Power can scare people. I see why. There are so many bad examples of power in the world today: primarily aggressive power and the use of power for personal gain. We shy away from power because we know that we don’t want to embody that version. But if the rest of us reject even the notion of power and don’t take the opportunity to demonstrate power in a better way, what will we be left with: Just one dangerous archetype of power in the world. 

The word power comes from the Latin ‘potere’: to be able. Accepting that you have power is about acknowledging the agency you have in your life (and the world). One of the reasons we don’t like to accept that we have power is that there are consequences to acknowledging this agency. The primary consequence is that we can no longer pretend to be disempowered. Power is not the problem. We all have power. The problem is deciding what we will do with it. We get to choose to be the example of what power can look like in the world. To demonstrate that power can be positive.

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