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What is Power?

So, what is power? I like this picture of the elephant better. What is power? One thing that I want to elucidate to you a bit is that power has often a negative connotation. When we think of power, what are some of the words that come to your mind immediately when I say power? Greed. Strength. Greed, strength. Anything else? Control. Control, yeah. Influence. Influence. Those are all pretty much synonyms and a lot of people think greed, evil, power, and we think of dominating others when we think of power. Many times throughout this presentation I'm gonna use some esoteric language. I'm going to use some things that might be a little bit kind of out into the clouds and I'll always make sure to bring it back down. You can take this to the bank. But developing your power starts with identifying the things you've been hiding from. Thinking about the things that keep you up at night. Thinking about things that only you know are affecting you. Facing those things head on. And ...

seeing your challenges as a vehicle for your biggest growth. An opportunity for your biggest growth. Not things that necessarily are going to hold you back or make you cry. But things that give you the opportunity to step in to that power. And it's not easy. It's very difficult to confront these areas of our lives that we're not used to talking about. But it's really the path. It's really the only way. And power starts with that realization. I love this quote. It says knowing others is intelligence. Knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power. This is by Lao Tsu, in the Tao Te Ching. And this is a great book. If you guys haven't picked it up you should. The great thing about the Tao is that it's a small collection of fundamental poetry. It's Chinese philosophy. Lao Tsu is or he was, we think he was probably multiple authors. Almost in the way that Shakespeare was now maybe, perhaps a few different people. Or at least a couple different people. An interesting thing about this book is that it really underlines some of the ways that we view the world. And it also talks about opposites. It talks about light and dark, positive and negative. And one of the things you'll find is that when you consider your own power, there is a real difference between power and strength. When you think of power versus strength, what comes to mind? Can anyone maybe think of what the difference might be? Can anyone think of what that might be? What does that mean to you? What's the difference? Effort. Effort, hmm? Yeah effort. Strength really is, you know when you think of yourself being strong. You think of the ability to push a lot of weight. You think of maybe a person at the gym. And they're pushing a lot of weight. It's really heavy. They can complete a lot of exercises and reps in a physical sense. But power is not the same thing as strength is it? Power is actually strength times speed. Power is strength plus precision. In other words, power means control. Power means that your ability to create the results is within your locus of control. A lot of people are strong. And a lot of people can be strong. But being strong doesn't mean you have control of that strength, right? It's not enough just to be able to do a lot of work, you have to be able to control your effort. You have to be able to control your output. You have to be able to control who you're being. And so a lot of us will build up our entire lives around one particular strength. We'll focus on one area of our lives, we'll try to get as good as we can in one area but we'll find other areas of our lives are falling apart. And it's because we're not really developing our power. And remember as you develop your power that your power is directly correlated to your ability to control that power, right? And so you can think of the difference between like let's say a Ferrari and a Ford F-150 right. This is my favorite example. You think of like the zombie apocalypse. And they have all these different Walking Dead clips of the Ford F-150 crashing through a shed and destroying the shed, and the zombies are clinging to it. This is like a classic zombie scene. And the Ford F-150 might be able to knock down the shed. But the Ferrari can stop on a dime. It can create thrust and energy in an instant. And so the Ferrari has true control, right? It's the ability to create force and to create effort, and to create results at will that will make you truly powerful. And you can have all the strength in the world. But if you can't control it, it's not worth anything. It's the same reason why people consider martial artists to be powerful. You see Bruce Lee, and he can start here and he can do a one inch punch that knocks someone back into the ground. You can have a bodybuilder who is much stronger than him, who can lift something really heavy. But he hasn't organized his energy in a way that creates that power. And really when you think about it, power comes down to organization. It's the organization of the energy. So I want you to consider thinking about this. As I use the word power throughout the lecture, think about what that means when it comes to the energy that you're controlling. How much you can organize your energy. How much you can become completely in alignment with everything that comes into your life so that you don't spill out this power. Spill out this energy. Let's talk about what true power gives you the ability to do 'cause we think about the difference between strength and power. We think about the ability to control your energy. What does true power mean? So, true power means that you are able to identify and create the circumstances that you want in your life quickly. This is very important. Many of us spend a lot of our time ruminating and on the treadmill of thought. And although we have these ideas for ourselves, we can't create the circumstances we want in our lives quickly because although we might have strong minds. We might be very smart and intellectual and intelligent, we don't have the power. We haven't developed the power to be able to take our thoughts and turn them into reality. And true power gives you the ability to do that. True power gives you the ability to become financially and creatively fulfilled. This is very important and I made sure to underline the most important tangible aspects of this. When you become powerful, it gives you the ability to fulfill these very tangible aspects of your life. It also gives you the ability to exercise fairness and generosity towards yourself and others. Again taking the example of a martial artist. Martial artists usually are people who are humble, reserved, these are the most dangerous people in the room. There are people that I roll with in jujitsu who look like average people. Who could take my life while doing their taxes at the same time. And they would have no second thought about it. But they wouldn't do that. They're powerful. But they don't have to flex that power. True power doesn't need to be flexed. It's self evident. And it comes with a confidence and a humility that is unto itself. True power gives you the ability to remain balanced and focused, even in uncertain times. As you become more powerful, you'll realize that your ability to interact with challenging circumstances and challenging situations is really dependent on you. A lot of times we walk into a situation when we're still developing ourselves when we're not quite powerful. And we feel the situation pushes us around. Anyone feel like situations in life have pushed you around? You don't have any control? This is a very common way of feeling as we grow up especially. Even as kids, when you're in middle school or high school, even into college. You feel like you have no control of your life. You feel like the situation pushes you around. People who have developed their true power know that they are the one creating their circumstances. Bruce Lee said this. He said circumstances? What circumstances? I create circumstances. That's a mindset of power. True power gives you to overcome the fear of the past and the future. Meaning that as you become more powerful, you won't be scared of the mistakes you made in the past because you can move past them. And you won't be scared of what happens in the future because you know that when you step into a situation, you gonna come completely in yourself, completely aligned with what you want. And what happens outside of you is not within your control but what happens within you is in your complete control. And that gives you the confidence and the strength and the balance to step into a situation. Even when it's uncertain and prosper. And of course, true power gives you the ability to overcome your fear of death. All the way out there. As you become more powerful, you'll start to become less afraid of the things that you don't know about. And I'm confident to say that to you, although I don't want to die today. I'm not hoping to die. I'm not crossing the street at bad times and risking my life. I'm not really afraid to die. And it just means that I've come to a point where what I'm doing, who I'm being, how I'm living, and what I'm communicating with the world is in complete alignment. And so if I were to die, it would be okay because I'm living in complete truth with myself. And that's something that we all have access to. Just having access to the ability to come into alignment with yourself reduces the stress and anxiety of life tenfold because you feel like every moment you're stepping into something that's true and accurate for you. And a lot of times, the reason why we're anxious about dying is because we feel like we're going to die with something inside of us that hasn't been expressed. And as you express that and as you learn to express that on a daily basis, it becomes less scary to think about that day when you're not going to be here anymore. So before we kind of go deeper into the modalities of power, I want to give you my baseline philosophy and perspective on life. 'Cause this is gonna inform how I think about power. How I think about the world and what I think is important for you to think about. I believe that you're not your body, you're not your mind. You are an individual spirit learning and evolving through a rigorous training called every day life. You're an individual unit of collective consciousness that we know exists but cannot name because it's so imperceptible that it escapes language the moment we acknowledge its existence. In other words, your perspective is one frame of reference for the universal consciousness recognizing itself. (breathes deeply) You are an individual spirit learning and evolving through a rigorous training called every day life. Now, if you were to think about life and frame life in a way where you saw it as a rigorous training that was devoted to evolving you, wouldn't that become much more, much easier to deal with than thinking of life as something that just bats you around, something that beats you up, something that's out of your control? If you think of your life as a training and your training is evolving you to a certain point where you will become free and you will become that powerful individual, then it becomes much easier to step into these challenges. And so as you can see, I'm layering on these ideas for you so that you can understand that power allows you to one, take away the anxiety of all the things that happen to you. And two, step into a greater vision for yourself.