A letter from Wendy

Hey all
It's time I started blogging again. My hope is that you will send me questions and comments to give me some interesting new ideas to blog about. Recently I got this email from Wendy:

I have been intrigued by questions about interpersonal power since I was about 10 or so and started noticing peer pressure--my influence on peers and theirs on each other. I was stubborn and resisted peer pressure when I was aware of it but was not always successful and gave in sometimes. As I got older I found myself having less and less influence with others (where I used to have a lot) and found myself the target of nitpicky criticism and rudeness and verbal abuse I couldn't seem to put a stop to. (mostly from peers, some from authority figures.) I didn't start having any real trouble with authority figures until my late teens and early 20s-- and even then over petty things. Authority figures just weren't as automatically nice to me as they had been when I was a kid. As a young adult, I really felt a lack of power: I was socially rather isolated and felt like I had to placate my peers, and had meaner bosses than ever before, and had a fear of losing a job, and i had no other means of support. This was hard to deal with as I had formed aspirations of pursuing political or professional power while I was growing up, and i found I had no platform to start from whatsoever.



My scenario: Question to follow


A moderately recent example of a power play from another person happened about 5 years ago when I first started graduate school and was a TA. I was 35 years old, and a fellow TA who was good friends with the professor was in her early 20s. She seemed overtly overconfident and gave the rest of us on the team orders which the other two TAs accepted meekly. (both were close to her age--one was a friend her age, one was an international student in her mid 20s.) I answered her back and got a dirty look, and ignored her command from then on. I was never told she was in charge, the prof was overtly hands off because he didn't want to be bothered, and I had no support from the other two TAs who were meekly willing to take orders from this girl. So I pretty much acted alone most of that semester, and the professor told us at the end of the semester how disappointed he was with us as a team. (no thanks to him.) I was flatly puzzled by the assumption this young lady made about the power she just assumed she had over her coworkers.

I would like to know any thoughts you have about the power scenario I described above. My question: Where does that kind of presumption come from? Was there anything in my personal demeanor or conduct which might have encouraged someone else to act "bossy" towards me?

Wendy from New York

Wendy: Thank you so much for your email. :)

I hope to start blogging regularly again and the best way to pick a topic to blog about is through questions from interested people. You have provided me with a dandy question. It will let me address your experience from a number of perspectives. It will let me reveal a number of insights.

Many people become fascinated with the idea of power and the interpersonal dynamics of control, influence and seduction. For me, it has been a lifelong obsession. I have spent great amounts of time analyzing my experiences and clarifying my thoughts. Some of my friends and family think I have spent too much time on this one idea. 

As a college professor I have been able to share these ideas with hundreds of students who seem to find my course on power to be life changing. So I consider myself lucky to indulge my obsession while responding to your interesting question.

The quest to understand this thing we call power often begins with triggering events. Usually such an event leaves us feeling powerless. Deep down we feel that we are not in control of our life. We feel like someone else has too much influence over us. We feel angry, afraid or confused. We hate this feeling.

The idea that we do not control our lives is hard to accept. The result is often despair and a sense of incompetence – worthlessness - emptiness. Although sometimes the feelings are not so intense, they are nonetheless of the same vibration and we question our own ability.

It is amazing how power finds its way into our lives.

Your story reflects just such an event. Your colleague tried to take control. You tried to take it back. Neither of you got the recognition you hoped for and the situation was left unsatisfied.

I am going to suggest to you that power dynamics always work out this way in the end.
But I am getting ahead of myself.

I think there are fundamentals that we need to cover before we get into the analysis. Once the fundamentals are understood, the analysis comes easy. Easy, but never simple. 

First let us be clear about the people involved. There are individuals or groups of people who try to use power for their benefit. For simplicity we will call them Actors. Actors will use power to impact a particular person or group of people. We will call such a mark, the Subject. No one is always an Actor or a Subject. We waffle back and forth between the roles all the time. And, as I will explain, we are usually both Actor and Subject at the same time in a power dynamic. But let’s use these names for our players as we try to describe the dynamic.


Actors use power for a reason. They always have an agenda. There is something that they want or need. It is the pursuit of this need that drives them to look to the Subject for satisfaction.

I have always said that power is the way we change a human being into a tool to be used for a purpose. I really like the words of Ekhart Tolle in his book the Power of Now.

Power is the process by which we reduce a person to a means to an end rather than an end in themselves.

We need to open up to the idea that Power is not a thing. Nor is it an event. Power is not an ability. Power is a mechanical process which attempts to create an experience.

The experience we attempt to create in another person is one of control, influence or seduction. Many people like to see these experiences as different. But I suggest, we create these experiences using the same technique and they should be considered different experiences of the same thing – power.

Now we have to deal with semantics.
We need to use words in similar ways with common meanings so we can move this discussion forward.

People like the idea of power. They consider every action to be personal power. But we must differentiate between power and ability. They are deeply related but they are distinct and should not be confused.

To have power is not the same as to have an ability. We like to think we have the power to walk out of the room or the power to stop reading this blog. But that is not power. That is ability. Power always implies and includes another person or persons. Abilities are personal and are part of what we can do. Abilities have a role to play in power. I will explain it shortly. But power – that is the experience of control, influence or seduction - is something someone tries to create in someone else.
Now I suppose you can use the words any way you want. We all like to think of ourselves as powerful. We all like to see power as a part of who we are. But my desire is to change this horrendous meme. I think not recognizing the difference between power and ability leads to confusion. More important, it makes being a Subject all the more upsetting.

I believe that this confusion makes it hard to answer a very simple question: is power a good thing or a bad thing? But once again, I am ahead of my self…

...a little more tomorrow...