In classic mathematics-style, I begin with a couple of definitions.
Definition 1: ‘Power’ is the ability to influence or change an outcome.
Definition 2: ‘Personal power’ is influence or authority that a person has over that person’s followers because of who that person is perceived to be, and not because of that person’s position.
Aside: I am officially punting (for now!) on the philosophical status of personal power (which we might think of as being of a similar degree of dubiousness to free will).
I want to discuss personal power this week, in contrast to political power, partly because present political situations and the enormous scales of our societies can distract so strongly from personal power — or even lead us to feel that we lack personal power when we first feel that we lack political power. Indeed, up until the past couple of years, I felt no significant awareness of having personal power or even the potential for it.
What is personal power good for (Why care?), and what do we mean by ‘followers’? Before I try to give a good answer to the first question, I want to bring to mind the distinction between the notions of ‘local’ and ‘global’ in relation to our individual lived experience. We might think of our day-to-day, first-person experience that we are consciously aware of as being at the ‘local’ extreme, and the entire body of human experience and activity over all time, regardless of awareness, at the ‘global’ extreme. When we think about our ‘local’ lives in their ‘global’ context, they can feel absurdly small and unimportant. What are we to do with our puny few decades and abilities in the face of well,…everything else?
Personal power is useful for exerting agency at this local level of human experience, i.e. your lived experience. While it is true that certain lives end up exerting disproportionate influence on the global level of experience, I don’t believe that diminishes the value of other lives operating mostly or purely locally, within relatively small groups of people. The best reason why I believe this is because if we decide that anything is to really matter in the end, then surely the quality of individual lives matters. One could (and I would) argue that optimizing quality of life across all individuals should be our goal as a species. So, closely attending to and taking care of oneself and one’s personal happiness is a meaningful step toward this putative collective goal.
For the second question, I personally consider an individual’s ‘followers’ to be those who have the potential to be affected by that person’s actions (which includes seemingly minute actions such as body language and speech — the things that we might think of as constituting ‘presence’). They are our stakeholders, whether they’re aware of it or not. Some people do follow each other in an active way — and yes, I am thinking of Twitter and Instagram. But the category of followers is so much broader and deeper than that, and that’s why we can view our followers as imbuing our day-to-day lives with a huge amount of consequence. That public transit worker to whom you just paid your fare? Maybe you made their day by smiling and giving them a (respectful) compliment as you passed. That pedestrian crossing the street whom you defended from an aggressive and reckless driver? You helped that person get safely to where they were going, and maybe gave the driver pause for reflection before they continue on the road.
Finally, to speak to sources of personal power: Where does it come from? I don’t pretend to have anything close to an exhaustive list. Heck, I’ve only really just started exploring what its sources in my own life are and might be over time. I will happily share those along with some more general thoughts.
My favourite answer to the question of where personal power comes from is this: Personal power comes from behaving in ways that others admire. Now, as with all forms of power, we all have the potential to pursue personal power in problematic or ineffective ways. Think of the leader who tries to win over her panel of advisors or board members on a personal level by using fear or strong-arm tactics. She probably causes harm and also undermines herself by losing genuine respect and admiration. When, instead, others look at you and see someone behaving in a way that they would like to emulate, themselves, this person is primed to literally amplify your actions through repetition.
I started thinking about my own personal power once I got a job — and one where I was explicitly given power to make or influence decisions that were important, at least to the organization and our customers. My reflections continued in a more formal way after reading the remarkable book, Deep Diversity: Overcoming Us vs. Them, by Shakil Choudhury. In it, Choudhury proposes that we can take charge of the interpersonal and ethical dimensions of our personal development and that large numbers of us actually doing so is essential for building a world without discrimination and prejudice.
There are certainly things that I have done in life, of the type that can be listed meaningfully on paper, that others have admired: getting a higher degree in math, biking across the U.S., and publishing a book are classically impressive examples. I didn’t do any of these things to gain status points, at least not consciously; I derive personal satisfaction from all the process and effort and learning that went into doing these things and the journeys that grew from them. I feel especially pleased with accomplishments that violate expectations and hopefully make others more conscious of bias or active prejudice in their thinking; on some level, I do go through the world knowing that people will probably expect less than what I’m capable of in certain situations because I am a woman. And I am aware that these expectations can be very influential in how I am treated and in outcomes that affect my basic well being and professional opportunities. But my response to this knowledge, which is to be galvanized rather than discouraged, is one of my greatest sources of personal power.
I like to think that I also derive a lot of my “mojo” from having experienced deep personal pain and struggle in a variety of situations. A key point that I want to emphasize is that I’m not at all unusual in this; struggle and discomfort are pretty much endemic to human life. Anyone can tap into the strengthening power of adversity. Having gotten through it in my own life has given me courage to take educational, professional, and interpersonal risks and to care about people without caring what they think of me. Yes, other people can always make my life more difficult or complicated or unfair, but I will always have the domains of my own conscious awareness and decisions. That’s all that anyone really ever has — no more, and vitally, no less.