Positive Power
Powerful mother-nature creates the paradox of new life and
destruction. With humans, power is too often used to oppress and harm
others.
In our April 2008 issue of Playing in the Gap!
we invite you to explore the positive possibilities of power … where
we extend honor and respect to ourselves, others and the planet.
Table of Contents
Being Messy
Positive Power Ensures Good Results and a Good Time!
More evidence that love does conquer all.
Calling Passion
Dr.
Wangari Maathai, the Epitome of Positive Power
Read about the first African woman and environmentalist who won a Nobel Peace Prize.
Finding Courage
Claiming Your POWER
What would you answer if asked the question, “When you hear
the word, Power, what words or phrases come to mind?”
Leading Edge
The Tao Meets the Easy Button
Learning to “go with the flow” may mean facing more
unknowns, but it will likely also allow you to feel more
powerful and free.
Seizing Joy
The Inspired Choice
Power over diminishes love while power with offers
freedom – especially to love in joy, possibility and hope.
Being Messy
Positive Power Ensures Good Results and a Good Time! - by Karen Tax
Power. Too often this word is associated with tyrants, oppression, manipulation, greed and the like. What’s your favorite story about the abuse of power? Most people have a personal experience …
Positive power. Different than abusive power. Abusive power is based in scarcity: you get to be powerful and I don’t or vice versa. Positive power is based in abundance; we both get to be powerful. In fact, my being powerful is enhanced by your being powerful and vice versa.
Simple, yes? No, it isn’t always simple or else we’d see a lot more of it …
Why is claiming positive power so tricky?
Positive power can be difficult to claim because of pervasive confusion about our right to experience joy, pleasure, happiness and healthy life energy.
One of my favorite authors and books is David Hawkins “Power versus Force”. Hawkins equates abusive power with force and describes how easily we get caught-up in unconscious patterns of unhealthy power, which provide the seeds of abusive power …
What does unhealthy power look like?
Hawkins describes unhealthy power as an addiction to pain and suffering. We, at KT&A, describe this as an attachment to drama or struggle thinking of any kind. Some examples of these thoughts might include:
· no pain, no gain
· suffer now, enjoy later, enjoy now, suffer later
Why does the path to success have to include struggle?
It doesn’t and it can’t, if we want to create abundant results that are good for everyone. The alternative is to claim our positive power every step of the way.
Here’s a simple example from recent experience:
I have had a lifelong fear of speaking in
public. Familiar anxiety waved in hot flashes through my body in the
days before a recent large meeting.
In the past, I tried to force away
the fear and instead it grew. This time, I welcomed the fear, loved the
scared part of me and asked it to step aside (and it did).
I refused to struggle with the part of me that was afraid. I insisted on my joyful power showing up.
By insisting on joy, I found the energy to love my fear and claim the best of myself that then could be given for the highest good of myself and others. The result? “A stunning success”, said the client. Even better: I had a great time!
Calling Passion
Dr. Wangari Maathai, the Epitome of Positive Power
- by Diane Craver
Next week I am presenting my project on Dr. Wangari Maathai, professor turned activist and the first African woman and environmentalist to win a Nobel Peace Prize (2004). When I think of positive power, I think of Wangari Maathai.
Dr. Maathai started her career in Kenya as a professor in
veterinary science. Through her volunteer work in the community, she
found that massive deforestation and ecological damage in Kenya was
having a disproportionate impact on women. So, in 1977, Dr. Maathai
started The Green Belt Movement (www.greenbeltmovement.org)
to pay women to plant tree seedlings. To date, over 40 million trees
have been planted and have survived all across Africa.
Through Dr. Maathai’s positive response to a need in her community, her career took a drastic yet important shift into advocating for a peaceful solution to what is right for the environment, women, children, and her community. She could have remained a professor and now be retired and enjoying her pension. But she states, “That wouldn’t have been half as interesting.”
As Dr. Maathai challenged Kenya’s oppressive regime and the cultural stereotypes, she encountered sexism, unwarranted arrests, physical and emotional abuse, threats on her life, violent break-ins and burglary, and yet she would not give up. She was willing to champion something that she loved so much – humanity. Although she is associated with trees, the ultimate object of her efforts has always been people and quality of life. Maathai often asks, “If we can’t protect our own species, what’s the point of protecting tree species?”
As I reflect on Dr. Maathai’s story, I am reminded that we all have our own stories of challenges that come our way. We may be at a crossroads in our careers, stalled, or just starting out, but how we choose to approach these challenges is entirely up to us. Perhaps all we need is just to rediscover those positive aspects of ourselves and shift to a new way of thinking – honoring ourselves and others.
Finding Courage
Claiming Your POWER
- by Lorraine Cohen
Do you immediately associate a negative meaning to POWER? If you said yes, you would not be alone. If you look at many of the situations around the world, power is often equated with harm, oppression, and fear.
People give their power away in conscious and unconscious ways. Often
through habit and, other times, because they feel having POWER of being
powerfull is something bad, wrong, or to be feared.
Some ways we give our power away:
· Putting our needs last
· Silence
· Compliance
· Saying yes when you want to say no
· Having no boundaries
· Putting up with things
· Other people’s influence
Is POWER getting a bad rap?
You might wonder, “Is it possible to claim your personal power and
express that power positively in the world without causing deliberate
harm to another?”
Last year I began coaching a woman with a talent for composing and playing incredibly beautiful music. She believes her music has the power to heal. Her whole face lights up when she speaks about her joy and passion for her music. As the only daughter in an Italian Sicilian family, her self-esteem took a beating. For the last year and a half, she has been working on claiming her value and personal power. With courage, she’s learned to give herself permission to speak her heart and to hold herself with love and respect.
When
we treat ourselves with love and respect, honoring who we are and the
amazing wisdom we have, we become our own champions. When we claim self
worth and self-confidence we serve others (all over the world) to become
happier, healthier and more productive. Imagine the kind of world we
would create if we all modeled self-love!
I invite you to consider some of the ways you give your power away to others that might be diminishing your vitality, happiness, and zest for life? What is the impact on your business success? Your happiness? Your self-esteem?
- If you claimed your power, how would you and your life change?
- What would you have to give up? What would you gain?
- Who would you become?
What are you ready to change to become the person you are meant to be?
Leading Edge
The Tao Meets the Easy Button - by John Berkley
I have always been intrigued with the martial art of aikido. Aikido is often translated as "the Way of unifying (with) life energy". In aikido, instead of fighting the force of an attacker with force, one uses or flows with the opponent’s force, stepping out of the way and directing one’s own force to be alignment with the attacker’s force. A simpler way of saying this is “to go with the flow”.
The Chinese character Tao 道 means "path" or "way". I find that when I am in alignment with this path, life is easy. The more I fight it, the more I feel like a novice attacker going against an aikido master.
I recently bought a Staples EASY button and challenged myself to change my thinking to “that is easy” (the button says “that was easy” referring to after the fact). Easy and hard are two opposite sides to the same coin. Which side do you choose to look at? People are giving me feedback that they actually see an evolutionary difference in me…who said that you had to wait hundreds of thousands of years for change?
My biggest change recently came when I went to a David Whyte poetry workshop in Annapolis. He talked about the paradoxes of wanting the adventure of life yet, at the same time, wanting the safety of what we know. It is impossible to have both. From that weekend I found a strong faith in accepting the unknown. Through this faith, I have been able to now live comfortably with my fears in business, in my upcoming marriage, and with the potential of raising children. I am now able to move so much faster, with less hesitation and procrastination. I still don’t know the answers I seek, but I am just fine in living the journey with many unknowns. I find myself at the frontier, at the edge of my life. I feel very powerful which, in turn, feels very freeing.
The more I learn, the more I find I don’t know. Life is full of paradoxes and I’m okay with that! I wonder if all our paths are more connected than we know? If our individual fears don’t dominate our thinking, then can’t we individually and collectively achieve anything? I have faith.
Seizing Joy
The Inspired Choice - by Robin Renteria
When my daughter was sixteen years old, I separated from my marriage to her father. She lived with him in our home near her high school while I found a small apartment nearby. She soon became so angry with me that we didn’t communicate at all for two and a half years. I missed our friendship, her sharing her day with me, her confidences. It was a fearful and painful time that required that I release her into her own destiny, and in the doing, create a whole new relationship with her and with Life.
During that time I’d meditate daily, feeling the cords that connected us in love, care and hurt, then turning them over to God and to Life. It was hard yet hugely freeing for us both. When we came together again, we did so as two adults, choosing to be in a relationship of equals. Now, seventeen years later, we are still good friends.
It was then that I learned that love only really exists in freedom; that power over, no matter how well intended, diminishes all involved. While care-giving of another person, whatever their age, comes with responsibilities, the largest responsibility is to be the guardian of their (and our) own freedom – the freedom of choice, dignity, and difference. This, to me, is the essence of power with, or power that comes from love.
Sam Keen writes that ‘an inspired life is marked by an increase in the power-in-love and a decrease in the will-to-power.’ The will-to-power is inherently violent – both to self and other. While our culture teaches that this is ‘the way of the world,’ power-in-love is possible everywhere. Practically it means that any violence to self or other in word or action is not an option, that a third more loving way will gradually emerge if we are open to it and if we are willing to move into, through, and beyond our discomfort and fear. This third-way will arise as the inspired choice that comes when we live in expectation of miracles and reach out for them in joy and possibility, or simply in hope.