In planning content for the month of Cupid and chocolate, romance and love were obvious topics. Money came to mind next. And then? Power.
As I’ve been thinking of power, and what it is around power that we’d be served by subtracting, I dug into two of my favorite sources: quotes and etymology.
The quote that leapt uncontested to the top of the list is attributed to Jimi Hendrix:
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”
What a perfect segue from love week, then, into power. (Don’t worry: money is up next.)
And then, I found the root of the word power: pouvoir in Old French, which comes from the Latin posse: a contraction of potis = able, capable and esse = to be.
Therein lies the problem — not power in itself, but mistaking the performance of being able for meaningful impact. We perform the ability to be — smarter, faster, higher-ranking — in the ways that are rewarded, rather than prioritizing our impact on the people and context around us (to say nothing of ourselves).
In what turned out to be my final project in the not-for-profit sector, I helped facilitate a delegation of influential private sector executives to Mozambique.
We partnered with an incredibly innovative, forward-thinking, and well-regarded leader from the Ministry of Education to explore the challenges, obstacles, and potential solutions around educating a young, poor, and rural post-conflict society.
Each delegate was moved by different elements of the trip, whether:
the community-run AIDS orphanage;
the upstart daily newspaper that had taken Maputo by storm with its global and progressive coverage of politics, finance, and social issues; or
the meditation practiced in Ministry offices, classrooms, and religious communities, borne out of its centrality to the country’s emergence from colonial rule and civil war.
And each started to imagine ways that they might support, advance, replicate or take inspiration from what they had seen as they returned home to their various roles at Fortune 500 firms.
One woman, I’ll call her Lisa, got quieter and quieter over the week. When I approached her at our nightly campfire, Amarula in hand, to ask how she was feeling, she shared freely: “I wish I had something meaningful I could contribute. I’m just not seeing my purpose in this trip.”
Her despondence was palpable.
Shocked at this response, I don’t think I managed to come up with much more than a platitude about how we all contribute what we have when we can. But I laid awake thinking about this response to the massive needs we had been seeing all week, matched by powerful opportunities we had already started identifying to meet them.
Because I knew, from our effort to curate a diverse and potent group of participants, that Lisa oversaw the Education practice for a major bank’s Private Wealth philanthropic advisory team. In other words, she counseled donors with a desire to support education, representing billions of dollars in deployable capital.
Given this influential and impactful role, what unsettled me about her disengagement wasn’t a lack of purpose. It was her blindness to her own leverage.
Over the next few days, as we set intentions at a stunning, remote, white sand beach retreat across the bay from Maputo, I recognized my own grief.
Not for the profound poverty, lack of access, or illness that we had seen, but for the leverage sitting in that elevated thatched roof dining room. And the knowledge that only a tiny fraction of it would be applied to realizing the opportunities we’d uncovered that week.
So how does power become performance — and specifically, what leads women with privilege to influence capital or culture to this distortion?
I’ve seen three forms of distortion.
First, we get addicted to the gold stars that are handed out to reward our ability to be smarter, faster, better, or more. We learn to equate our value with advances up the linear ladders of education (GPA, test scores, degrees), career (titles, responsibilities, raises, returns), and family (’perfect’ marriage, high-achieving children, magazine-worthy home decor). So we perform to those external standards, regardless of how or if the resulting achievements advance the goals we actually care about.
Lisa earned a Master’s Degree in education before taking a grueling job in finance. And proved her ability to be a hard worker, amenable team player, and sharp mind. For which she was rewarded with a role that aligned more closely with her dream of improving education for children around the world.
But she got so practiced at accumulating institutional markers of power — now performed in line with a purposeful title — that she couldn’t see the opportunity to exercise her hard-earned influence when it presented itself.
When we pursue the ability to be for its own sake, at the expense of the impact of how we are being, power becomes performance.
Next, we have been taught that power comes from one-dimensional pursuits. Whether becoming a business badass, hostess with the mostess, tiger mom, or Mother Theresa, we are implicitly and explicitly counseled to focus on a single path.
Unfortunately, all you can build in a single dimension is a straight line. Whatever direction it might go, it’s flat, lacking interest, much less impact.
Two dimensions are necessary to take up visual space, and three to come alive in the real world.
Similarly, a robust, inhabitable form of power takes into account the three dimensions of humanness: me (my individual, holistic wellbeing), we (relationships with family, friends, colleagues, collaborators), and world (the communities we care about supporting).
When we pursue and measure our power in only one of these dimensions, we erode our power in the others — which leads to burnout. Or selling out. Or the understandable temptation to opt out.
Finally, particularly as women, even women of significant privilege, we deny our power.
We may feel discomfort about the forms of power we have accumulated inside systems we did not design — or do not agree with. We see others we identify with being stripped of their power, rights, or very dignity. We are surrounded by unfairness, violence, injustice that we wish we could change but can’t.
And so we distance ourselves from the power that we do have, rather than directing it in the ways we are positioned to do.
Today’s subtraction is not less power. Or less ability. Or less being.
It is about subtracting the performance of power in the ways the system rewards, based on external, one-dimensional, zero sum frames.
Those of us who have privilege inside extractive, misaligned systems may feel rightly uncomfortable with that power. Our success in a single dimension might feel tight or restrictive. We often recognize the brittleness of externally assigned power.
But there is nothing inherently wrong with power.
Power is simply the ability to be.
The problem is outsourcing decisions about how we use that ability, aiming it in a single direction, or pretending we don’t have it — instead of using it consciously, authentically, in an integrated way to achieve the goals that actually matter to us.
There is grief in recognizing the myriad ways we may have under- or misused our power in these ways, resulting in frustration, suboptimal team results, missed opportunities for our families, and foregone impact.
But there is also relief.
Because our true power returns the moment we reclaim our ability to be, aligned with the outcomes we care about.
Where might it be time to subtract power as performance… and remember what you’ve always wanted to be able to do, how you know to do it, why it matters, and who you are doing it for?
“You’ve always had the power, my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself.” — Glinda the Good Witch to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939)
