This year, let’s understand the feeling of power
Happy New Year community!
As we start the new year thinking about our resolutions, goals, and visions, I wanted to share one of the most important insights about power I've gained in the past few years and how this shapes our collective work ahead.
Power is a somatic experience. When we gain power—or even perceive we could gain it—we experience this in our bodies. The same is true when we lose power or fear losing it.
Because we don't have much healthy language for talking about power, we can often internalize lessons about power that are untrue and harmful. The impact of these experiences can cause us to choose actions that make us feel safe while jeopardizing what actually keeps us safe in reality.
We can choose strategies to manage our own power that are completely divergent from our aspirations and beliefs. Our bodies learn to identify threats, risks, and resources as a result of what we've ingested about power in our life experience. Pushback or feedback can be seen as devastating reproach and a lack of respect. We can see sharing information or context as being asked for too much. We can fear sharing power, thinking it will only decimate our own. Our somatic experience of power can often have us act outside of our beliefs, and inside our greatest ghosts. As people who wield power, something we all do, we often have to do internal work to match up our lived experience with the beliefs we have.
Eventually, the two can match up but not without self-reflection. Here are some examples about the way it can manifest.
A person who grew up with a strong code switch in educational and professional dynamics may internalize code-switching as the best strategy to access power and harshly judge those who don't.
A person who has been an organizer in their youth can carry a "disruption is the only way to access power" orientation and sets to demolishing any power that comes into their path.
A person who's experienced dominating and boundary violating parents or leaders may mistake power for domination in management.
A person who had a parent that always played the victim role in a codependent relationship can constantly deny their own power or feel attacked at even the smallest correction.
A former evangelical may reject the abusive experiences they had in their church but will carry a "you must perform piousness to gain social capital at all times" orientation to their activism.
A star student who was highly rewarded for it and has ingested that systems should reward you highly and deprive others who feel ignored in more collectivist systems.
This is just a small selection of examples of how the things life has thrown at us can impact the way we approach our power and how that can separate us from who we want to be. As this new year kicks off, I will challenge all of us, myself included, to think deeply about how we learned power in our most impressionable and vulnerable life moments. What impact do those moments have on us now? Are there experiences we detest that left us with fears we don't recognize now?
We are currently watching a constant barrage of people with power whose relationships to power are extremely toxic. They have committed an entire media ecosystem to getting the left into reactivity. As the environment around us is consistently seeded to get us to our most reactive selves - how can we inoculate ourselves to our worst tendencies? How do we not end up as the very people we are pushing back against?
Let's recognize strategies for conflict that influential people in our lives used to "win" and actively choose or not choose their methods.
When we can do the work of digging into those experiences—whether that is in therapy, with a coach, a journal, with a friend—we can be more choiceful about how we lead.
As we walk into the new year, may we commit ourselves to intentional and choiceful leadership. Let's embody the leadership we need by setting an example that stands in stark contrast to what we're seeing.
Cheers to a new opportunity to build and be the very thing we want to see in the world.
Warmly,
Karla
