We Focus on What We Can't Control

We only get out of our power when the problem seems out of our control. When you focus on what you can't control, you leak your power. Your nervous system's resources are redirected toward monitoring incoming information about any potential threats to physical survival or emotional well‐being.

These threat detection parts of your brain are like a Marine sentry on the lookout 24/7/365. When a threat is perceived, the Marine sentry sounds an alarm to begin problem‐solving to cope with it. Our minds are programmed to focus much more on what we can't control in a threatening situation than what we can. Your attention will naturally be pulled to the ways you feel “done to,” assessing the list of factors out of your control.

We have a built‐in follow‐up response, which allows us to get back into a place of safety within, once we learn that the stimuli in the environment are no longer a threat. But when we focus too intently on what we can't control, our attention loops only on the threat. Then the Marine sentry can't signal it's okay to let our guard down.

Our acute sensitivity to such threats was demonstrated by a study done with college students. They were asked to write about interpersonal situations in which they had power over others, then ones in which others had power over them, and then complete a cognitive task. Even a brief experience of being out of one's power—simply by writing about a situation in which they felt powerless for a few minutes—reduced their sense of agency and what they thought they could control.²

When threatened, the brain also filters all incoming information through one question: “How will this affect me?” The survival mechanism of your brain literally sets you up to take things personally. While in early human evolution the threats we had to be alert to were primarily about our physical safety, David Rock, author of Your Brain at Work, highlights that today threats to our status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness (SCARF) are primary.³ We are wired to be social, and we are constantly looking to other people in order to assess how safe we are and how well we are doing. We micro‐track and then interpret other people's behavior. This is especially true if you're in a lower power position; you'll pay greater systematic attention to behavior of the person in the higher power position.⁴

Over time your brain associates this “How will this affect me?” question with the more general question “What does this mean about me?” This leads us to the second factor that derails us from being in our power: a personal subconscious reaction you have to the perceived threat.

We Act Out of an Unresolved Pattern

When you become stuck out of power, it's because there is a personal “hook” that gives the situation a disproportionate effect on you. Your brain associates the current situation with a prior experience that registered strongly with you emotionally, and you perceive the theme is related or being reenacted in the current situation.

Every human has had some—or far too many—experiences that have caused us to feel powerless. In order to try to control and make sense of it, we tried to explain and assign a meaning to it, which will remain as an unresolved source of fear, pain, or self‐doubt unless actively processed. This is like “kindling” inside of our psyches. Other people's actions, or the circumstances we're in, can act like a match that lights it afire. These are triggers, a painful reminder of similarly themed past experiences. They teleport us into a reexperience of powerlessness.

Our kindling leads us to personalize the situation, making it about issues from our past rather than seeing it objectively in the present. This subconscious process elevates the perceived gravity of the current situation as implying something about who you are, beyond the current specifics. We're often unaware of our kindling because it is embedded deeply in our psyche.

For example, let's say a colleague left you off an email chain for a meeting. If you are in your power, you might approach the colleague to discuss the value you could bring to the meeting or why it would be helpful for you to hear what the attendees discuss, and then ask to be included. But if an unresolved pattern gets triggered, you might instead ruminate about how you've been left out, telling yourself, “I'm not respected,” “I'm not smart enough to be invited to the table,” or “They're trying to marginalize me,” fully convinced that's what objectively transpired.

Even though the specifics of the current scenario might differ markedly from the situations you faced earlier in your life, your mind has connected the current and the past events through a chain of associations. Suddenly, a situation has become a referendum on your worth instead of an everyday interaction among flawed humans.

Then here's the clincher: When our kindling has been alighted and we're stuck out of our power, we often look to involve other people in shoring ourselves up. We'll seek their validation and acknowledgment, try to prove ourselves even more, or vent to seek sympathy. We'll hold back to prevent them from criticizing or rejecting us and wait for their permission to boldly do what we know we should. We'll try to please and be perfect in order to not disappoint them. You give away your power trying to change people and circumstances outside of you in order to fix something that is insecure inside of you.

As I introduced in my first book, Success Under Stress, this diagram shows you the visual of how we commonly give our power away. You'll act toward other people (depicted as the arrow up the left‐hand side of the triangle) in order to get other people to act toward you (depicted as the arrow down the right‐hand side of the triangle) so that you can feel secure in yourself. Your time, energy, and attention go toward managing other people's perceptions of you. You outsource your evaluation of yourself to others and overweight their opinions. In short, you involve other people in your own efforts to feel worthy inside. I call these approaches “Indirect.”

With an Indirect approach, it matters how others think and act toward you because you need their input in order to be in your power inside yourself. By setting up a formula where you have to go through others in order to get the thing you need most inside of you, this gives away your power. It sets you up to be the thermometer.

I was the thermometer when I held myself back from an opportunity to make an impact on millions of people's lives because I was worried about what the people around the White House table would think of me.

Indirect behaviors are completely normal. As infants, we are biologically hardwired to seek caring responsiveness from important people in our life. It's the way human babies learn to calm their own nervous system and internalize whether we are worthy of being cared for. Just as we need to breathe in oxygen to grow physically, we must take in “emotional oxygen” from caregivers in order to grow our self‐esteem. As a child grows up, we come to see and know ourselves through the eyes of important others. Our parents’ love and attention, teachers’ evaluation and praise, and peers’ approval and appreciation are the mechanisms by which we come to know ourselves—favorably or not. Similarly, we are hardwired to avoid physical or emotional harm and be afraid of getting “kicked out the tribe.”

In short, important people in our early lives serve as a “secure base,”⁵ and when we have a responsive caregiver, we go to them in order to be safe, soothed, and assured we matter. From this home base we get the fill‐up we need to go conquer the world.

Indirect behaviors start off as adaptive. Because we have learned to know ourselves through others’ eyes and regulate ourselves through others’ input, many of us continue this approach to feeling secure in ourselves in adulthood. What I discovered in my research at Harvard Medical School is:

What you have been doing right to try to build your sense of power within (i.e., through other people) is the very approach keeping you out of your power now.

If you haven't built the ability to be in your power from your own means, you may keep going to other people to try to get into that state in yourself. And if you don't get the response you need from them, then you're going to try harder to get it from them. It becomes a vicious cycle—you put yourself out of your power and then blame the other person for not being a good source of helping you be in your power.

You can learn to stop yourself from making any specific disempowering situation into a general conclusion that you are not enough or unworthy.

The fix is to Go Direct, which means you source your worthiness from within, independent of others’ evaluations of you. You feel filled by a sense of reward and satisfaction from your contributions. You source your sense of purpose from your Source, however you define it. You become a secure base for yourself to always come home to. Then you have the fill‐up you need, as Jo said, to go out and be the one who raises others.

If you were thinking of this concept in terms of love, Indirect behaviors are like trying to “get love”. Go Direct is “be love.” Go Direct is “feel loveable”—because that you can control. Then it doesn't matter how limited anyone in your personal life or work family is. (To do this, you need to discover what your kindling is and learn to Go Direct, as I will guide you to do in subsequent chapters. Note: There are four specific types of Indirect behaviors, and generic advice can be counterproductive for certain types. Go to www.inyourpowerbook.com to take the full Power Profile assessment for personalized learning.)

My client Susan was able to quickly get back in her power this way after years of being stuck in an out‐of‐power quagmire. A leader in the long‐term disability division of an insurance company, she always had more claims to process than she could get through. Despite backlog being due to the company's bureaucratic processes and challenges in hiring adequate staff, and notwithstanding high praise on her performance reviews, she saw the problem as having to do with her not being enough. She was constantly thinking that she wasn't doing enough and the fire drills were hers to fix. She was constantly monitoring whether she was proving to her boss and colleagues that she was doing enough.

In one exercise together, she had an aha insight. Her mother had been big into volunteering and helping out at food kitchens. Susan had resented all the time her mother spent doing that work, so she avoided doing any such volunteer work. She felt guilty she was not doing enough—not processing enough claims, not giving enough in her community life. Once she made this connection she was able to break the hold that kindling had over her and have a new experience of herself as enough without having to burn herself out taking on more than was humanly possible in the hopes she'd be acknowledged for it.

Often the situation throwing us out of our power does, in itself, present real threats to our goals for ourselves and to our well‐being. Getting back in our power, then, requires strategic problem‐solving that addresses the true issues with effectiveness. This third derailer explains how our brains can work against us taking those approaches.

We Take Flawed Approaches to Trying to Fix the Problem

Our natural emotional stress response can derail our effective problem‐solving, so we overlook the unused power we already have. When out of our power in an emotional state, you can only see a narrow range of options (which may be the same lack of options already thought of, and usually pertain only to how the other person should change). The increased levels of stress hormones in the brain constrict our ability for pattern recognition by shrinking the database searched by the brain.⁶ Our brains interpret new information in a way that is consistent with the way you recently interpreted this or another situation, so an out‐of‐your‐power cycle can keep you looping on the same understanding of limited options.⁷ Research on the brains of people in high power and low power positions revealed that the while the goal‐oriented centers of a high‐power persons' brain are active, there is little active goal seeking among the low‐power subjects.⁸

I often hear from clients, “Well, I said something but …” with the net that they didn't get a cooperative response or even one at all. This was the case for one of my clients, Tara, who was able to turn her situation around after our first session. She was in sales at a Fortune 100 company. She told me she was ready to leave because her manager of six years had systematically denied every request for more resources and better assignments, reserving those for the younger men in the group. It was affecting her income, and she was to the point she had what she termed a “victim mentality.” We agreed that she would give her best shot at influencing her manager, and if that didn't work, we'd pivot to plan B and seek a new job for her to move into.

She had described the manager as being narcissistic and only managing up, which to her meant never being supported because it was all about him. But knowing this about him gave me a great clue about how she might be able to influence him. We carefully scripted her ask, which instead of being about what she wanted would allow him to see how her requests would help him to look good for having granted them.

The next week she emailed to say she met with him and got everything she asked for (and more!) Not only did she stay with the company, but in the subsequent four months she brought in the biggest deal of her career, was promoted, and pocketed an extra $100k in commission. In the position she was promoted to, she was able to improve the process by which deals got assigned and resources were accessed by the sales team, and in that way she was able to raise the rest of the whole sales team up as well.

This is just one small example of the blind spots we have. Though it's never okay for a manager or anyone else to deflect requests for support, you also want to appreciate that you have available to you a vast repertoire of influencing approaches that you might be overlooking.

This “blind spot” approach starts to form an out‐of‐your‐power vicious cycle. We set ourselves up to stay stuck by having limited or ineffective approaches, then we blame the other person for not being cooperative and deepen our hurt that we are not supported, further curtailing our effective approaches.

The more power we hold inside of us and use (not leak, give away, or overlook), the more we have what we want for our life and the bigger our impact with less effort.