The Secret to Experiencing True Power

As a high schooler, I was in the marching band.??I did not play a musical instrument but rather I joined the Color Guard as a “Rifle”.??(There was probably some other more complete, descriptive term for it, but that’s what we called ourselves and were called by others: the “Rifles”.)???

With one hand, and while marching, my job as a Rifle was to spin a piece of wood carved and painted to look like its namesake.?

But the Big Show in the Rifle world was the toss, where we spun and flung the rifle into the air so that it circulated up to five times before it was to land in our hands, easily locking into a horizontal position with a satisfying snap.??

The rifle toss required a perfect release from the left wrist, with your arm at the correct angle, and you needed to take into account wind strength and direction.??And sometimes you tossed it while on the run—a rigid-backed, pointed-toe, gazelle-like run.???So, in starting your toss, you had to?anticipate where your feet would be when you planned on catching it.??A wooden rifle landing on your head coming down from a failed toss was painful, and a fairly regular, if not frequent, occurrence.

(If you were up to cooler things in high school, check out?this video?to show you what being a Rifle is supposed to entail.? And?this one?will show you what it was really like, most days.)?

You know, in retrospect, that was a really hard hobby...

It took a lot of practice and growing up, my approach to a challenge was to beat it into submission.?

So on hot summer afternoons, I would go to the backyard with my rifle, practice through finger-jamming incidents and blood vessel-breaking accidents, and sometimes tears.??

My forty-something self wonders, why didn’t I just take a break???

How much more successful could I have been, and more quickly, if I had just lightened up on myself, taken frequent breaks, and enjoyed what I had become capable of along the way????

It’s a natural reaction to tense up when we aren’t getting what we want.??But that tension generally results in less of what we want, not more.??This principle applies in a number of ways.??

It applies at work when you are completing a challenging task. Or to a relationship with a “difficult” colleague.

It applies in sports, where we do better when we relax into the motions.

And it applies as we navigate our way through our world of unrest and instability.

We fare better when we release tension and decrease force.??

True power comes in an eyes-wide-open understanding of the reality you are in, and releasing your grip on a particular outcome. And it makes for a more enjoyable ride, along the way.