The New Rules of Power

In the hundreds of interviews I’ve conducted with WOC, most women I’ve met no longer want to play the 'old game' of power - one based on scarcity and competition. When I ask the women I interviewed about power they would recoil or have an adverse reaction. Even in my posts here, I've noticed that many people don’t want to talk about power. To many, even the word has a negative connotation, and people associate it with oppression and exploitation. The ‘old power’ ideals and models failed us as we faced a global health pandemic in 2020, and opened up the conversation around equity and access. But I believe we can’t shy away from power, we need to embrace it and remake it.

Power has only looked one way for a long time. Just look at Machiavelli's The Prince or, more recently, The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. The 'kill or be killed' mentality is outdated and runs counter to how a large majority of people operate in the world, especially WOC. The Women of Color I met are not gathering power for power’s sake. For us, like success, true power is power shared—meaning once we reach the top, we use that status to either send the elevator back down or to ensure that others don’t have to struggle as hard as we did to arrive to that seat.?

Image credit: The Cut

Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term 'intersectionality' in 1989, said it well when she said:

“It’s not about supplication, it’s about power. It’s not about asking, it’s about demanding. It’s not about convincing those who are currently in power, it’s about changing the very face of power itself.”

I believe we can redefine power and do away with these specious notions of how it has been wielded in the past. Because we, as WOC, have a broad perspective and unique vantage point, we can begin to write new rules of power that work for us.?

Here are some initial suggestions that I laid out in my book:

Rule 1: Power and safety are coupled, and the leaders we gravitate toward should make us feel less guarded. How do you lead with this characteristic?

Rule 2: Power is personal. We should lead with aspects of ourselves that feel most powerful to us. Many WOC have been navigating systems and processes that take power from us to feel powerful. We need to go inside first.

Rule 3: Power can be used for good. We need to think of collecting power for good. Maybe then more of us will step into visible and sometimes broken seats of power.

Rule 4: Nothing about what exists can’t be changed. We get to remake power if current approaches and definitions don’t work for us. We don’t have to just accept what we have been taught about power or do it in the way it has been done before.

This is a more abstract topic, but these are the conversations we need to have as we lay the groundwork for making work work for everyone. To evolve structures and systems, we need to rethink power. We need to redefine it and embrace it differently.

Here are some questions to consider:

• How do we take our power back?
• How do we find power in systems that weren’t made for us and don’t see us?
• How do we step into seats of power and do power differently?

I would love to hear your thoughts and what you might add to these new rules!

I’m grateful for all of the reviews that many of you have left for The First, The Few, The Only - like this one!?

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