CHAPTER TEN

Putting the Power Grid into Action

The premise of this chapter is simple: habits matter. When pressure heats up on the job, it’s ambitious to assume you’re going to think clearly. When emotions are running high around us and inside us, the majority of us begin operating on automatic pilot. The action plan in this chapter will help you use what you’ve learned throughout this book to upgrade the operating system that kicks in when your capacity for logic gets knocked out.

The good news is that reconditioning yourself to play to your strengths is simple. The challenging news is that it requires dedication. I mention the importance of dedication up front because as an executive coach, I’ve met many people who are eager for a quick fix. Today, many of us have been seduced into believing that if something doesn’t work quickly, it doesn’t work at all. The Power Grid is not a quick fix. It’s taken you most of your life to develop the responses that dictate your power style. Some aspects of your power genes work in your favor, and some are blind spots that undermine your efforts. The destructive ones aren’t going to disappear overnight without some active effort on your part.

My coaching experience over the last decade has taught me that engaging in the right sequence of self-reflective exercises and subsequent action steps is crucial for achieving sustainable professional growth. The sequence of steps outlined in this reconditioning process is designed to guide you through the work of learning and unlearning in tandem. Just as we inhale and exhale to keep moving forward in life, alternating periods of action and reflection keep us progressing in our careers. You can’t just think yourself into a more powerful operating style; you need to experiment with new patterns of behavior and experience what goes on with your internal and external triggers to evolve effectively.

In my first book, The Authentic Career, I introduced clients to a four-stage process for evaluating their professional priorities that took them through an in-depth exploration of why they might have chosen their current career path.¹ Part of this process involves guidance on how to deal with the emotional backlash that often prevents us from considering a broader range of professional options. Think of this emotional backlash the way you would the choppy part of the surf that can impede your journey into the deeper and smoother part of the ocean. If you hang on and don’t turn back, the best part of your journey is yet to come.

How Blind Spots Impede Positive Change

The emotional backlash that thwarts positive change echoes the way that our blind spots work on the Power Grid. When you are facing a professional challenge, your blind spots work to keep you operating on automatic pilot. They kick in to protect you from what you would prefer not to know about yourself. Unfortunately, these same blind spots simultaneously prevent you from considering the fullest range of potential responses when your power is threatened on the job.

Blind spots kick in when we lose perspective and the less effective aspects of our power genes shift us into automatic pilot so we can avoid uncomfortable feelings. Just as with a car that gets poor gas mileage, when we are driven by the need to deny certain aspects of our emotional reality, we simply aren’t using our energy effectively. The blind spots that take over are all too predictable. The Pleaser wastes valuable time and energy trying to gain approval from people who either take their hard work for granted or, in a worst-case scenario, manipulate them and discard them when they burn out. The Charmer starts isolating, driven by the need to avoid his or her inner demons. The Commander can get crazy about winning at all costs. And the Inspirer can lapse into fantasy and overlook the details needed to make his or her concepts commercially viable.

Blind spots get lodged in our psyches because the brain is basically a pleasure-seeking organ. Thus, it’s not surprising that most of the automatic responses we have developed kick in because our subconscious is hardwired to avoid things that make us uncomfortable. As we have seen, this wiring process begins in the family system, where we learned how to get what we wanted and needed from our early caregivers by observing and intuiting their reactions under pressure. When Pleasers could finally get their preoccupied parents to turn around and pay attention to them, their stress abated and they felt emotional relief. When Charmers were able to soothe a needy caregiver, they felt as if they could temporarily relax. When Commanders were rising in the pecking order, the accompanying surge of adrenaline (and relief) produced an emotional high. Finally, nothing brightens the day of an Inspirer like discovering a new solution to an old problem. The rush of pleasure the Inspirer feels echoes what they felt when they heard the applause of proud parents who encouraged their inventiveness.

You can bet that when your blind spots kick in, you are not consciously in control. As we have seen with all types on the grid, when you are feeling anxious or exhausted, you snap into automatic pilot and your awareness narrows. When that happens, your range of options can seem fairly slim. When clients call me to say that they had no choice but to storm out on their boss or blow off a demanding client, I know that the blind spot won that round. Reflecting on the Power Grid when you have a stretch of time on a long airplane flight is one thing. However, putting the Power Grid into practice when your colleague is trying to undermine you for a key promotion is, as we say in Texas, a horse of a different color. That’s the horse to bet on.

The Reconditioning Process

This process is designed to help you recognize the instinctual reflexes you have developed that have worked in your favor professionally—based on how you have been conditioned in your family system. The objective is to identify the natural strengths inherent in your power genes so you can play to them more effectively.

A second, and complementary, goal is to clarify where your blind spots have been systematically diminishing your professional potential. As these self-sabotaging reactions are identified, you are going to learn how to recondition yourself so that when you get triggered, you are able to practice new and improved responses.

Cycling through the four stages of the reconditioning process will help you develop a deeper dialogue with yourself around power. In doing so, identifying the precise quadrant you resonate with most strongly is not as important as cultivating the ability to ask yourself more thought-provoking questions when you suspect you are being swept away by your blind spots and caught in the undertow of a power struggle on the job.

Excerpts from the case study of Larry, the Pleaser mentioned in the first chapter, will be used to illustrate each of the stages of the reconditioning process. You may recall that Larry was the first head of corporate communications to be considered for partner at his investment firm. As a result, Larry’s power style was being evaluated by the top brass at his firm. Reviewing Larry’s reconditioning work, stage by stage, will give you a personal glimpse of how one client used the Power Grid to create an action plan to keep his promotion on track when his encounters with senior managers took him out of his comfort zone.

The Four Stages of the Reconditioning Process

1. Identify Your Power Quadrant(s)—A Self-Reflection Stage

In any change process, the first thing you want to do is identify your strengths and your starting point. This initial stage is where you begin a deeper dialogue with yourself by clarifying the quadrant or quadrants that you identify with most strongly. You are engaged in this part of the process right now, and some part of your mind has been testing the waters of self-reflection as you have been reading through this book.

This first stage is built on a simple truth: you can’t improve what you don’t understand. As you increase your awareness of how the balance of power in your family system has forged your habitual responses to authority on the job and shaped your power genes, you will be able to appreciate the ways that your innate strengths and your recurrent challenges influence emotions and behavior.

If you have difficulty pinpointing the quadrants you operate from most frequently, it’s helpful to take the time to think of one person you are close to personally (such as your spouse or best friend) and one person who you’ve worked with in an ongoing professional context. With these two individuals in mind, write out the four to five strengths and blind spots you suspect each person would use to describe you. Then, take this list of qualities and consider the quadrant that you think is most reflective of these traits. If, in your opinion, some qualities assigned to you fall into more than one quadrant, feel free to list every quadrant where you think these characteristics might belong. Then, simply count. The quadrants that come up most frequently are a good starting place in terms of graphing yourself on the Power Grid.

Stage 1 Case Study

After his initial review of the Power Grid, Larry felt that he operated as both a Pleaser and an Inspirer. While he suspected that he was grappling with a Pleaser blind spot as he struggled to impress members of senior management, he was also convinced that much of his career advancement stemmed from his ability to draw on the strengths of an Inspirer.

Larry’s initial self-assessment was fair enough. After all, as we now know, there are no right or wrong answers to the questions on the Power Grid. The central purpose of this framework is to help people develop a deeper dialogue with themselves around how they deal with power in the workplace and why. What’s more, many people find that their strengths are clustered in one quadrant, while the predominant blind spots they grapple with stem from a different quadrant on the grid.

Taking a closer look at Larry’s family system clarifies how and why this happens. Larry’s mother and father shared a deep respect for each other, and while they were both committed to a spiritual approach to life, his mother was a devout Catholic but his father never embraced a particular religion. Their shared commitment to ethical living, as well as their tolerance of each other’s viewpoints, made a case for this family system being one that might easily foster an Inspirer.

However, when Larry took the time to examine some of the more emotionally charged memories from his childhood, it was clear that he didn’t get the attention and validation he longed for from his parents. A highly creative student, Larry was often crushed when his parents barely had time to acknowledge his latest accomplishment because they were preoccupied with the drama surrounding his alcoholic brother. To keep his parents from feeling even guiltier about a situation they couldn’t control, Larry suppressed his feelings by working even harder. These feelings rarely bubbled up to the surface unless Larry found himself in one of those situations where he was on the verge of getting the type of attention he had craved for so long. Larry’s need to impress members of his senior management team tapped directly into this Pleaser blind spot.

As Larry’s situation illustrates, no family system will be fully aligned with any one power style. Even in the most rigid Commander families, there are going to be moments when the parents work as an evenhanded team and perhaps even choose to bend the rules when dealing with their kids. What the Power Grid gives you is a framework for understanding the emotional and behavior patterns that characterized your family system the highest percentage of the time. As you consider these percentages, bear in mind that your emotional memory of the dynamics that took place between you and your parents is a far more powerful force than any third party’s objective assessment of the facts.

Considering how his wife and one of his closest colleagues would describe him helped Larry clarify the quadrants he needed to focus on to operate more effectively.

In Larry’s case, he felt his wife would list his strengths as:

1. Loyalty

2. Good networking skills

3. Empathy for others

4. Strong work ethic

In contrast, Larry felt one of his key staff members, Jason, would describe his strengths as:

1. Successful in delivering results

2. Team player

3. Good at expressing appreciation

4. High energy and charismatic

Larry then went on to group the strengths he felt his wife and Jason would use to describe him into the power styles he decided they represented on the Power Grid as follows:

1. Loyalty—Pleaser

2. Good networking skills—Charmer/Inspirer

3. Empathy for others—Pleaser

4. Strong work ethic—Pleaser

5. Successful in delivering results—Commander

6. Team player—Pleaser/Inspirer

7. Good at expressing appreciation—Pleaser

8. High energy and charismatic—Inspirer

Thus, when it came to his strengths, Larry realized that he put five of the characteristics he thought others would use to describe him in the Pleaser category. Larry also had one strength he considered descriptive of the Charmer power style, one that represented the Commander, and three that he listed in the Inspirer category. The bottom line? Larry discovered that many of the strengths others might use to describe him were representative of the Pleaser and Inspirer power styles.

Larry went on to do a similar grouping of the blind spots he felt others would use to describe him. Nearly all the blind spots Larry thought people close to him might use to describe him fell in the Pleaser category. This simple exercise helped Larry realize that when it came to some of the less effective reflexes he needed to correct to get ahead, overcoming blind spots associated with Pleasers was an area where he needed to start focusing.

Many clients I have worked with find that working through the first stage of the reconditioning process can be a self-reflection tool in itself. Pleasers tend to think carefully about how others are likely to describe them, and strive to “get it right.” Charmers breeze through this exercise quickly to avoid getting emotionally engaged. Commanders critique everything from the number of comments to the objectivity of the people that come to mind for them, searching for flaws every step of the way. Inspirers are often tempted to focus on finding new ways to use this feedback process, and need to be mindful of staying in the moment and applying their answers to themselves and their current challenges.

2. Learn to Take Strategic Pauses—An Action Stage

Once you have given yourself credit for the strengths inherent in the quadrant(s) you habitually operate from, it’s time to start to deal with the blind spots that may have accumulated over time. This second stage of the reconditioning process begins as your heightened awareness of your power genes enhances your ability to choose the way you will respond to challenging situations rather than slipping into automatic pilot. For most clients, the second stage begins after they have had a couple of weeks to reflect on the power quadrants they identify with most strongly. As you go about your job, you will find the second stage kicking in when situations that used to drive you to automatically lose your temper, sneak out for a cigarette, or fantasize about calling a headhunter begin to strike you as learning opportunities rather than potential threats.

An important parallel exists between operating powerfully on the job and driving a car: being able to stop can save the day. Developing the “inner brakes” necessary to pause when you are triggered and about to lapse into a blind spot requires both commitment and courage. The two seconds that it takes to suspend an automatic reaction when you feel that your power base is threatened can feel like the longest two seconds of your life. Remember, you are never responsible for your first thought. Your first thought may run something like, How dare he meet with my client without taking me along . . . I’ll make him pay!

This type of defensive thinking can shoot through your brain like a meteor racing through the night sky. What you are responsible for is noticing this first thought and then taking control of your second thought. Practicing the inner action of taking a strategic pause between your first thought (a conditioned response) and your second thought (a choice) builds the foundation of inner discipline necessary to stop reacting and start responding more powerfully under pressure.

Stage 2 Case Study

Having determined that gaining a solid understanding of both the Inspirer and the Pleaser power genes was important for him, Larry proceeded to start tackling his most troublesome blind spots. To do this, he had to become particularly conscious of the emotional and physiological triggers that kicked in when he was most tempted to indulge in self-sabotaging behavior. This is a simple concept but a challenging task.

By strengthening his understanding of his own automatic actions and reactions, Larry found that he was able to better withstand the tension that took place inside him when one of the senior partners he was trying to bond with seemed disinterested during a casual conversation with him.

One morning, when he was seated between two senior partners at a firm off-site, Larry sat in agonized silence while the two of them began chatting avidly about their golf games—acting as if he were invisible. He was dying to find a way to join this conversation. His emotional trigger around wanting to be noticed was causing him to feel like an anxious second grader—and to squirm in his seat like one.

At that moment, Larry remembered to take a strategic pause and pay attention to what was happening to him on the inside. He realized that his first thought was that he needed to improve his golf game so he could “fit in” better.

Rather than saying anything in haste, Larry began to wonder how a confident person who didn’t care how these guys reacted to him might respond in this situation. In a flash, Larry had a realization that shifted his emotional energy as well as the energy of the moment surrounding him. It dawned on him that a confident person wouldn’t feel the need to do anything. They wouldn’t force a change of subject, and they wouldn’t try to force their way into a conversation they knew little about. A confident person would simply be in the moment and enjoy a second cup of coffee. As Larry’s perspective brightened, the partners surrounding him suddenly seemed to notice his presence, and the conversation shifted naturally to a topic he could enjoy. Larry hadn’t changed anything but his attitude.

Remember, your ability to stop reacting ineffectively and start responding more powerfully begins with your second thought. Under emotional pressure, your first thought is often a conditioned response that cycles through your brain like a loop in a computer program. It’s your second thought that represents your ability to objectively assess your own power reflexes and take the strategic pause necessary stop recycling bad habits and start practicing new ones.

As you develop the new habit of taking a strategic pause when you get triggered, your sense of perspective returns. Your inner world gets bigger than your blind spot as you gain perspective and the capacity to make more powerful choices is restored.

3. Reflect on Your Power Patterns and Their Hidden Costs—A Self-Reflection Stage

For most clients, it takes at least a month before they are ready to engage in the third stage of the reconditioning process. This is because many people find they have to experience the benefits of playing to their strengths more consistently before they develop the inner courage necessary to face what their blind spots have cost them emotionally and financially.

Watching someone in the early days of the reconditioning process hold their tongue when they are dying to give “some idiot” a piece of their mind can feel like watching a volcano decide not to explode. There’s a lot of pent up energy here, and it’s going to have to be channeled somewhere. The most constructive place to channel this energy is into self-reflection. Many clients report that as they struggle to slow down their behavior on the outside, their thoughts speed up on the inside as their mind tries to pressure them into indulging in their same old habits.

“Give him a piece of your mind; you’ll feel better,” the mind in search of emotional relief urges. “Walk out of here now; you are better than this!” prompts the irate voice of the psyche. It’s at this crucial moment that you want to reflect on the voices in your head rather than blindly obeying them. Whose voice is this anyway? Is it yours? Your father’s? Your spouse’s?

As you start learning to reflect rather than react, you will become increasingly aware of how your power genes play out on the job by noticing the following:

•   It’s not just the source of the messages but the messages themselves that bear scrutiny at these moments. Where has this behavior gotten you in the past? What might be driving the other person’s reaction to you? The better you get at taking strategic pauses when you are triggered, the more your sense of perspective gets restored.

•   As you recondition yourself to take a few precious seconds to reflect before you react, you will begin to notice the previously hidden costs of running away from your feelings by going into automatic pilot. Have you been spending money you couldn’t afford to medicate the frustration you feel over placating people you resent? Have you made risky investment decisions because you didn’t have the courage you needed to take meaningful risks to advance your career? Did you accept a job that promised a career track they couldn’t deliver on because you were too impatient to do your homework on the organization before you joined? Do you buy lottery tickets hoping you will win millions and all these tough questions will just disappear? Assessing these hidden costs is not intended to discourage you. It’s intended to reinforce your commitment to working through your blind spots so you can operate more powerfully in all facets of your career.

•   When the hidden costs of denying your blind spots compound over time and the emotional bill comes due, you may experience a power turning point. Such turning points enable you to come to terms with ways that you have inadvertently given your power away at such a deep level that you become able to readjust more than your conscious attitude. This type of deeper realization empowers you to begin to rework your less conscious (and more emotional) reactions to workplace triggers.

Stage 3 Case Study

By stopping himself from anxiously babbling in stage 2, Larry had actively taken control of his internal emotions and reacted in a positive way outwardly. During the precious seconds it took for him to overcome his mind’s urgent command to fill the silence by verbally “tap dancing” for the other men at his table, Larry had unleashed a hornet’s nest of anxious voices on the inside. Meanwhile, on the outside, Larry needed to behave calmly until his trigger subsided.

As Larry learned over time to channel the pent-up energy he was managing on the inside away from self-sabotage and toward self-reflection, he made some important discoveries about himself.

The more he practiced holding his tongue when he felt insecure, the more Larry began to realize that the lack of confidence he felt around members of senior management had made him into a workaholic. The problem was that while he was working hard, he wasn’t working smart. Driven by the belief that he could “never do enough” to prove his worth, Larry agonized over the details and missed the big picture when it came to important initiatives. One of the biggest areas where he lost track of the big picture was with regard to his own net worth.

Larry was so focused on helping the members of senior management explain their financial strategy to the media that he forgot to look out for his own finances. As he burned the midnight oil, Larry failed to keep a watchful eye on the investments in his retirement account. What’s worse, because he felt guilty for spending so much time at the office, he turned a blind eye while his teenage son ran up credit card charges that put his first year of college tuition at risk. This financial hardship was even causing some strain to his marriage.

Larry experienced a power turning point the night he made the realization that he had been emotionally abandoning his son the way his own father had abandoned him. Like overlapping weather patterns that can take on the force of a thunderstorm, power turning points take place when our psyches are snapped out of their normal operating pattern of “underawareness.” The walls of denial we have constructed to protect our blind spots begin to crumble when the emotional charge of memories we have been suppressing from the past begins to mix with new realizations about our present. Larry’s power turning point caused him to go back to the Power Grid and take a harder look at the blind spots associated with the Pleaser. After doing this, Larry resolved to make some important changes so he could operate more effectively on the job and in his life.

The hidden costs of your blind spots can provide clues to the power quadrants you operate from when you are under pressure. As we have seen, the Pleaser who hasn’t developed strong self-promotional skills often pays the high price of not being given full credit for his or her efforts and getting passed over for promotions. Charmers, who are highly image conscious, may accumulate financial debt through lavish spending on clothing, entertaining, or even vacations, to “take the edge off” when pressure mounts on the job. Commanders, whose tendency to be gruff and impatient can sometimes take root in the home as well as on the job, may become emotionally estranged from loved ones. Finally, when Inspirers don’t keep their feet on the ground, they often pay the price of watching more organized competitors reap the benefits of some of their best thinking.

What are some of the hidden costs you are facing in life? Are you underemployed? Overleveraged? Emotionally isolated? By considering some of the key challenges you are facing in your life today, you may be able to clarify the blind spots that have caused these various types of costs to accumulate. By becoming aware of the price you pay for your blind spots, you enhance your resolve to replace less effective habits with new ways of responding to old challenges.

4. Practice New Habits—An Action Stage

If we are designed to mentally go into automatic pilot under stress, then we want to upgrade our internal operating system so that the habits that kick in when our brain shuts down work for us rather than against us. Reinforcing the positive habits that are foundational to this inner upgrade is what this final stage of the reconditioning process is all about. Most clients start the fourth stage of the reconditioning process within two to three months of being introduced to the Power Grid. This stage evolves naturally as you discover new solutions to old problems on the job. The more mindful you become of the ways your power genes influence the tone you set professionally, the more the habit of playing to your natural strengths shifts from becoming something you focus on consciously to something you are conditioning yourself to do automatically.

This final stage of the process is where you squarely face the challenge of unlearning the habits that may undermine your professional advancement. As you tackle this, it’s important to remember that new habits are easier to adopt than old ones are to eliminate. This is because we only have our conscious mind to contend with when we are trying to practice something new. We can read a book, solicit advice from a trusted friend, or even find something inspirational in a film, and get plenty of ideas for new and empowering career strategies. All you have to do to put a new strategy into practice is make a conscious commitment to give the new behavior a fair try.

However, old habits can maintain a firm grip on our psyches. It often takes releasing the emotional energy that is fueling our habitual responses to unwind an old behavior, and that can take longer—sometimes years. This is because reconditioning an old habit that’s become part of your unconscious operating system requires ongoing work. This is also why, as much as we long for them, quick fixes can’t produce lasting change. Sustainable change requires us to do more than think differently. To achieve sustainable change, we must consistently practice new habits in response to old triggers.

Stage 4 Case Study

Consistently learning to pause before speaking, and speaking succinctly and deliberately, became a life preserver for Larry. So much so, in fact, that he developed a reputation among the senior partners for being a man of few words—but a man of important words.

Since the core blind spots he was reworking came from the Pleaser quadrant, Larry worked to consciously enhance the Pleaser’s strengths that came to him naturally as he worked through his reconditioning process. Pleasers innately realize that many people prefer to hear themselves talk than to listen. By keeping this in mind, Larry developed the habit of listening intently to those around him. As this new skill became second nature to him, Larry branched out and studied the Charmer quadrant to learn more techniques for successfully engaging the members of senior management who were now seeking him out in the hallways. Considering the role of seduction in relationship building inspired Larry to begin to listen to comedy tapes in his car to brush up on jokes that would help him lighten tense moments, and maintain eye contact to convey a sense of confidence. Within a month of starting his campaign to convey a more confident tone on the job, Larry was given the promotion he longed for.

After he had made partner, the real work started for Larry. Now that the beauty pageant was over, the stakes were higher and the gloves were off. Larry found himself engaged in ongoing power plays with experienced Charmers and Commanders who were willing to do much more than withdraw their approval; they were willing to engage in all-out warfare to get what they wanted. Larry found himself cycling through the stages of the reconditioning process repeatedly as he won some power plays and lost some others. He began to gain the respect of his colleagues, and to respect himself, as he learned to draw on a more agile power style that incorporated a balance of strengths from all four quadrants. One of the strengths he drew on the most, which tapped into the Inspirer dimension of his family system, was a healthy sense of humor about the ongoing challenges facing members of senior management. As Larry developed more internal balance in the way that he responded emotionally and behaviorally on the job, he found he was also enjoying more external balance as well. Larry gradually developed the self-confidence he needed to shift his mental focus away from work at the end of the day so he could be present for his family as well as his firm.

One of the main benefits of the Power Grid is that it clarifies the ways we can all play to our strengths. By listing how others close to him would describe his strengths, Larry was able to see ways that he exhibited positive power reflexes from both the Pleaser and the Inspirer quadrants. In my experience, people who fail to give themselves sufficient credit for their strengths sabotage their careers just as fast as people who ignore their blind spots. Using the Power Grid will help you draw on your existing strengths with confidence as you begin the work of replacing self-sabotaging reactions with more effective professional habits.

Power Patterns in the Headlines

Life is not an accidental experience. Everything from our first love to our last overdue bill notice presents us with lessons about power. As we’ve seen, stories are powerful learning tools. Reflecting on the Power Grid as you consider the headlines describing leaders who are amassing (or losing) power is an exercise that can deepen your own understanding of power on the job.

Every day we are blasted with news that recounts the exploits of business leaders, politicians, and entertainers who have done something that captures the public’s imagination and makes many of us say to ourselves some variation of “Thank God that wasn’t me!” I’ve had clients from around the world draw on their assessment of the power styles of public figures ranging from Eliot Spitzer to Albert Einstein to deepen their own understanding of the way a leader’s power genes can influence their legacy in politics, business, and even scientific research. As they do this, clients become more and more aware that there’s always an explanation for why people do what they do—especially when it comes to power. The key is that the explanation may not be found purely by examining the mind of the individual. It may also have its roots in the way this person has been conditioned by the systems that have shaped his or her life’s journey.

What’s Your Power Turning Point?

As you work through the four stages of the reconditioning process, like Larry from our case study, you are likely to run into a power turning point of your own. This can be either a public or private moment in your own life when your growing awareness of how your power genes have influenced your operating style snaps you out of automatic pilot. Clients who have experienced power turning points report confronting some challenging questions when the part of their mind that has learned to shut down in the face of strong emotions comes back online. Why am I responding this way? Is there something I need to know about this situation I’m unaware of? How does the person I’m working with feel about themselves in this moment? Power turning points take place when you have developed a strong enough relationship with yourself to ask deeper questions about habitual reactions you had previously taken for granted. This enhanced capacity for self-reflection is the cornerstone of personal and professional growth.

Here’s some good news: it takes less energy to learn to operate more powerfully than it does to stay stuck. Here’s some even better news: working with your power genes can be fun and self-perpetuating because the person who was conditioned to give his or her power away was a child. The person focused on reworking these patterns is an adult.