The Problem with Power
John Thomas Wood
(John was a member of Center for Studies of the Person in La Jolla, California for 17 years and has led workshops and therapist training programs throughout the United States and in Western Europe. His books are available on Amazon)
Power has a bad rep.
Ask people to define power and you’ll hear, from most people, words like control, force and manipulation. The one-liners we’re familiar with are ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ and ‘When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.’
I think it’s a shame that we have to put down power and oppose it to love, when they’re much more closely related than we think, and when it discourages much of the population from moving freely into their own power.
About thirty years ago, I decided to look deeply into the word power, how we define it, how it works and how we use it. I ended up redefining power and writing a book that would make power much more user friendly. After all, how we define some of the ‘big’ words we use, like ‘marriage,’ ‘religious’ and ‘capitalism’ has a great deal to do with how we regard those concepts.
The book, now re-issued as The Heart of Power, has 100 aphorisms about personal power and leadership and I’ve used it in the classroom, in consulting, training organizations, and individual therapy. Within the limits I have here, I’d like to hit some of the high points.
I redefined power as the capacity to experience yourself coupled with an effective response to your own experience. How deeply do I know who I am and what do I do with that knowing? The two faces of power—capacity and action.
To experience one’s self may be everything; at least it is the starting point. If you are going to be powerful, you need to be aware of and accept your full range of experience. How fully do I know your self? How deeply do you experience your sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell? How deeply do you experience your ideas, opinions, fantasies, inferences, beliefs, values—in short, your own consciousness? How deeply do you experience your feelings? And how much are you in touch with your wants and needs?
The second half of the process—the other face, if you will—is how I respond to my own experience. Do I speak, write, dance, jump, run, play music, paint, turn away, remain silent? What do I do in this relationship that expresses my own experience, in an effective way? Who decides what is effective? You do, but not alone. You take in and evaluate your impact on another. In a nurturing relationship, each person can express their own experience, ongoing: how do I hear that, what do I think about it, how do I feel and what do I want.
Rollo May wrote that we are born with two basic urges: (1) to bond and, (2), the urge to make something happen, to manifest, to actualize. So, we are wired, in my opinion, to love and to use power.
Power is pretty much everywhere in our lives all the time and you avoid it at your peril. Power and issues around power are in every relationship and organization, including marriage, religion, work, politics, education—anywhere we have a relationship with two or more people who want something together.
Power happens in relationship and it is a living dynamic—‘breathing’ and changing—that has a identifiable process. (‘Dynamic’ is a good word for this; rooted in the Greek word for power).
Here is what I identified at the power process: all power has a foundation, power has a form, and power has a result. Foundation, form, and effect.
The foundations are various and changeable. Strength can be a basis for power, as well as interpersonal connections, the holding or resources, a role, charisma, and expertise. The foundation for power is a response to the statement: ‘because I have this, I can be powerful’.
The form power takes is some kind of interpersonal communication, verbal or nonverbal, intentional or not. We communicate our role, our charisma, our expertise through our words, looks, movements.
Results. We can identify these general ends of power: force, exploitation, manipulation, conquering (or competition), collaboration, nurturing, and synergy. I like to ask people to look back in their lives and see their past as the wake of a motorboat moving across a lake. Look back in your wake and see how you’ve used your power, look at the results of how you have been with people.
The great thing is you can look at this and change how you use your power. I looked at my own life and made a conscious choice to devote the rest of my life to collaboration, nurturing, and synergy. That meant eliminating force, exploitation, manipulation, and competition.
This way of defining and thinking about power guides me in personal relationships, teaching, group leadership, individual therapy, and consulting.
In an organizational, or a therapeutic, setting we are often faced with an imbalance of power based on our role as boss, doctor, therapist, teacher, or leader. I like to deal with that imbalance directly by talking about what power is and what it is not. I want to support others in stepping into their own power. I’d much rather rely on an expression of my own personal experience, and ask that of the other, than falling back on the power inherent in the role I have. In my opinion, this builds a relationship based on mutual trust and respect and supports the actualization of the other.
It is the end to which we use our power that counts, not the fact that we have power. I don’t believe that power and love are in any kind of opposition. In fact, we all want love and we all want power. We can use our power to loving ends and the more powerful we are, the more deeply we can love.
