Our culture is not very good at teaching the exercise of power. In many ways, ‘among decent people’, wielding power is a no-no, or an embarrassment. At a recent training event a good middle leader reacted to the idea of being powerful with a mixture of disgust and contempt. Power seemed soiled at the very source. And we don’t need to look too far to learn about the corruptive quality of power.

But if good people don’t think about, explore and learn how to be powerful, then expertise with power is left in the hands of those who are....well, not so good. Meanwhile the world cries out for good people to achieve more effective agency, to have greater impact.

A couple of distinctions might be helpful. Paul Tillich distinguishes between ‘power to’ and ‘power over’.  ‘Power to’ is focused on the capacity to make something happen, to manifest something in the world, to ‘self-realise’. This ability to influence and respond to our environment, is a fundamental human need. ‘Power over’ implies an ability to hinder the ‘power to’ of others, to torpedo their ‘self-realisation’ for the sake of yours.

In life it’s easy to confuse these two.

It’s also very easy to slip from ‘power to’ into ‘power over’, because even when our intent is focused on a project or goal (power to), whenever there is resistance, the difficulties and fascination of human relationships can be so much more vivid and ‘noisy’ and demanding of our attention. It can feel so much more immediate to foreground the ‘struggle against people’ than the struggle for ‘something’.

But we first learned our very personal lessons about power when we were children. Deeply embedded into our make-up is some fundamental ‘knowledge’ about what happens when we exercised power. Did our carers sustain or squash us? Did they collapse before us and encourage our narcissistic tyrant to thrive? Or punish and mute our attempts to find agency? Were they comfortable with their own power? If we were lucky, perhaps they skillfully cultivated an appropriate sense of our own power and balanced it with an understanding that we live in community with others, also entitled to their own agency?

These lessons were learnt very early. So they got built in to the sub-strata of who we are. The trouble is our discomfort with power can lead us to two unsatisfactory ends. We either dull the edge of our own effectiveness in the world, or when the pressure for action grows irresistible, we over-extend our power. We waver between too passive, and too aggressive. We speak too softly, we speak too loudly. We speak too little, we speak too much. Finding a skillful and balanced relationship to our own empowerment is not automatic. Being able to shift between different modes of power appropriate to the demands of the situation is not simple. It is however aided by conscious exploration and training.

Because of all this exploring our own power requires more than thinking. It requires a physical, or somatic, exploration, enabling us to become more aware of what happens in our body and heart when we display or experience power. It requires us to work from the bottom up, how we shape our self and open or close down in the face of power, our own and others. Training in a good martial arts class or an embodied approach to coaching and training can make a crucial difference, enabling a simulator experience where we can observe our own patterns of shaping our power and practice skillful alternatives.

The skillful exercise of power is a fundamental human capacity, and in the next period one we need more of , not less. Good people need to find  and become comfortable and skilled with power. Indeed, connection, collaboration, compassion all become insipid without an infusion of power. Perhaps the last words can emerge from the deep experience and urgent voice of Martin Luther King Junior”-

“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”

If you are interested in exploring the issues raised in this post and your own personal relationship with power, you might be interested in the upcoming workshop “Exploring Power” on December 10th. Click here for more details.