The True Nature of Personal Power
Things to remember

We are born with two basic urges: to be able and to bond with others -– power and love.

Personal power is the capacity to experience yourself and the ability to respond effectively to your own experience.

Power is not good. Power is not bad. We usually judge the ends to which we use our power.

Power is present in nearly every interaction we have. There are countless opportunities for you to be powerful.

Power is not authority. Authority is granted by an organization or a society and is limited in time and space.

Everyone uses power. Everyone is powerful. It is how you use your power and the impact you have on others that is critical.

You can shape and improve the basis for your own power, the form your power takes and the results you create with others in your life.

The most basic definition of leadership is the shaping of power.

Who can get married?
This morning, as the news reports about the Supreme Court justices’ questions and comments on gay marriage filtered in, I asked myself that question. And some other questions too: Who am I to refuse anyone the right to form a union with another person? What can we do if we are really interested in preserving the institution of marriage? What is at the heart of this issue and this resistance?
The good people of California, with whom I share some history and affection, have decided that marriage should be between a man and a woman exclusively. A man cannot form a legal union with a man. A woman cannot form a legal union with a woman. The argument goes, I have read, that gay marriage would destroy the institution of marriage itself and erode the American nuclear family. (I’ve always thought those last two words together were odd.)
News flash: the institution of marriage is not in great shape. Breaking news: the American family is sliding down the slope as well. Both of these social changes have nothing to do with homosexuality. Marriage is not the same as it was 100 years ago, not even as it was 50 years ago. Our ideas about marriage, as our ideas about love, are constantly changing and, as most of us realize, change happens faster these days.
Ask any sociologist how the nuclear family is fairing. Look around at your own friends and family and see the struggles within marriages, the aggression and violence, the divorces and the changing landscape of how we relate to one another. Check out blended families and see how the children of our former and new spouses are cared for, and not.
Marriage is one of our institutions that is complex and in constant flux. It is a phenomenon that exists on many levels and even our reasons for getting married vary a great deal. Marriage is a legal institution, a moral union and a social bond. It is also sexual, religious, financial and, ultimately, personal. While many marriages may look the same, I can’t think of a single person/couple who has a marriage just like mine.
How can we possibly regulate all that?
Tongue in cheek this morning, I thought: why don’t we ban marriage for people who have been married three times? Three strikes and you’re out. Why don’t we ban marriage for men and women who are addicted to drugs or alcohol? Why don’t we ban marriage for people with histories of marital abuse? Why don’t we ban marriage for young people who don’t know what they’re doing? Why don’t we ban marriage for people from widely different cultures and religions? (Statistically this is one of the biggest challenges.) Why don’t we ban marriage for men and women who are too poor to hold a family together? You get the idea. Where do we stop?
Apparently we have stuck here, at homosexuals. Perhaps at the bottom of this resistance to gay marriage is the fear of what homosexual energy, if you will, will do to us, all the rest of us; pure old-fashioned homophobia – fear of the same sex. What a great time to open a national dialogue on how it is to feel attracted to a person who happens to be the same sex as you are.
Just as we have learned—reluctantly—about other personal and social issues, we need to learn more about homosexuality in America. Just as we are learning about what it means to be a woman in this society, just as we are still learning what it means to be black in America, just as we are learning what it means to be a legal and illegal immigrant in our country.
Our country. Whose is it? Our families. Who do they belong to? Our marriages. Who owns those?
If we as a society are truly invested in breathing life, vitality and joy into our personal lives and in our families, we will invest in openness and education. We will encourage learning at all levels about relationships, what marriage is and is not, how to form intimate bonds, how to deal with power, how to avoid violence and what love is. Look at your high school and college curriculums and see how many courses you find on those subjects.
We as a country spend so much time and money promoting freedom in other countries. How can we go wrong allowing freedom at home?

John Wood

“Is this real, is this real, this life I am living?”
The Pawnee

It seems as if every day someone is challenging our perception that something is – or is not – real. Manti T’eo, Lance Armstrong, TV news, politicians are asking us, in the sub-text, is this real? Or is it illusion?
Unconsciously, every day, our perception and our belief systems are challenged to determine on what reality we behave.
Is there really a looming debt crisis?
Can we really get a free trip five-day to the Caribbean on a cruise liner?
Did Lance really take all those drugs?
Was there a real girlfriend who died and tugged at our heartstrings?
Is the second amendment to the Constitution really threatened?
Does she really mean it when she says ‘I love you?’
Is an abortion a sin?
Every day, defining reality. Look at this in terms of power.
One of the first things we do when we enter any new situation is to attempt to determine what reality we face. Our everyday language reflects this: “What’s going on here?” “Hey, what’s happening?” ”What do we have here?” “What’s the situation?” Even “Wha’s up?”
Sometimes this is done with urgency, as when a doctor comes into an emergency room, and sometimes it takes months, beginning a new job and trying to see how things work. Essentially we are to establish what is real.
Once we think we know what is real, we will act on that reality, or perception, and spend some energy trying to convince others we know how things are. This happens in married couples all the time, one person trying to convince the other, “This is the way life is.” Or, this is really our problem.
As we grow up we learn what is real from our direct sensory experiences and from our parents, the latter especially related to interpersonal and social relationships. Our parents are in a very powerful position for they, at first, define our reality, our ideas about love, power, morality, reward and punishment and so on. In relationships as adults, the person who is able to define reality for others is a leg up in the power equation.
It’s a very important step in developing your own power base when you become aware of and define what is real for yourself. Part of that process is repeatedly affirming your own awareness, ideas, feelings, desires and needs.
In the meantime, TV reporters, politicians, church leaders, educators and public figures like those named above will try to convince you of the reality and the urgency of a given situation. As we move further and further into the technological/information age, we are more and more confronted with secondhand information – stories, requests, demands — that do not spring from our own direct experience.
The truly wise among us will be those who can separate the real from the illusion, and communicate about and operate on their own reality.
Or is it all illusion?

Do we pay attention to something because it is beautiful?

Is something beautiful because we pay attention to it?

Our attention, day to day, is pulled in thousands of different directions.  A bird swoops by out of the corner of our eye, a car’s breaks screeching nearby, the aroma of lavender as we walk by a garden, a woman’s hips as she walks ahead of us. These are split seconds, as temporal as can be, and they grab a bit of our sensory awareness, natural enough for all of us.

What does it mean if and when we come back to the bird, the car, the lavender, the woman?  What is it when we return, more than once, to the object that stimulated our senses and took us away from whatever else was happening in that second? Do we return and pay attention because these things are beautiful? Or do they become beautiful in our attention?

Not so fast, you say. We pay attention to things that may be repulsive, ugly or harmful. We sometimes dwell on these things. Is this warped or somehow masochistic, to subject ourselves to the objectionable? (Words are interesting aren’t they?) Or, do these things become beautiful to us the longer we dwell on them?

Let’s take an example, a person’s intestines. At first mention, you probably scrunch up your face and maybe say something like “uewe.” If we saw a person’s guts, opening up by a knife wound or a surgeon’s scalpel, not many of us would say it was beautiful. But what if we dwelled on it? What if we moved closer, examined the intestines, learned something in our looking and began to appreciate their functions? Would they then become beautiful?

This may be similar to what happens in a surgeon as he or she moves through medical school, focusing more and more attention on the human body and what it does. Perhaps she learns that the body is beautiful by learning about the body, by getting closer to it, by ‘sending’ appreciation its way.

This is why the essence of the line, “Beauty if in the eyes of the beholder” is so profound. Beauty and ugliness are behind the eyes of the person using the eyes, as is just about everything else. It is how we perceive what we see, hear, taste, touch and smell that moves us to declare it beautiful.

How do we come to our own perceptions? We learn them. We grow into our perceptions just like we grow into our knowledge of math, science and language. Our perceptions are shaped by our experiences and our experience shapes our perceptions.

This is why it is so important to be aware of what we pay attention to, what we watch and listen to over and over again, for we become, in a way, what we take in through our senses. “We are what we eat…yes, and what we see, hear, taste, touch and smell.

As an exercise, become aware of what you watch on television, day after day. Maybe it’s the news. Try to categorize the repeated information you are paying attention to daily – crime, violence, anger, upheaval, conflict? These daily occurrences become part of the glasses through which you see the world.

The good news is you have a choice of what you pay attention to. Make that choice. Begin to pay attention to the people, media and other sources that make up your daily “diet.” These are the things that continue to shape your perceptions.

When you begin to see the world through the lens of love and you choose to become intimate with the essence of the person across from you, beauty begins to blossom all around you.

“It is not beauty that endears, it’s love that makes us see beauty.”


Tolstoy

So we have members of the Obama team saying their boss leads by following.
And we have the Republicans ridiculing that practice. Former NYC mayor Giuliani said on the CBS morning news: “They say he leads by following. I wrote a book on leadership and that’s an oxymoron.”
If he wrote a wise book on leadership he wouldn’t be saying that. If he was intellectually rigorous, he would be explaining to the TV audience what the term meant. But maybe that’s too much to expect from the opposition.
Leading by following is something many wise leaders do and it is something that fits Barack Obama’s personality, far as I can tell. It can be a confusing term, I will grant you, but it has a profound meaning. All leaders –eventually –must be in touch with the people they lead. They must know what motivates them, what they want and what they are suffering from.
All leaders must be aware of their constituency, lest they find themselves way out front, looking around for someone to lead. And all leaders must eventually speak in “the coin of the realm,” appealing to the reality the group faces and speaking in the language they know and use.
Obama, being a collaborator and consensus builder – if he stays true to his nature –must continually reach back to the nation as an audience and discover, and rediscover, what peoples’ lives are like and, in a sense, know where they are going.
Leading by following.
His voice and the voices of the Congress are important in that process too, but they are not all important, a belief politicians frequently overlook. Leading by following is an ongoing process that includes the voices of the people being led.
It is at the heart of democracy and I am saddened that more leaders are not practicing it.

The sexual abuse crisis at Penn State has reached another peak in the mountain range with the release of the report by former FBI Director Louis Freeh. That report answered many lingering questions regarding Jerry Sandusky’s abuse of children—who knew when, as well as how reports, rumors and allegations were handled. Perhaps the most disturbing element of the report had been hinted at in the press: the role that coach Joe Paterno played in the scandal, what he did and did not do.
Paterno’s role is the subject for another treatise, and I’m sure it will be, but I find myself focused on a larger picture: the culture and the dynamics of power that exist at Penn State and at every other large scale athletics program in this country. In an earlier essay in this space I referred to it as “The Locker Room Culture.” It is a space, this culture, where athletes’ brushes with crime, violence against women and sexual abuses are taken in and absorbed, nearly like a large anemone folding in on itself. The athlete, or in this case the coach, is welcomed back into the locker room, patted on the back and life goes on as usual. The outside world just doesn’t understand our values and the pressure we’re under, they mutter to themselves.
The Penn State scandal is not just based in an effort to avoid publicity; it is the revelation of a bureaucracy that fought to preserve itself as it is. This, you might say, is the function of a bureaucracy—to keep itself alive, to keep functioning and grow. Just like an animal, it must feed and it must maintain some kind of equilibrium so it can move and keep growing. If things change, we lose, the thinking goes. So the basis of horrible cover-up is fear.
I must say here that any crisis reveals a system and so it is doing now. The more we learn about the individual crimes of a football coach, the more we expose the system and the culture that supported the crime, the abuse and the secrecy that followed. The Penn State program will eventually be splayed out like a dressed deer, gutted and exposed so that all can see what made it tick, what lead to the behaviors.
This is what the leaders in College Station fought to avoid. In their minds, secrecy preserved the status quo. The fear is of exposure, the exposure leading to change and loss.
That this happened in such a venerable program, led by such a revered coach as JoePa, is shocking and sad and it only points out that such a culture of money, power and the drive to preserve those things exists at many of our institutions.
There is a very large amount of money flowing in and around college football. There is even an argument that universities and colleges abuse millions of young men on a regular basis by pumping up their football programs with television revenues while paying the young men nothing. But I digress.
There is little doubt in my mind that Graham Spanier is a fine man and a respected academic. But he made a fatal mistake in leadership and many people are suffering as a result. He gave in to the fear. He buckled in the face of the loss of money, reputation and legacies.
This is the heavy, awful responsibility of a leader: you must make the choices that you know in your heart are right, even when you believe that it will lead to the disintegration of the very organization you lead. You must. In my mind, there is no other way, for, as we have discovered, everything is exposed in the end. Eventually your secret is revealed. Look no farther than our churches.
Leaders in our colleges and universities must be divorced from the power, money and glamour that has become college sports and they must make very tough choices that deal with the cultures they have helped create, cultures that are all too often sexist, misogynist, violent and abusive. They must face the dragon.
At Penn State, the men whom the investigation has centered on have lost that chance. Their lives will never be the same, because they tried to deny the truth, a truth they knew in their hearts needed to be exposed. But we must not forget the scores of young wounded boys who also had their lives changed forever. They, not the administrators, are the reasons we must fully take on the locker room culture that hides, and thus encourages abuse of the vulnerable among us.

“What leads to this repression? We found that participants who reported having supportive and accepting parents were more in touch with their implicit sexual orientation and less susceptible to homophobia. Individuals whose sexual identity was at odds with their implicit sexual attraction were much more frequently raised by parents perceived to be controlling, less accepting and more prejudiced against homosexuals.”

New York Times, 4/29/12
“Homophobic? Maybe You’re Gay”
Richard and William Ryan

Despite the provocative and unfortunate headline, this research is interesting in the broader sense of having fears and growing up in a controlling environment. The Ryans measured responses to homosexual and heterosexual images and attempted, through semantic association, to identify implicit sexual orientation. The results will lead to dinner table arguments and taunting over drinks at the bar throughout America, but it is more interesting to me in what it says about fear and repression in general and how parents raise their children.
The paragraph above, near the end of the article, is a big vote for acceptance, authenticity, compassion and an open mind in the home.
Repression is a way of holding something away from yourself, keeping parts of your self at a distance, taking your own feelings and compartmentalizing them so you don’t have to deal directly with them. As with many fears, the fear of being gay (which I believe is fairly common) leads one to keep gay itself way over there in the psyche and in day-to-day experiences. The fear leads a man to believe that if he lets a little bit of this gayness “in,” he will be swept away in it, much like stepping in a stream that is faster and more powerful than we thought and we are carried downstream.
It is still, unfortunately, one of the most damning things one young man can say about another. Just last week I saw graffiti in a schoolyard: (“so-and-so is GAY”)
Those are still fighting words and part of what we are fighting is even a little bit of admission that we find men attractive, that we like their bodies, that we find them compelling in their masculinity, courage and strength of character. This fear and the repression of our feelings of attraction are, and have been for centuries, what keeps men apart and keeps them lonely. The fear: If I am a little bit gay, I am certainly going to be swept down a river that I won’t be able to get out of.
This makes it easier to see how many public figures can “make a living” speaking out against homosexuality and, if they have any political power, trying to repress it in the society at large. Decrying same sex love helps their audience (the percentage that shares their fear) identify with them and, two, gives them a public way of keeping their own feelings at a distance. When I can passionately deny my feelings to you and add on judgment and condemnation, it helps affirm my own repressed stance.
So read the quote above again and take out references to sexuality. “…participants who reported having supportive and accepting parents were more in touch with their implicit_____ …” and fill in the blank. People who have had supportive and accepting parents are more in touch with themselves period. Their full self is not denied. They have little to fear. They learn to face themselves, to deepen their awareness and accept their thoughts, feelings and desires. This “recipe” for healthy relationships is what some parents aspire to: acceptance, compassion, empathy, authenticity. This is not only true between parents and children, as I’m sure you will recognize, but between and among all persons.
“Individuals whose … identity was at odds with their implicit …attraction were much more frequently raised by parents perceived to be controlling, less accepting and more prejudiced against _____.”
In other words, children who are at odds with their own inner experience may have been raised by parents who were controlling and biased. It’s a no-brainer when you consider it, isn’t it? If I have thoughts and feelings that may be fearful for me and/or socially unacceptable in my sub-culture, it is going to do me harm if my mother and father are repressed themselves and control the hell out of me. The result is an adult who is not fully aware of himself, has serious inner conflicts that are unresolved and who will condemn others for the very things that he is afraid of.
All in all, this research and more like it, will help support our belief in and value of unconditional acceptance of those around us, including our children.

When learning replaces teaching, a new channel for energy is opened.

“This is how it’s done” is teaching. “How would you do it?” is learning. There is a time to teach and a time to learn and most leaders take it upon themselves to be teachers. How many are equally committed to learning? What happens when you stop to learn about someone who works for you, to discover what she wants, how she will get there and how she feels about her own progress? What if you made learning a conscious priority in yourself and your organization?
What if learning replaced blaming, finding fault, solving a problem for someone or being right? Teaching comes from “I already know.” Learning comes from “What can I discover with you?” When all team members set a goal of learning from each other a new level of creative energy is released.

“What leads to this repression? We found that participants who reported having supportive and accepting parents were more in touch with their implicit sexual orientation and less susceptible to homophobia. Individuals whose sexual identity was at odds with their implicit sexual attraction were much more frequently raised by parents perceived to be controlling, less accepting and more prejudiced against homosexuals.”

New York Times, 4/29/12
“Homophobic? Maybe You’re Gay”
Richard and William Ryan

Despite the provocative and unfortunate headline, this research is interesting in the broader sense of having fears and growing up in a controlling environment. The Ryans measured responses to homosexual and heterosexual images and attempted, through semantic association, to identify implicit sexual orientation. The results will lead to dinner table arguments and taunting over drinks at the bar throughout America, but it is more interesting to me in what it says about fear and repression in general and how parents raise their children.
The paragraph above, near the end of the article, is a big vote for acceptance, authenticity, compassion and an open mind in the home.
Repression is a way of holding something away from yourself, keeping parts of your self at a distance, taking your own feelings and compartmentalizing them so you don’t have to deal directly with them. As with many fears, the fear of being gay (which I believe is fairly common) leads one to keep gay itself way over there in the psyche and in day-to-day experiences. The fear leads a man to believe that if he lets a little bit of this gayness “in,” he will be swept away in it, much like stepping in a stream that is faster and more powerful than we thought and we are carried downstream.
It is still, unfortunately, one of the most damning things one young man can say about another. Just last week I saw graffiti in a schoolyard: (“so-and-so is GAY”). Those are still fighting words and part of what we are fighting is even a little bit of admission that we find men attractive, that we like their bodies, that we find them compelling in their masculinity, courage and strength of character. This fear and repression is, and has been for centuries, what keeps men apart and keeps them lonely. If I am a little bit gay, I am certainly going down a river that I won’t be able to get out of.
This makes it easier to see how many public figures can “make a living” speaking out against homosexuality and, if they have any political power, trying to repress it in the society at large. Decrying same sex love helps their audience (the percentage that shares their fear) identify with them and, two, gives them a public way of keeping their own feelings at a distance. When I can passionately deny my feelings to you and add on judgment and condemnation, it helps affirm my own repressed stance.
So read the quote above again and take out references to sexuality. “…participants who reported having supportive and accepting parents were more in touch with their implicit_____ …” and fill in the blank. People who have had supportive and accepting parents are more in touch with themselves period. Their full self is not denied. They have little to fear. They learn to face themselves, to deepen their awareness and accept their thoughts, feelings and desires. This “recipe” for healthy relationships is what some parents aspire to: acceptance, compassion, empathy, authenticity. This is not only true between parents and children, as I’m sure you will recognize, but between and among all persons.
“Individuals whose … identity was at odds with their implicit …attraction were much more frequently raised by parents perceived to be controlling, less accepting and more prejudiced against _____.”
In other words, children who are at odds with their own inner experience were raised by parents who were controlling and biased. It’s a no-brainer when you consider it, isn’t it? If I have thoughts and feelings that may be fearful for me and/or socially unacceptable in my sub-culture, it is going to do me harm if my mother and father are repressed themselves and control the hell out of me. The result is an adult who is not fully aware of himself, has serious inner conflicts that are unresolved and who will condemn others for the very things that he is afraid of.
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
All of us, as Whitman, contain multitudes. All of us have a piece of the most holy and the most evil (if you believe in good and bad) inside. We all contain, in our glorious brains, souls and bodies, sexism, racism, prejudice, judgment and fear. We also have love, acceptance, courage, intelligence and compassion.
Our fears and self-denial stand in the way of our love. This is not just about being gay or not gay, black or brown or white, fat or slim– this is about living our lives fully and loving our children and the others in our lives for all of who they are.

John Wood

I spent a good deal of time early in my life learning from love. Unconsciously at first and then gradually opening my eyes, I learned from the love of my mother, father and extended family. I watched, listened and learned how they treated one another and felt how they treated me. That love was steady, naturally given and without any “ifs” or “buts”– unconditional in today’s language.
Later on I devoted a lot of attention to looking to be loved. I wanted the same kind of feeling I got at home. I wanted someone to regard me in an uncritical, all-accepting way. I knew it was possible, after all I had just come out of the greenhouse of my family’s love and had not fully discovered how different this other world was. So, I hurt some and got hurt some, asking that someone love me. I had the script and I wanted them to follow it.
That was not successful, to understate the facts, so I turned my attention to learning about love. I figured the more I knew about the subject, the more able I would be able to love and be loved. I thought hard about love, talked about it, read about it, led classes on love and even wrote a book about it. Now, I had a firm foundation of experience and knowledge and relationships would be easy.
Ouch.
Perhaps the pain turned me around and at some point in my life I decided (was it a decision?) to give love, just to love. With all my experiences, with all I’d gone through and learned, I could give my love to someone and we’d both be happy. In fact, I felt so strongly about this, I reasoned I could probably save someone with my love. All I had to do, no matter the health or responses of the other, was to devote myself to their well being. Right. Let’s move on.
Currently, nearing the end of this life lesson, I am learning to be love. I am learning to be the brightest candle I can be, in a room with other bright candles and not in competition with or need of the other candles. I am getting to a place where I can just be all that I am and the essence of who I am will be enough. It will show. That essence will be felt. And if it’s not, that can’t be helped. I don’t have to earn love. I don’t have to know a lot more about it. I don’t have to demand love. And I don’t have to love someone who, for whatever reason, doesn’t love themselves and can’t accept what I have.
AND I hold the distinct possibility that this is not the end of my learning.
Perhaps beyond being love, there is simply being, no reference to other.
Perhaps love is a delightful, twisted, amusing, painful and totally rewarding mystery that doesn’t have heroes or villains and we never know how it ends.
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