorce after five years of separation, a period in which our children moved most of the way to adulthood. The failure remains a disappointment, but today I primarily give weight to my failure to provide my children with something better. I truly wanted to provide my children with something better than my own parents failed marriage and the broken apart family that resulted. Alas, all that one can control is one's choices and subsequent actions. My choices and actions will need to suffice as a small legacy to my children.

I have also chosen to remain the captain of my soul in professional situations. Years ago, I attended a meeting where the executives were discussing upcoming projects. The head of facilities reviewed a project he had been working on for six months and was about to implement to install new electronic door hardware on about 350 doors in our major facility for a cost of $200,000. The hardware was on its way and the installers were set to go. At the time of the meeting I had no responsibility for the facility. Because of past work, I knew that at least some of the doors had fire proof cores that contained asbestos. I spoke up and raised the issue. I asked if they had tested the doors. My boss very much wanted the project to move forward and began to voice his disapproval. In an agitated manner he dismissed my concerns and told the manager to go forward with the project. I strongly objected until they agreed to put the project on hold until the doors were all tested. 

After the meeting, my boss invited me into his office and chastised me for both having "higher" standards and for imposing those standards on others. Who did I think I was to be setting standards for others? He demanded to know. I had delayed a project and embarrassed him in a meeting, but I had also prevented the inadvertent release of asbestos particles into the air due to sawing or drilling into those doors. My relationship with this person slowly and steadily spiraled downward from that point and led to me leaving a good position and decent paying job, but I remained the captain of my soul.

This is not about perfection. I lay no such claim as I am clearly a faulty human being not a divine entity.

It is more of a life stance. The leader, the creator, the artist, the builder all must choose not to be the victim of circumstance. My life is not a "reaction" it is rather a chosen "action".

The captain knows that the ocean is unpredictable and unforgiving, beautiful and sometimes deadly but the ocean is also the source of life and container where life is lived.

To be the master of your fate and be the captain of your soul, you must embrace the suffering that comes your way and remain brave, unselfish and dignified in its very presence. Be bowed to God but not to your own circumstances.

Confidence or Arrogance: What to do with Feedback

A leader, inventor or artist must have a strong ego to persevere in the face of failures, mistakes and indifference. If you attempt to create what matters most you will receive feedback in many forms and sometimes the feedback will be in the deafening silence of apathy. When you are pushing forward, some will see your actions as confidence and others will see them as arrogance.


To ignore feedback is folly and yet to be weighted down by feedback is to disempower yourself and surely fail. There are several planes upon which critical examination of feedback is important among these are structural, values and financial.

Structural feedback is feedback focused upon whether your approach is naturally delivering the desired result. The focus here is not upon the opinions proffered but rather gaining understanding of what is working and to what degree is it working. To assess what is working, you need data whether it is observed or measured. Your own honest observations may, in fact, be the only available data early on and at points in your creative process.

When the developed parts of your intended creation exist primarily in your head, you need a thinking discipline to conduct experiments. These "thinking" or gedanken experiments were used by Einstein to test his theories. It was often decades before his could be tested with actual experiments due to both cost and technological capability. Both Eliyahu Goldratt in the book, Theory of Constraints and Gerald Nadler and Shozo Hibino in their book Breakthrough Thinking, have outlined approaches to conducting thinking experiments that are useful for both developing and testing solutions..

On the values plane, both your approach and the consequences must be examined in terms of your values. Here you must take in data that is direct and indirect as well as data which is immediate and data spaced over time. When you are creating, your ultimate success depends on the sum of all results including those which are unintended.

Many otherwise successful leaders and creators are undone by the long-term ripple of values flaws and their unintended consequences. Each creative idea has a window of opportunity for its fruition and this window narrows when value-based standards of behavior, methods and outcomes are lowered.

The final plane for examination at this time is the financial plane over which you are working. Given the rate at which the resources available to you are being consumed, how much time do you have to work with? Given the estimated cost of the next step or the next experiment, can you afford to take it? If not now, when?

Actions and experiments that are cost prohibitive may need to curtailed, modified or only conducted in your head.

Whether you are confident, will depend upon your ability to filter and handle input and then keep moving forward. Arrogance will need to be kept in check by honestly assessing the feedback and revisiting the values plane examination.

Developing a Personal Creative Vision

What is the source of meaning in your life? As Viktor Frankl discussed in Man's Search For Meaning, each individual brings or grants "meaning" to their own life. Dr. Frankl gained deep insights into the human condition while a prisoner at Auschwitz.

If one was "lucky" enough to survive the initial selection process at Auschwitz, a short life of brutality, starvation, hard labor and hopelessness was bound to follow. Yet, among this alien world, Dr. Frankl saw hope, love and humanity. While an individual was constantly subjected to the prospects of a random death over which the inmate had no control, the key factors for survival in Auschwitz emerged, which were a rich or strong inner-life and a sense that one had unfinished work to do if they managed to survive.

Dr. Frankl addressed both of these by collecting examples of expressed humanity at Auschwitz and designing lectures to be given regarding his observations in the future after his release. He would imagine teaching his future students and engaging in dialogue with them.

If you were given a finite lifeline, what unfinished work would you want to accomplish?

For many people, this work will have nothing to do with how they earn a living. For some, it will be a modification or refinement of what they primarily do for a living.

Some helpful clarifying questions are:

What are you passionate about?

If you had the power to change the world, what would you change about it?

How would you ensure that your values or perspective or abilities are passed on to others.

Your creation can be a work of art or a fictional story, a business or institution, a book or a movie, a forest or park, a new law, a solution to a problem.

The important part is to have enough clarity to begin to envision (if only in your dreams) a desired result.

As Robert Fritz discusses in The Path of Least Resistance, the more clarity and detail you bring to your desired result the more tension and power you create. When you climb a cliff the rope tightens under the tension of your weight and your progess or lack of progress becomes painfully clear to all.

Many of us use being vague or unclear to keep us emotionally "off the hook" for producing a result. No one wants to fail. Most of the time, we actually prevent failure by avoiding the competition. We do not even enter the race or step up to bat. (Please excuse the sporty metaphors.) I plead guilty to this myself.

So to avoid the pain of failing at something that we put our heart and soul into, we stay vague about what we truly want, keep our distance from the tension of wanting something that does not exist and ultimately guarantee that we will fail just a little bit each and every day.

I want to create, build and lead a successful alternative adult education institution that addresses our spiritual needs, general well being and professional abilities in a holistic way. I have taken some risks and followed up on some of my opportunities to further this vision and yet I have held back and delayed much energy and commitment as well.

What fires you up? What fires you up on an ongoing basis? Of the things you were passionate about as an idealistic teenager or youngster, which of those things still hold interest?

The first step in developing a personal creative vision is looking inward for that spark and then envisioning how that spark would grow if you fed it and breathed your life's energy in to it.

Avoiding the Truth Undermines Your Ability to Create

A key ingredient to creating something of enduring value is accepting the truth.

Enduring value is undermined when required things are not done, when things are done incorrectly and when there is dishonesty about either current reality or the desired result.

What definition of truth will best guide the person who wishes to create?

The language that lawyers use to describe the truth in court is inadequate to describe truth in the world. There is a famous story of King Canute ordering the tide not come in. He was the giver of laws and issued an absurd law. In the legal system, the truth is subjected to both the King and the King's law.

In other words, both laws and interpreters of law can easily differ from the reality of the world. This is why the legal system can never find one innocent but rather it finds them guilty or not guilty. The legal system can not find the truth but it can find what is false or not false.

The best working definition for creating is that truth is "what works in the world over time". If you want to know whether your creation is beautiful or functional you must take it into the world and test it.

Many institutions focus so much effort upon their self-interest that they lose the ability to tell the truth over time. They act like a sports team that is defending a lead instead of playing the game. They forget the very things that led to their success and attempt to manage success as if it can be manipulated.

When you create a new medicine, there is a protocol called double-blind testing, that allows a researcher to see the truth when comparing the new medicine to alternatives. The major concept in double-blind is that parties involved in creating and those with vested interests in the results tend to have biases that prevent them from seeing the objective truth.

There is also a great difference between a "long-term" and "short-term" study as the most significant effects (positive or negative) may not appear for decades in a medical study. I am not proposing that the creative person must wait decades but rather that when testing whether your creation is working in the world, one must continue to pay attention to the object created and all its consequences, intended and unintended.

Being honest about the good and bad of current reality and being as clear as possible about the qualities of the desired result are key to empowering the creative process. The "world" is available for testing your creation in many ways but do not expect it to either embrace or reject your creation outright.

Creation is iterative, and your early failures may in fact be the most important lessons in teaching yourself to create. When looking at a difficult task, I like to estimate the number of mistakes (lessons) to be encountered along the way. A long-term difficult project may be a 1000 mistake project. The goal is to make your mistakes early and keep them small but remember that your ultimate success requires the learning in your early mistaken efforts.

The truth does set you free. Free to let go of what does not work and that prevents you from failing in the end.

A Creative Life is NOT a Stress Free Life

One should never confuse the meaningfulness that a creative life can bring with there being a lack of stress or tension.

There is a famous story attributed to Norman Vincent Peale, where he offered to show a man suffering from anxiety, a place where there were 50,000 people without a worry in the world. He drove the man to a hill overlooking the largest cemetery in Brooklyn. Peale makes the point that no one alive is completely free from stress or worry.

The Buddha's famous saying is; "All Life is Suffering". In that everything you love including your own life will pass away and the loss of those beloved leads to great suffering. The Buddha's advice is to transcend the suffering not to take a pass on living or on loving.

Dale Carnegie's great book; "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living" has sold tens of millions of copies over the past century.

What does it all mean? What does it say about worry and stress?

The act of choosing to create is an empowering act. It is a stark reminder that you are alive and you are not merely a reflection of external circumstances. You can choose to create whether your are strong or weak, rich or poor, healthy or ill. You can choose to create without knowing how to reach your goal or even knowing if your goal is reasonable or reachable.

Making a choice moves you from the dependent or reactive world into the independent or responsive world. In his book, "Man's Search for Meaning", Viktor Frankl speaks eloquently of the difference between a reaction and a response. While he had no control of his environment or the circumstances he encountered by choosing his response to each situation he could affirm his humanity and values. For both punishment and to force compliance the inmates at Auschwitz were periodically lined and counted off. The unlucky in these forced counts were either abused or executed as a lesson for all. Dr. Frankl never used his connections to escape a count-off as he truly believed that none of the prisoners deserved the treatment nor was his life any more valuable than his fellow prisoners. He found peace in accepting his circumstances and choosing an honorable path based upon his own values.

When you choose your response, your actions become the expression of your values, your intelligence, your passion and your creativity. Often, the only difference between a response and a reaction is a brief hesitation but sometimes a the proper response requires much reflection and some soul searching.

As we move from a response to a situation to your response to living a meaningful and good life in this world, we peel another layer deeper into this same onion. A fundamental choice to create or to take a creative and independent stance creates its own supporting structure. Robert Fritz in his book, The Path of Least Resistance uses the analogy of a rubber band to discuss the structural tension formed by the choice to create.

When one fails to choose to create, the stresses and worries of the world exist but lack direction like a loose rubber band. When one chooses to create a desired future result, a structure begins to form along the lines of difference between current reality and the future result. It is as if the rubber band begins to be stretched between your two thumbs. Clarity about the desired results and honesty about current reality support a clear structure and add tension around this structure.

A creative life is a full life in a world of uncertainty. Yet, by choosing to create, we have empowered ourselves to be both more independent and responsive to the world. The structure induced by our choices, our vision and our honesty actually support us by focusing our actions.