Steve Pavlina's Principle #3: Power

This is the third post in the series where I share one of Steve Pavlina's 7 Principles of conscious growth in each post for a total of 7, and also an introductory and concluding post to sum up all that I shared. As a reminder, these are the principles as viewed through my experience of them, and might not be a completely accurate interpretation of what Steve had in mind, even though I'm sure I'm quite close to what he intended to say. Please keep that in mind, especially those who are big fans of his.

In the last 2 posts I wrote about Truth and Love, and in this post I'll write about the 3rd principle, that of Power, the ability to create our reality in the way we choose to create it. 

When we exercise the principle of Power in our lives, there is an undeniable feeling of flow to it. The experiences we have are mostly of our choosing, without having to succumb to activities, places, or people that aren't compatible with us. Perfection isn't the objective here because that is unrealistic, but getting closer to expressing our fullest power is.

Power in this case isn't the dirty word that people sometimes associate it with in terms of controlling other people and manipulating them to do things they'd rather not do. This is a much more conscious way of looking at the concept of power, and it is the power that we must exercise over ourselves to achieve our dreams and desires.

There are 6 components of power as described by Steve: responsibility, desire, self-determination, focus, effort, and self-discipline.

Let's look at each one of these in more detail:

Responsibility reminds us of the first principle of Truth. To exercise Power, we must first unconditionally accept complete responsibility of our lives. No one external, whether it's a boss, friend, spouse, or a higher being is to be held responsible, blamed, or held accountable for the results that we have produced until now. We all have produced results, through our own action, whether deliberate or not, results in our health, fitness, work, career, money, finances, spiritual beliefs, and no matter how good or bad they might seem, we have to accept responsibility for them. Further change in any of these areas are 100% our responsibility, and until we accept this we can't properly exercise our personal Power.

"Desire is the fuel of power" is the sentence that starts off this sub-section of the chapter and I believe that one of the reasons that we are on this Earth is to make our desires come true. As you know, some desires are already programmed into us, such as the desire to eat, breath, sleep, and drink water. We don't have much choice in those matters, and we have to do them to stay alive. But we have higher drives and desires as well that must be acknowledged: those which encourage us to exercise our creativity over the long-run to become experts at what we're naturally inclined to do, for instance. Our true desires are those that stir strong positive emotion in us and make us feel good to pursue them. False desires come from societal programming and don't usually fulfill us in the long run. Tuning into our true desires and making them a reality is what the principle of Power is all about.

Self-Determination is responsibility with purpose. You are the one that calls all the shots in your life, and you decide exactly what you want to do. This means making decisions even when there is no guarantee of success, and even when failure is a very likely option. Self-determination ensures that you exercise your responsibility boldly and without and hesitation no matter what the outcome, in all areas of your life. Your Power increases as a result.

Focus is realizing the fact that we can only exercise our power in the present moment. We cannot exercise our power outside of this present moment if we really think about it. The past and the future aren't real. What happened in the past happened in the now, what will happen in the future will happen in the now. Focus enables us to concentrate on exactly what's happening in the here and now and not succumbing to thinking about the past and the future more than this very moment.

A  very common goal-setting mistake is to set big goals for the future and then forgetting the fact that it's our present moment reality that goal-setting is supposed to improve. The focus on the long, arduous road full of obstacles is not what the purpose of goal-setting is, but rather to help us focus on the tasks here and now and ensure that our current actions bring us joy, even if that means exercising some effort.

Effort is the next component of power. No real surprise here. Since Power is about taking action, effort is required. Notice, however, that Power comes after Truth and Love, and under Power, the component of Effort comes only after 4 others. This increase the chances, even though it doesn't guarantee it, that you don't fall into the trap of taking lot of massive action on a set of haphazard goals that you have no interest in but you decided to work on because you didn't know about the component of self-determination. You choose what you want to work on, even if that choice means that you choose to work for somebody else.

If you're chronically feeling unmotivated to take action on your goals you most likely have set the wrong goals to being with. Success takes hard work, a lot of it, but when aligned with the principles of Truth and Love, and with the preceding components of Power, that effort shouldn't feel like an uphill battle at all times. Sometimes, though, even when we set intelligent goals to being with, we will face an uphill battle especially at the beginning, but to rescue us from this plight comes the final component which is self-discipline.

Self-discipline is the ability to take action regardless of our emotions, problems, setbacks, and roadblocks. Once we have accepted responsibility for ourselves, acknowledged and owned our desires, put self-realization into perspective, focused on our tasks at hand, and exercised consistent effort towards making our desires a reality, the final step is making sure that self-discipline is on board to see us through to the end.

Motivation starts the race, but self-discipline ultimately crosses the finish line.

Self-discipline gives us that second-wind wind to press on when the going gets tough, and is there to remind us why we set our goals in the first place when the lazy, unfocused, and fearful part of ourselves wants to take over and run the show thereby causing us to lose sight of the end. Like a muscle, self-discipline grows with use and atrophies with lack of it. Think of it as a muscle that needs to be regular worked out to become stronger.

The above are the 6 components of Power and those aligned with the sub-components of Truth and Love provide a powerful primary framework for any sort of human development, whether professional or personal. To learn more about the Principle of power from the perspective of now exercising your power deliberately, you can read Steve's 2 blog posts on Abuse of Power, and How to Give Your Power Away.

The next post will be on the first (of the four) secondary principle of Oneness, a combination of the primary principles Truth and Love. The other ones are Authority, Courage, and Intelligence.

Your feedback on this content, whether positive or negative, is most welcome. Please don't hesitate to share your thoughts. This article was also posted on the www.ccmasterminds.com blog. If you're interested in learning more about creating 4-5 person mastermind groups geared towards holistic lifestyle development towards self-mastery, please email me at [email protected] or through the LinkedIn messenger. I'm very interested in those who already mastermind with others or are interested in it.