Getting Comfortable in Talking About Personal Power

How comfortable are you with your own power? The power you have for living, doing your part in your family, in your team, your organization, your community? For those who are determined to lead their lives in positive ways, it is imperative to be comfortable and confident with your own power.

I am mentoring a female manager. The topic of personal power comes up with an invitation to explore three questions:

1. What is power?
2. Do you feel you have power?
3. What is your relationship to your personal power?

There is a lot of resistance to talking about power. The woman has linked power as somehow being harmful, being bad. There are many reasons for this association in the minds of people of ‘power as bad’. I am not so interested in what led to her to concluding that power is bad. I am interested in helping her to deconstruct the link to ‘power is bad’. Further, to replace it with a choice to be in her personal power, and then use it wisely and well.

So, picture this. The woman sitting with me has realized that I am working with her to change her attitude about power. The divide in our perspectives about power is big in this moment. I make the bold statement “if you are not comfortable with your power, you run the risk of mis-using power without realizing it.”

Should I keep pushing the subject of power and how important it is to claim her own power as a critical step to leadership in her life including her work?

In this particular session, she made it easy. She laughed. She said that although I was irritating her, she would go along with me at least for a while in a conversation of power. This was a first beautiful step that she took in raising her awareness, her willingness, her curiosity to discover if this topic of power was going to be the one that made a positive difference in her leadership.

I breathed a silent sigh of relief. I knew it was going to make a difference. And yet, it was essential that she accept my invitation into the topic, instead of feeling pushed into it.

From this invitation, we could go back to those questions and begin exploring personal power and her relationship with it.  We could begin shifting that relationship into one of confidence in personal power and knowing how to use it wisely and well.

How do you answer those questions about personal power?

1. What is power?
2. Do you feel you have power?
3. What is your relationship to your personal power?

Getting Comfortable with Your Personal Power

We explore personal power and how to get comfortable and confident with your power during our Individual Health and Balance workshop. As a leader, being comfortable with personal power and using it wisely and well is a key ingredient in achieving and regenerating your health and balance. It also contributes greatly to your ability to lead your team or organization in accomplishing its goals.

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Whether or not you are joining us in the workshop, I encourage you to spend a little time in answering those three questions about power and discovering for yourself how comfortable you think you are with your power.

_{Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash}