What Your Sense of Self Really Teaches Us About Personal Power

So welcome to our next podcast, Dr Paul Donovan, Dr Vinay Gunther. We're talking about power. We're exploring many different facets of power. And today we're looking at personal power. Now there's a great deal to say about personal power.

And it's a great interest because it not only is relevant in terms of organizations or roles, it's relevant in many areas of our life. And it really underpins the operation of organizational and role power. So today we're going to firstly get into it by framing it in terms of three different types of power courtesy of Julie Diamond and some of her inputs. She's written a wonderful book which we both recommend. And a power uses manual I think, isn't it?

Yeah, or uses guide. Use guide. That's right. Yeah. So let's just get stuck straight into it.

So Paul, what's the first domain of power? Right. Now, thank you Julie. I want to acknowledge her. Now, the work we're going to draw on today, although we recommend her book because it's such a great thought leading contribution to this area.

The three domains of personal power we're talking about today actually comes from her proprietary tool. So she has a 360 tool which we neither of us have any financial stake in. It's clarifying it's the Diamond Power Index. And so I've used this tool many, many times organizationally. And one of the great aspects of this tool is that it enables an individual to get a mirror to what they have as their personal power.

She does this by separating it into three domains. The first domain is this capable self. So capable self is the level to which you have a sense of confidence that you can have impact on something. So I simply put how optimistic are you that you can do whatever it is that you're tasked to do. And if you have, as I've coached many people over the years, a sense of I can't do this.

This is really hard. And it's beyond me. Then what you'd say is that in that first domain of personal power, you're scoring yourself low. There is a low capable self. And we both suggest that that is actually problematic.

Now it sounds like it might be humble and maybe even useful in some context. But the reality is going into a task holding grave doubts about whether you can even do it is not helpful to bring all of yourself to the task. Yeah, that really helps. That's right. We were talking in a previous episode about role power and how sometimes people don't use the role power that they have.

And that's just as problematic as when they overuse it. So again, that's not a position of kind of humility. It's a position that comes out of fear or something or being demented. And so it's the same thing with personal power. When people don't really own the power that they have and they feel power less, then their sense of their own capacity and capability goes down.

And of course, we don't want to encourage support people to be overinflated because you know, that's skating on thin ice then. And that also creates problems we can say in terms of people's use of power when there's kind of too much belief in their own capability. So it's a little bit a matter of the golden mean where you need to have kind of a grounded belief in your own capability. And of course, you know, I'm a therapist, so this is something where people's own personal history often has a great deal to bear. The way that power was used in their family, power was used over them, whether they were encouraged to become confident or whether they were diminished.

And these are factors which contribute to people's sense of positivity and capability. Now in the sphere of maybe personal development or motivational speaking or something, there's a lot of kind of rar rar. You know, you can do it, David Goggins, anything's possible, push yourself. And whilst that can energize people, I think what we're talking about is something a little quieter and more internal. I like the way you put that.

It is quieter and it's more internal. And it looks to bring an intelligence to unquestion, unignolaged, persistent self-douting. And it suggests that such an internal thought pattern is not helpful for good use of power. And as you mentioned earlier, if you lack a persistent set of thoughts that suggest that you can learn and be capable in the context in which you find yourself, then you might be more vulnerable to overusing the role power that you have available to you or shrinking back and becoming victimized by a circumstance you believe is too much for you. And we want to avoid either of those two things.

It's useful to have a strong sense of being capable. And the last thing I'd say here about this, Vinay, is when I'm working with groups teaching power, often I ask them to reflect on when they've used some of the other powers that we mention in the podcast. So I ask them whenever you use the power of the collective or the network, or whenever you use your sense of having character, whenever you use your sense of being able to be attractive and build rapport with others, and I draw their attention to when in fact they have used these powers. And that gives them an increased sense of, oh, I can do it again. And in that workshop, what I often do then is I say, now bring to mind a dilemma that confronts you.

And let's apply one of these powers right now to how you might address it. And that's a great exercise. And it's just all about building a sense, a building a capable self. Yeah. And that's what we're on about.

We're on about empowering people, both on a personal level, organizational role level, because empowerment is good, using your power well and wisely and effectively is beneficial to yourself and beneficial to others. So this is one of the foundations, the sense that I can have an impact on other people. And sometimes people sort of shy away from that. Maybe particularly, let's say, for example, if someone's an introvert, they may have less sense if they're capacity to have an impact. Although actually introverts sometimes have a stronger impact because they have a sort of quietness about them and they're not making a lot of noise so that when they make a contribution or when they come forward, they tend to be more noticed.

There's a book called The Introverted Manager which, you know, discusses these type of things. You don't just have to be a bouncing extrovert to have a sense of your own power. Yeah. I love the book's introversion and an extroversion. And it's been a great support to me actually, having, you know, declaring my preference for introversion.

It's been a great asset. And perhaps that brings us to the second capacity. Well, I mentioned something there. Yes, the aware self. The aware self.

The aware self? Yeah. So I'll just say about the aware self, it helps us answer this question. Do you want to agree, am I aware of the thoughts and feelings that are running through my head? What triggers those thoughts and feelings?

And to what degree can I consciously direct my mind to the object of choice? So these are the two key parts of aware self. You know, sometimes when I'm working with people and I'll ask them, does your mind, you have trouble keeping track holding your focus on one thing, but you dash from one thing to the other. And there what that person is lacking is a low aware self, unable to become meta to their own mind, observe where it's going, what's triggering that, and then being able to consciously focus it in the chosen direction. That's aware self.

And as you can tell, it's at a level deeper than capable self, capable self being, how can I am I confident to what degree can I, do I believe I can have an impact on the outer world, get traction on something, move something along, that's an outer world kind of measure of personal power. Now we come in one layer and we ask ourselves, to what degree do I have a sense of my own mind? Am I aware what's triggering my fears, my anxieties, and can I focus my mind consciously? You're going to mention something there. Yeah, well, it reminds me of a current popular arena, which is mindfulness.

It's certainly popular in wider society. It's popular in psychology arena. And of course it derives from an originally spiritual source. So in a way, it sounds like what we're talking about is a sort of a mindfulness, the capacity to not just self-reflect, but to be kind of aware at a deeper level, rather than sort of being driven by our impulses to be able to, as you say, take a meta perspective and stand with them. Now my concern is that talking about this might sound a bit abstract or a bit idealistic, and I certainly want to point out that this discussion of the aware self is not something that you've got to be an advanced mindfulness practitioner to be able to achieve.

In fact, in my area, Gestalt Therapy, the core practice that we use is awareness. And it's not like I say some sort of transcendent awareness. It's a very simple awareness, very grounded, present-centered awareness, such as, what do you feel in your body right now? Because that's the most grounded place or what you're aware of as you look out the window. Like these questions, draw people's attention to their present awareness and away from often the spinning thoughts that go on.

So, in a psychotherapeutic process, we're very interested in drawing people into their own aware self, because within that lies the kind of empowerment that people are seeking in terms of the problems in their life. That's certainly been my experience and my practice. Yes, my personal experience as well. I thank you for saying that. It's not abstract.

It's a very doable, actionable strategies that... we can engage in to build our aware self, this second critical component of personal power. In fact, one of the exercises I sometimes do with corporate groups for now when I'm looking to assist them to build aware self is I asked them this particular set of questions. They're straightforward really, but I asked them to consider, when was a time that you had rank in the room? You were elevated, you were in a role that had authority, but you felt really frustrated, exasperated, upset.

And so those two things were going together. You had some authority, but you felt in effect powerless by virtue of your feelings of frustration and exasperation. And then I asked the question, so what did you do at that moment as an expression of your feelings of frustration? And often what we discover is the manager in that case became either very harsh, or just unilaterally stopped a group conversation, or withdrew altogether from the conversation and just went elsewhere. Sometimes they just get up and walk out of the room.

And then I'll say, okay, so now we're getting to be aware of, and I'll ask them by the way, what triggered the feelings of frustration? Then I ask them, what did they do as a result of those feelings? And then I say, so what impact might have your behavior had on those who are less senior than you? What were you modeling? What were you teaching them?

What were you telling them was the rules of the game here? And that's when they're often say, oh, wow. So I just got momentarily upset about something, blew my steam off, and then I just felt better and we just went on with the meeting. But an actual fact, what they're lacking awareness until we do this exercise is what triggered my upset? And what's the impact of those behaviors I chose, especially when I had more freedom to act as a senior person?

Yeah, we've been talking previously about awareness of impact, and this is part of the personal dimension of this awareness. And without this personal awareness, the sense of knowing yourself and aware of yourself in relationship, then when you operate through the lens of a role power, it can become quite distorted as you point out. And I think another aspect of this personal awareness is being aware of your limitations. Now you mentioned 360 before the Diamond Power Index is one way to do that, but of course there's many different types of 360 processes now. And the point of them is basically to help people become more aware, more aware of their strengths, more aware of their limitations.

So really what we're talking about here is a particular kind of self-knowledge. You have actually the more power you have. It's not just about feeling confident and I can do things. It's also a sense of, yeah, where is it that I find difficulty? Where is it I need support?

Where do I need to get input? Or where do I just come up against my own personal ceiling or something like that? These are the kind of things we're interested in psychotherapy exploring. And they're equally relevant as you say to these managers who might not have reflected on that before. So your questions elicit that kind of awareness.

Yeah. Yes. I just want to pick up. I love what you've just said there. Understanding what triggers our rambling thoughts and sometimes our surging feelings is very powerful.

And it lifts our game and it gives us way more options in the world. And it's a critical part of being personally powerful. Yeah, it's great. Exactly. So let's move on to the third one.

Purposeful self. Yeah. What can you say about that? Purposeful self. So I consider this to be the final deepest part of the three parts of personal power.

I imagine them as a kind of concentric circles or spheres within spheres. Purposeful self is our sense of optimism, our sense that we can get up again after falling. The sense of confidence we have that we can recover after the inevitable hiccups that life brings. The more we want to do in life, the more we want to realize our potential. We are going to have bigger and bigger problems.

They're not going to get smaller. They're probably going to get bigger. And the question posed here is, can we see our lives beyond the immediate hiccup, beyond the horrible failure that we've had in that meeting that we ran or that client that we worked with or whatever we did? To see the bigger arc of our lives and to see our hiccups in the context of a much bigger life purpose. And that gives us a kind of a meta quality to the things that happen that are upsetting and problematic when we think we've failed.

But in actual fact, our hiccup on a bigger, bigger life arc meaning. And here I encourage people to consider, what is my bigger life arc? What am I doing here? What's my quest? What do I want to provide in this life?

And then in doing so, we build that purposeful self and we build resilience for now. It means we build the capacity to get up again after the small failings we experience from one week to the next. Yeah, it sounds a bit like a version of an organizational vision. Like a personal vision and mission and vision. The thing that keeps us going, the long term perspective, as you say, that can mean when we fall over, we see ourselves going somewhere.

So there's a great deal of empowerment in holding that kind of vision. And certainly there's something called the vision quest which is derived from native tribes or shamanistic sources where sometimes there's a right of passage or something that a person might do when they come to some difficulty or trauma in their life that they'll be sent out on this vision quest. So they go out into the desert or something in nature and they'll go out with very little food and they'll kind of fast and just sort of be present in nature and with themselves. And there's some sort of vision that they get that comes out of that. So that's part of the notion of, yeah, what is our vision?

Not just plotting a long day by day going for the paycheck or something. Power, personal power comes from having something much more profound. There's a lot of indicators of health too that say that when people have that greater sense of mission and purpose in their life, they're happier and they're healthier in the long run. Yes, there's a whole bunch of studies on well-being suggest that clarifying one's bigger purpose has a ripple effect across the well-being of your life. And your capacity to realize your own dreams.

And I like you have done a lot of work and I reflect routinely on what's really important in my life and it's what I'm doing now, line up with that. One of my quest in life is to enable those who experience power in their roles to be able to use it more consciously to bring others, more freedom, more dignity, more growth. And that's why I'm here with you because I know you share a similar life purpose. And it invigorates the task we do with something deeper, values that we hold really deep that then infuse into the day-to-day actions that we're doing. And this is very important part of being personally powerful.

Yes, so I guess there might be some people listening that say, well, it's all very well for you too. You've got your careers, your consultants, you're obviously doing what you enjoy doing. But what about people who are stuck in a job that they don't really enjoy or with a boss who's not that fantastic or dead-end career or something, or they're there because that's their original degree, but it's not really their interest. So people in that position might say, well, this all sounds very wonderful, but how does that relate to my life? I'm just here to get by kind of thing and do the best I can.

And managers, especially middle-level managers, might also feel the same. So I guess it's important that we speak to that too. And it makes me think a bit of the work of Victor Frankall, who's very well known. Jewish psychiatrist who wrote a book about his experiences in concentration camp in the Second World War, man search for meaning has never been out of print since, whenever it was printed in 1947. He also examines this kind of question of meaning and purpose from an existential point of view.

And what he says is that even in circumstances which are difficult or restricted, that it's still possible to find that sense of meaning and purpose. And in fact, that's what he observed was the difference between people who survived in those very hard conditions and people who didn't, is that they had some sense of meaning and purpose, even amidst the terrible reality that was surrounding them. It's not just about comfortable white middle class men who don't seem to have certain kind of challenges that other people from other demographics or the country might have talking about this. I think it can be relevant for anyone in any kind of circumstance, no matter how difficult or how limited, that it is possible to find a set of values that drive you. And what Frankl pointed out is that sometimes it's not so much external values, it's more internal values, it's how you might contribute to the world around you.

And so even in a relatively uninspiring job, the way that you interact with the people around you or how you bring something to the clients, these can constitute a sense of meaning and purpose on a smaller scale, but still kind of meaningful. Yeah, fabulous. You know, in my life, I'm in my mid 60s now, but for many years I was just working hard, doing what I felt was adding value. And at the same time, paying, trying to pay down a mortgage. So I think there is a lot of meaning that can be made from that kind of stage in one's life.

It's a very noble thing to want to just provide for yourself and for your family if that's indeed what you're doing. And I encourage people and I've coached many people over the years who've got stuck in their careers just in the way that you've described who are kind of laboring their way through one day after the other. And one of the things that we cover is the nobility of what they are doing. And we look for meaning in where they are. That there is really excellent and admirable aspects of the situation they're in.

Like I am working and earning. And I'm providing for myself, or my autonomous, or perhaps for my family as well. And then from after honoring that, we then go on to say, let's see if we can discover more about what might deeply motivate you with some of the values that are present, that may have been actually present since you were even little that had been taking shape in your life. And then we begin the journey in one small way after the other of shaping their life increasingly around those deeply held values. Exactly.

And it's an honorable, it's a wonderful journey and it won't happen overnight. But there are small ways in which we can do that. Just down to how do I spend my weekend time? Who do I give these resources to? Who shall I spend my time with?

I think they're very worthwhile questions. And I ask those questions routinely. It was only two nights ago I sat down journaling for the day and I asked myself these two very famous questions, one after the other. The first question, the first thing is, I'm, imagine you get two phone calls. The first phone call is to tell you that you've just inherited from some loss aunt or uncle 20 million dollars.

Like, what? The second phone call is to tell you that you have contracted an incurable rare cancer and it will take your life in 10 years. So then you ask the question, what would you do now? And just two nights ago I sat up in bed and I wrote out everything that I would do in that circumstance and then I aligned that to how I'm filling my next seven days. And it's just a way of deepening my personal, sorry, personal power, particularly purposeful self.

Yeah, and that's a great example. Yeah, yeah. And also I'm in another hat that I have. I'm a career coach. I have a career coaching system.

And I'm also engaged with people who do want to change their career and do something different in their workplace and perhaps in a completely different direction and I help people make that kind of decision, I call it career decision coaching. So that is also, I guess, another possibility is to, you know, if people ask those two questions they might indeed say, well, actually I do something completely different. And, you know, there's actually a number of career authors who have very much inspired me. One of them is a woman called Barbara Scher, she died about 10 years ago, a very, very wonderful woman, had the honor of meeting her and learning something from her. And she's written some great books.

I recommend any of these books because she's a very ordinary person. She was a sole parent with a couple young children living in New York, you know, she hasn't, they come from some high flying position. So what she writes about is very, very realistic, very gritty. And at the same time, very encouraging people to really open up a sense of possibility with what they're doing with their life and to step outside their blinkers of what they've been told is possible or what they've believed is possible. And to consider enormous, you know, opportunities that kind of they might otherwise go, no, that's too much or that's too impossible.

So yeah, I very much recommend her books for this purpose to think about how your life and your work might be aligned to this greater sense of purpose. I love hearing you say that. I feel inspired just hearing it. And it reminds me sometimes in the work I do around these three aspects of personal power from Dr. Julie Diamond.

I ask the question, okay, so if I built my capable self or if I just allowed myself to experience momentarily, myself as being more capable than perhaps what I might on your every day moment. And then in that context, how might that enrich my vision for my purposeful self? And so I fold them in on one another and enrich each one by doing that. And so it's they can be folded in and overlapped, routinely woven together to deepen this sense of personal power. And when we have that personal power, we are less vulnerable to misusing power in other ways in our workplace because most misuses of power are derived from anybody, including me or you or anybody else when we are really lacking the experience of being personally powerful.

Exactly. And that leads me actually, if I might just mention it, I think the fundamental goal of personal power really is to be able to choose your state and not just have it thrust upon you by external circumstance. So to choose your state and to take action out of that chosen state, that is the quintessential outcome of building personal power. And that is life changing. Can we, when we encounter great challenges, avoid being caught up in feeling victimized or overpowered or just held ransom by a mind that can't control itself or completely dominated in our thinking by the failures that we experience in one day and the next when we're losing the big picture?

Can we overcome that and that's what personal power is? Yeah. And I think of some input from NLP which talks about changing state and the possibilities of doing that. There's some very interesting techniques which allow you to change state. And I remember the one I first learned NLP very long time ago in the 1980s, one of the things we were taught was to use what they call an anchor for a change of state.

So they were preparing us to give a public talk and they're saying, you need to change a state from your normal kind of relaxed or kind of casual self to kind of higher energy and you can fuel your spine straight and you're breathing more fully and you're allowing your energy to move to your body. You've got to move to a different state. So what our trainer did is she said choose something that is an anchor as they call it a little trigger. And for me it was just sort of like kind of gently slapping the side of my knee. And I use that ever after when I was stepping into like a big meeting or an important meeting or big event, I just do that.

Touch the side of my knee and I feel myself moving into that state. It was like a switch which went on. So there's some great techniques on that front. I was also thinking about the normal Vincent Peel and the power positive thinking as kind of over 100 years old now. So there's some interesting research which I think you and I will go into at another point.

However, I want to mention it here in terms of the personal power. And there's a lot of research been done on power. Mostly there's sort of experimental settings where they do things like what they call a power prompt. They say imagine that you have a lot of money or imagine that you're the boss and then they observe people's behavior in different circumstances or they answer questions or something just based on these prompts which are like sort of personal empowerment. They're kind of your own mental shift.

And what they observe as both of us have read is that these small shifts, these little imaginative pieces actually change people's behavior quite dramatically and observably and consistently. So it's quite amazing just how much this sort of sense of personal power, even if it's just imagined, even if you just imagine yourself more powerful than you are, it's not just a kind of a silly fantasy that these things actually do influence us in the way that we actually then behave in the world. Yes, absolutely. And you know, as Dr. Joe D'Spenza says, and others have said, change your state, change your life.

And if we can, and in fact this is one of the primary messages really in the whole 42 years of Tony Robbins' work, is the power of state management. And as it turns out, it is really at the essence of building personal power is to be able to choose your state, to change your state when it's no longer useful to you. The state, when a state no longer lines up with the outcomes that you want to create, then it's useful to literally change your state. That can be done simply by imagining something. As you've just said, it's just a game that we play to enable us to come into the state which most supports us in our chosen goal, in our chosen behavior, the one that's going to enable us to be as effective, as compassionate, as fair, as we want to be in any circumstance.

And I think personal power is just at the essence of that. And in fact, maybe if we suggest the last couple of things that I could mention on this for now, in my working with many people over the years, I've come to conclude that there are two supplementary beliefs that people entertain which seem to support a sustainably, a sustained high personal power. And the two beliefs that I've identified in those who've actually been measured to have very, to use power beautifully are this. The first one is that life is inherently good and that I can find a benevolent, intelligent hand in it. That life is here to support me in my growth.

my becoming and that those who exercise higher personal power seem to cultivate that belief over time. That life is inherently good, that it is orientated toward me in a benevolent fashion. And that's a remarkable belief, I think that's the first and the second is this, that I am inherently worthwhile. That even though I might do bad things from time to time, my worth is not based on just a superficial read of my behaviors that I have worth that's beyond that, that I'm valuable and worthwhile. And that each human being that I interact enjoys that same profound sense of value.

And those two beliefs seem to support the practices of building personal power. And I cultivate them in my benetations, I actively put myself in a state where I believe and where I'm entertaining the notion that life is here to support me in my becoming. And I routinely take on that posture in a meditation and then relook at my life and wonder what's possible now. So I try to hear that and it sort of takes us in what you could call a more spiritual direction but not necessarily direction, some sort of, yeah, even belief in a higher power, but some belief nevertheless or faith you could say in the universe, as you often refer to it these days, that it is a kind of synchronicity despite suffering, despite things that happen towards that are terrible and damaging and painful and tomorrowizing. It's part of that purposeful self in even larger things that even larger purpose to all of this.

That can also indeed be a source of empowerment. I think these beliefs seem to be useful. You see, I'm speaking to the utility of them as opposed to whether they're actually always true. What I notice is I'd rather not ask the question, is it true it is it not? I'm saying actually these beliefs seem to be highly effective to enable me to live well and to be effective in my life, so I choose those beliefs.

Yeah. Fantastic. Well, I guess that's a good place to live it for today. Thanks very much. I always stimulating and enjoyable discussion with you.

Thank you very much. Thank you too. Cover the ground today of personal power. There's a lot more we can say about it, but this is I think a very good introduction. We'll see everybody next time.

See you next time. Bye. Bye.