The Key Power Principles

By Author: Mark Eyre
Total Articles: 8
Comment this article

How do you feel about your life? Do you feel like you're on an escalator, doing things you'd prefer not to do? Do you sense that you could only become powerful at the expense of being ethical?

Power is a wierd beast, and it has absorbed me for a number of years. On one level, it is essential to life, and to living. Without power, the ability to turn energy into momentum, we have no existence whatsoever. Yet many people I meet don't desire power. Isn't that wierd?

Perhaps not. After all, we often associate power with corruption and misuse. As a result, we view power as something to avoid, even if it is important. Not an easy conundrum to deal with. Indeed, it has been one of my significant challenges in life, and it's why I wrote my book on power. I called it 'Stand up and live' because for me the two things go together.

In the book, I cover nine steps to ethical power through a narrative. Since publishing it, I've realised that there are four central principles that underpin these steps. Mastering these principles will make a significant impact on your own personal power, in addition to helping ...
... you to become more ethical in deploying it - a real win. Covered below are the four key principles. The more you do these, the more ethically powerful you will be.

Feelings

The importance of connecting with our own feelings is often referred to in a self help context. There are a number of great benefits from connecting with how we feel at any point in time. One of the key benefits is to keep us in touch with our own state of power. Put simply, the better we feel about a specific situation or aspect of our life, the more powerful we are likely to be in it. Having a say in what happens in our own life makes us feel better, and empowered people don't use their power to make themselves feel upset! All of this means our feelings are a good measure of our state of power.

Direction

Get clarity on your direction in life, and take whatever action is necessary to get clear. If power is the conversion of our energy into momentum, then where is the momentum going? As the famous quotation goes, if you don't know where you're going, you will probably end up somewhere else. There will be no shortage of people saying where you ought to go if you are not clear about it yourself! So get clarity on where you wish to go, and what you want to do.

This could include clarifying any or all of your own life purpose, a vision for the future, your key values, or even just some personal goals. There's no need to get too spiritual over it (although many among you might wish to). Getting some direction helps you to view with greater clarity where other people might be preventing you from living an enjoyable life - and others might not be undermining you deliberately. In addition, having clear purpose, vision, personal values and goals delivers a momentum of its own. Seaweed will only stop a boat if that boat had no momentum to start with. If it had momentum, it would sail through the seaweed.

Expression

Once you have the first two principles sorted, the next step is to express yourself to others when they are dis-empowering you, inadvertently or otherwise. Your own direction and feelings will let you know when a situation matters if you listen to yourself. So if someone is dis-empowering you, say something, along the lines of:

"When you criticise me publicly, it undermines me. I'd like you to stop criticising in future"
"I want you to help me in my work"
"I'd like you to come with me to see my family"

The golden rule on expression is to say whatever is true for you. Not aggressively, but clearly. You have just as much right to verbalise your needs, wants and desires as the next person, as long as you're not harming anyone. Avoid the temptation to dress up what you say in the hope that others might 'get the drift'. Usually they won't - the problem with hints is they're not always clear to other people.

If you have trouble doing this, practice in front of a mirror, get a coach, talk to a friend, whatever it takes. But do something to develop this skill. It is in these moments of truth where we say something, or don't say something, that our own lives are defined as joyous or depressing.

But do remember that in your rush to get to where you want to go, don't trample others into the dust. Other people have rights too. Which leads us nicely to the last principle.

Forgiveness

Many of us find it difficult to forgive somebody, unless we're like Gandhi. For many people, it's forgiving ourselves we can't cope with. We run around berating ourselves for things we did, or didn't do in the past - sometimes a long time in the past. We feel guilty for this. For other people, it's forgiving others that is the difficulty. Others who wronged us in the past. Crossed us, undermined us, embarrassed us, got the better of us. There are folks out there who look around for 'bad people', and don't forgive them, for many things.

We might have a tendency to favour either beating ourselves up, or beating others up - perhaps even both. We might hide our feelings, but we still haven't forgiven. I just want to emphasise one thing about forgiveness.

Non-forgiveness undermines our own power. It destroys our power for one reason. Whether it's ourselves or others we fail to forgive, the act of non-forgiveness ties down our energy. Ties it up fighting battles long gone. Ties up energy on beating ourselves up. Ties up energy that could be channeled now to generate momentum, and this is the essence of power. We can live in the past or live for now, and ethically powerful people choose the second option. Let's face it, the only person you're harming by bathing in non-forgiveness is you. What's the point in that? So again, find someone to counsel you, clear the air with those who have 'offended' in the past, talk at the mirror, but find a way to move on. Otherwise you won't move on.

There you have it. The four core principles - connect with your emotions, get clarity on your direction, express yourself , and forgive people for their (and our) past deeds. Developing your personal power is crucial to living a good life, and to enabling others around you to do the same thing.

I end with a wish, a variant on an old 'Star Trek' saying (I do confess to liking Star Trek!). Spock, the Vulcan, used to say 'live long and prosper'. My alternative mantra, to you, is 'stand up and live'.
Mark is the owner of Brilliant Futures. He is the author of 'Stand up and live', and is passionately committed to helping people fulfil their potential and have great careers. http://www.brilliantfutures.net/