Understanding Personal Power

What is power?

Power is the capacity to do things,  or to make things, to change things, or to make things happen.

There are several ways of exercising personal power.

1. Acting on things: making things, controlling things, changing things, destroying things.

2. Influencing others: reproduction of human life, contributing to the survival or well-being of others, controlling or manipulating the behaviors of others, persuading others, sharing with others, motivating others, exploiting others, restricting others, destroying others.

3. Directing the self: knowing and understanding, deciding, executing decisions, controlling own thoughts and behaviors, managing own emotions, instincts, and drives, setting strategic goals, achieving intended outcomes, achieving rewards and happiness.

These expressions of power require various resources and abilities. Power over things is the first and easiest type to find and use. The next most difficult type of power we can have is the power to influence others. The most challenging form of power to achieve is power over self, since this is having power over the thing that generates and controls all the other types of personal power.

Power over the self therefore becomes the most important form of personal power human can have. Yet this seems to be the most difficult power to achieve.

There are parts of ourselves that we do not see or cannot control. We don’t consciously control our autonomic biological functions. We have little control over our physical bodily reflexes and our instinctive emotional reactions. Yet, there are other parts of ourselves that we can control but may not be aware that we can, like our thoughts, our knowledge, our beliefs, our meanings, and our values.

Then there are conflicts  within ourselves. There are drives, and wants, and urges, and instincts, that we follow, even when our thoughts and understandings and beliefs are not aligned with them. There are internal power struggles, and divergent ideals, ideas, methods, and goals, and logical disconnects between pursuits and priorities. Sometimes our desires win. Sometimes our intellect wins. Sometimes, neither wins. Sometimes, both win.

One of the most important forms of personal power is the ability to understand and manage these internal conflicts and will ourselves to follow or support the side that is in our overall best interest. This is perhaps the most difficult type of personal power to achieve.

Achieving effective power over the self is the aim of EgoPilot.  EgoPilot is an approach to learning, personal development, and living, that focuses on self awareness, self understanding, and self management, in order to achieve important life goals, by aligning knowledge, thinking, feelings, and actions, to the external and internal realities that actually affect us and determine outcomes.

It is an approach that can help us align internal perceptions and understandings with external realities, so that we can exercise actual power over things and positively influence people in the real world. But that power begins with power over the self, since self is the central agent in all things we do, experience, and affect. Self therefore is the center and source of all personal power and must be understood and well managed if we are to achieve positive outcomes in the world. EgoPilot can help.