Real Power is the degree to which a person has control over their own circumstances. Real Power is the degree to which we control the directions of our lives.
When we allow our thinking, our personality disorders and our mental schemas, combined with their accompanying behaviors, to determine the course of our decisions, we relenquish real Power. The man who succumbs, by force or by will, to the responsibilities, liabilities and accountabilities that are required of him by society, marriage, committment, family, fatherhood, career choice, etc. leaves him very little influence over the course of his own life.
The painter Paul Gaugin is one of history’s most powerful men. At middle age Paul was a “successful” banker, with a wife and children and by all appearances, a man of great merit and considerable wealth. Then one day Paul decided he’d had enough and wanted to paint. He left his wife, children and his money, and decided he would become a painter. He cast off his former life to live the life he chose, he had the power to assume control of it. Eventually he died in Tahiti, but not after having one of the most interesting of lives and becoming a world renowned painter. You may think, what a horrible man he was to abandon his responsibilities to selfishly pursue his own desires, but the fact remains that he had the Power within himself to do so that most men would shudder to even consider. So entrapped are we in our self-expectation and self-imposed limitations that we fail to see that we have always had the keys to our own prisons – we’re just scared shitless to use them.
[ ] It’s this ability to make our own decisions, right or wrong, and to confidently own them that separate us from “other guys.” It’s this self-guided Power that evokes a seemingly irrational confidence to Spin Plates, to assert ourselves and to be unafraid to make ourselves the PRIZE, and it’s just this Power that women want to be associated with.
SNY Ideas 