Facilitating a MasterClass the other day opened up an important thought – we can use each of our powers for evil – even our personal power. We have access to five sources of power – positional, expert, opportunity, referent and personal. We explored how you use each of these for good and for evil.
Personal power is your personal brand – where you come from a place of strength- aligning and igniting values, personality preferences and what you stand for with how you behave. Now sometimes we can go into overuse of our strengths to an extent that we judge others against our values. For example – my top five strengths taken from Martin Seligmans Character Strengths Survey are: gratitude; bravery; authenticity and honesty; zest,enthusiasm and energy; and capacity to love and be loved. Recently I went into overdrive as a client took action that I perceived went against each of my values – and I could feel myself going into overuse of each of these strengths. To have accessed my personal power too early would have been destructive – I would have used it for evil. Here is how that would have played out:
Gratitude: I have invested so much time in making their development program brilliant and they are taking me for granted – there is a lack of gratitude for what I have done
Bravery: they have not had the courage to come and talk to me about their decision
Honesty and authenticity: what about engaging in a real conversation and being honest with me
Zest, enthusiasm and energy: has been ripped out of me by their actions
Capacity to love and be loved: I do not feel like my care has been reciprocated.
This would have been me using my personal power for evil!!
Do yourself a favor and invest some thinking into how you access each of your sources of power – for good and for evil – and I would love to hear your stories.
