Empower over Power — Master Class Series #8

Power is control over other people, and empowered means that you're not looking for control of others. You're just being you despite the consequences.

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host, Joe Hudson. The accumulation The acquisition of power seems like a good idea at first. Then we see how deeply insecure some billionaires and leaders of countries can be. What if no amount of power could ever make you feel safe? What if it was just another thing that could be taken away from you? And what if being empowered is the key to the only security that truly sets you free? Joe, what makes this distinction so important?

Yeah, the empowered over power distinction. I think there's a deep confusion in us as a people and internally between the two, and that confusion is what creates the subjugation that we feel both in the relationship to ourselves and the relationship with the outside world. And to clarify that confusion, to actually see that we are always a choice, and that choice is always empowered, whether we want to admit it or not, as a way to set us free from that subjugation.

So power is real. There are, there are people who really do have power over us, and there are, there are situations in which we have limited control. So that must be partially responsible for our situation.

Yes and no. The, the thing is, is that we're all interdependent. Everything is interdependent. You know, it's like a gigantic machine, if you will, or a gigantic ecosystem. And so who has the power? The the ants or the mountain lion or the rabbits. And if any of them go, the whole system changes, right? So the whole system is dependent on all the other parts of the system. And in that way, yes, there are things that have power over us, right? If you're a deer, deer ticks have power over you, and mountain lions have power over you. But if you're a mountain lion, deer have power over you, because if the deer disappear, you're screwed. You're not eaten. So there's a way of looking at it that says, oh wow, everything that I'm interdependent on has power over me. And you can look at it that way, and it's absolutely true. The other way to look at it is that our choice is ours. We get to choose. We might not like the consequences. Like, we don't always have control over the consequences. And I think when we don't have control over the consequences, that's when the mind wants to say, oh, somebody has power over me. But there's nobody on this planet that isn't dependent on somebody else or something else. So, you know, take the most powerful person in the world. If people stop buying their product, or if people rebel against them, or if the price of oil goes to $20 a barrel, and all of a sudden their money to control their society goes away. Everybody has something like that. You know, it's something that I think about oftentimes when I'm thinking about CEOs, and my experience in working with them is that they have more bosses than anybody. They have their key employees who they need to keep happy, their customers they need to keep happy, their shareholders they need to keep happy, their board of directors they need to keep happy. There's so many people who they are dependent on, or they need their approval, or they need them to buy into their vision in some way. And so there's nobody in this system that isn't dependent on other people, and there's nobody in this system that isn't scared to change the system because of consequences, right? So just as one person is sitting there and saying, hey, "Uh, if I stand up for myself, I'll lose my job." There's a CEO that says, "Hey, if I don't give my quarterly numbers, I'll lose my job. If I don't get to the quarterly numbers, I'll lose my job." And there's a billionaire that's like, "Wow, if I don't keep on finding more oil, I'm gonna lose my fortune." You know, there's just something everywhere. Everybody's got something. And so in that aspect, absolutely everybody has somebody who has power over them.

Right.

I think we often think about the people who— diversified, you mean like lots of customers or lots of people as more powerful, meaning that they're not dependent on one person, they're not dependent on one customer. They feel more powerful in our system, but everybody's dependent.

So it sounds like kind of what you're pointing at in terms of power, when something has power over us, it's setting the constraints of our environment, and if we have power over someone else, we have the power to set the constraints for the system. In some way, but that doesn't tell the whole story. There's what we do within the constraints and which constraints we buy into or don't.

That's it, yeah. So inside of the constraints, you're completely empowered. And the way that you show up inside the constraints, the constraints have to adjust. Meaning if you are scared of losing your job and you say, forget it, I'm gonna show up the way that feels right for me, and if I get fired, I get fired, you will change the system. There's no way for it not to change. Even if you get fired, there's no way for the system not to change.

Right.

There's no way that the way you interact with the system doesn't affect it.

Yeah, even the structure of a company or even the interpersonal relations in your team will change if you're not being the same cog in the wheel. Ecosystem that was existing before.

That's right. And you see this, you know, working with CEOs and working with billionaires, you see this all the time, that there's a whole bunch of things that they want to affect change on that they can't. They don't know how to, or they— that nobody knows how to, or it's just beyond their control. It's not like anybody in any situation doesn't have something that they are not able to affect the change on, right? There's billionaires that I know that if they could control everything, they would have more billions. And there's billionaires I know that if they could control everything, you know, everybody would have social and economic equality, but they can't. Just like we can't, you can't, I can't, nobody can. As long as you need to control a situation to feel empowered, then you are subjugated.

Yeah, that's not real empowerment.

That's right.

So where does this come from? Where does this this yearning for power arise from, if not empowerment? Fear.

If we're making the distinction between power and empowered, you know, and I think that even in our language, oftentimes when someone says, I feel powerful, they might, they mean empowered. And as far as the semantics we're gonna use, that means empowered. And then some people are like, I feel powerful, meaning I have control over you. And so people who want to feel power, control over situations, just fear. They just are scared on some level. We all are scared when we are looking to find power. Now, power might come to us, and just because I have power doesn't mean I'm scared, but if I'm looking for it, then I'm scared.

And then how does achieving some sense of power actually satiate or affect that fear, or does it?

It doesn't. You know, it's, it's like any addiction. There's a, um, short-term high that you get, and then it's over. I remember when I was, I was, I was in like the one of my poorest times in my life when I had the least amount of resources, and my attitude towards money and power was just changing. And I was driving in my car and I was thinking, oh, I don't have enough. And as it turned out, at that time I knew several billionaires, and I kind of went through the list and I'm like, oh, you know, they're driving around right now thinking they don't have enough either. I'm like, oh, I'm a billionaire. My situation, their situation is no different. Like, yeah, they can affect some change in a way that I can't, but I can affect some change in the way that they can't.

Like, I could imagine a situation where a billionaire even feels more powerless because they realize they have all this money and they're actually not able to change the world. So they don't get— yeah, they don't get to believe that money would solve that problem for them.

That's right. Yeah, that's the thing is like one of the best investors I ever met said that if you see somebody who thinks that money's gonna solve their problems, don't invest. And they're dead right. Capitalization doesn't solve problems. It just makes them bigger often.

Yeah, you throw money at problems and you end up with bigger problems that require money to sustain.

Yes, that's right. Yeah, so it's like this illusion. Once you have the power, then you gotta worry about holding onto it. You know, it's another billionaire guy told me at one point, he said, um, everybody works, Joe. Everybody works. You know, there, if you have a billion dollars, you gotta work to maintain it. Everybody works.

Or even if you're, if you're going for social capital, you have the billion dollars, like, you still have to work to maintain social capital and connections.

And right, yeah. Or you've got, you know, $54 billion and you can't affect an election. Right? One guy with maybe a billion dollars can beat another guy with $54 billion, who can— both of them can be beaten with somebody with like less than a million. Power isn't accumulated by more power. It makes it easier in some level, in some forms of power, but sometimes having large amounts of power actually make it harder to accumulate power.

Like in, uh, in the current election cycle, trying to get elected as a billionaire, like, takes you down a whole bunch of notches already, right?

Or being a really big shot investor with a lot of power, on some level there's some benefits to it, and on other levels, a lot of people follow you, which makes it— creates complications as far as like liquidity and other things. It's the same thing with somebody who has the power of leadership in a small community. On one level, they— there are certain things that they can affect change around that other people can't. And in another level, there are certain things they can't. You know, there's a certain balance that is struck in, in any leadership position, and some things can be taken away from you more readily, and some things you can't affect change on. And it's something that I realized when I was on boards of directors that Sometimes in certain boards of directors, I had more power being off the board than I did being on the board.

Hmm.

Because being on the board, I was part of the dynamic and I couldn't help the leadership see through the dynamic. And my capacity to help people see through the dynamic was more powerful than having a vote.

Right. Having the unseen hand behind the curtain kind of thing. Yeah.

You know, like the way that I define power is that Power is, is the thing that can be taken away from you. Empowerment can't be taken away from you. Power is control over other people. And empowered means that you're not looking for control of others. You're just being you despite the consequences. Power is looking to find safety. It's an expression of fear. Empowered is standing in the face of that fear and being truthful to yourself. And if you think about, like, every story that we've ever heard, it's always the story of the person who goes against the consequences for their truth. Mm-hmm. This is what we long for in ourselves, is that I'm gonna be empowered in a way that I will do the right thing despite the consequences, whether I'm saving somebody from a burning building or whether I'm risking my job to be authentic. That's what empowered is.

Yeah, the burning building one's a good example, 'cause like running into a burning building to save somebody, the fire has power over you. There's nothing anybody's going to do to change that, but you are going into the burning building to do your truth, to try to save, you know, somebody. And regardless of the consequences, and you're willing to experience and feel the consequences of coming up against something with much greater power than you.

Yeah, that's right. And there's this— there's the kind of the material power, like money or gun or fire. And then there's also just kind of the power of influence over you or other people. And what, what I notice is that when people act empowered 8 times out of 10, maybe 7 times out of 10, the consequence that they're scared of doesn't come to pass. Even though the moment before they take that action, they're pretty sure it's like inevitable, right? You know, if I'm saying I'm going to be true to my wife even though I might lose her, 8 times out of 10, I'm not going to lose her. If I'm saying I'm going to be true to myself, even if I might get fired, 8 out of 10 times I don't get fired.

Right.

Fire, you know, if you're actually going into a burning building, I don't know what the odds are. You know, it's not something that I have enough experience. I will say the other part of that is that even when you act empowered and things don't go the way you want them to go, they end up going the way you want them to go eventually. Meaning, yes, maybe your wife leaves you, but eventually you get in a relationship that works for you. Meaning that as you act empowered, as you act in your truth, the world that can handle your truth surrounds you, and that becomes your reality bubble, right? We're all in these echo chambers. You know, if I believe one political thing, I'm going to be in an echo chamber of verification of that. If I believe something else, I'll be in an echo chamber that verifies that. It's how our consciousness works, and if we're true to ourselves, we end up in an echo chamber that is true to ourselves.

Right, and it seems there's like a difference between the actual constraints that our environment places on us and then the predicted constraints that we are simulating, that we are— Yeah. That we're actually acting on, which are not exactly the real constraints of the environment. And if we start operating in a way that don't fit the constraints of our immediate environment, we may end up losing the partnership, we may end up losing the job, But if we stick with the operating as though the world had the constraints that we want, eventually we will only end up fitting into a system that fits those constraints.

That's right. And you see this in great leadership, right? So I would say that one of the ways that you know that you're empowered is that you're acting in a way as if your reality is already true, that your vision is already true. So if you're a civil rights leader, you're acting as if you are already equal and free. And you're, you're showing, you're being that example for everybody to follow. And you're assuming that everybody will treat you that way. And it starts bending the world into that way of treating you. And if you feel like you're less than, then your civil rights movement by its nature will have more friction in it. More people will treat you as you're less than. And it's the same with anything, whether it's like if you're acting as a leader of a CEO and you're like, of course we're going to be successful, and you're acting like you're successful when you're in the negotiations, you're acting like you're successful, then the world wants to bend towards that. It doesn't mean it bends towards it all the time, but it wants to bend towards that. So that's what being a visionary is. And that is, if you're empowered, then that visionary nature starts becoming more and more obvious to you. It just becomes something that starts happening.

So that brings up an interesting subtlety, the idea of acting as though you're already successful. It seems like there could be ways of performing success that are not beneficial, but like the actual belief that you are successful, how would you distinguish between those two things?

The way I would distinguish between those two things is that there is, There's a great story of— it was an admiral in the Navy who got into a POW camp in Vietnam, and he was asked, who made it? Who didn't make it? He says, well, who didn't make it was easy. That was the optimist. And the interviewer is like, what do you mean optimist? And he said, um, means that they thought they were going to get out by Christmas or by, you know, the next season or whatever it was. They didn't make it because when that came and that timetable came and left, they became defeated in it and they didn't make it. He said, well, who did make it? He said, well, that's clear. It was the people who thought that they would get out, the people who maintained that vision of their own freedom.

Right, so in that sense, like the people that are performing, if we find ourselves performing successfulness and then like signs of failure come, then that can just completely break down and we'll actually just believe we're a failure and that'll be the end. Whereas realizing that this business can entirely fail and I still feel empowered as a successful, you know, as the person who can be successful.

Correct, and will be. It might be the next business.

Right.

And you see this all the time when people are transforming, when they're changing, they have this massive breakthrough And then they go, oh, then they feel disempowered because of the power of the pattern. And they're like, how do I keep it? How do I keep this breakthrough? And as soon as you see that, as soon as you see somebody start wrestling with how do I keep it, you know that it's gonna be in flux. You know that it's gonna pendulate back and forth for a while. But when the person sees it so clearly that they're like, of course this is what's happening, then it's over. Even if it comes back a little bit, it's over. Like, the, the whole process is quicker. So if somebody's like been getting angry a ton in their world, and then all of a sudden they have this breakthrough of like, oh my gosh, it's not that I'm angry, it's that I'm hurt, and they start crying and they see this, this new reality, and they're like, yeah, of course, they don't need to hold on to it. Then you know that that change is gonna be smooth and quick. And if they are like, "Oh my God, I see it, how do I keep it?" Then you know that then they're not fully empowered.

Yeah, there's a belief that it's fragile then and that they don't really have it. Exactly.

And in that belief system, they still feel like this thing has power over them, right? This influence. And what's interesting is, of course it has power over you. You know, of course. And it's exactly that that you need to enter into. It's exactly that helplessness that helps us become empowered. So what I mean by that specifically, 'cause that can be incredibly confusing, is that the feeling of helplessness, going through the feeling of helplessness is what creates oftentimes that sense of empowerment.

Yeah, that's important 'cause what you were just saying earlier is that the power itself or the seeking of power is a deep expression of fear. And it seems like that would be the fear of feeling the helplessness, the fear of being helpless. If you just move through that helplessness, then you end up on the other side feeling empowered.

That's it. You just said it better than I could.

So is there anything else you want to add to the definition of empowered?

Empowered really is a feeling. It's a state. It's not a life condition. Meaning you can be a billionaire and feel empowered, and you can be in poverty and feel empowered. It's not really about how many resources you have. It's about your resourcefulness. It's knowing that you have the courage to do what's true for you. And the other thing about empoweredness is that you can't really love without it. Like, if you look at all the people who we see as beacons of love, there's a deep sense of empowerment. To them. And if you close your eyes and you go inside and you feel what it is to be unconditionally loving, and then you feel what it is to be unconditionally empowered, you'll notice that they're two sides of the same mountain. And the peak— you can't get to the peak without both sides of the mountain.

So I'm curious about What are some of the different ways that we allow ourselves to have power taken over us? Like, what are some of the types of power? There can be like economic power, there could be emotional power. And I think a lot of this could allude to like the victim, savior, bully stuff that we've discussed in some of the other episodes.

So when we're in fear, which is often when we're seeking power over another person, we're often in a victim, savior, or a bully role. And so that is a good sign that you're in the power over. And you can have power over somebody by being a bully. That, that one we know really well. Our society agrees with that one. They're like, oh yeah, that person's a bully, they want power over. But you can get power over people as a victim too. So I was watching a television show about magic, and for whatever reason they had this group of moms and they were all talking about, you know, guilt, and they were all laughing and smiling over how guilt was a good way to control their kids. And it's like, right, that is how people can control through the victim. Like, I'm so fragile that you can't tell me your truth. If you— if there's somebody in your life that you can't tell your truth to because you're scared of hurting them, then you're being— somebody is controlling through victimhood. And it's the same way with a savior. You can control people by saving them, right? You see this in very wealthy families all the time. They maintain control over their children by making sure that their money is there to save them. Or the, or the Al-Anon saving the alcoholic. It's, it happens all the time. So there's all sorts of ways in which we are trying to have power over people, and they mostly fit into 3 categories, which is victim, savior, and bully.

The example with like the rich people with the money doing the savior thing, I think that there's many, many ways that that could apply to philanthropy as well.

Yeah, absolutely.

Philanthropy can be done in a way that is entirely disempowering and it can be done in a way that is empowering. And I think a lot of that would come from, come from the mindset of the people involved on all sides of it in the system.

That's right, yeah. So when I did a lot of philanthropy with schools and with kids, I would stay away from working with anybody who was coming from a place of guilt. That they were doing it because they felt guilty, because their philanthropy just didn't work. And if they were trying to help people, I would also stay away from it. But if they were working with people so that both they and the people they were there to serve were being helped, then those were effective.

What's an example of how that would work? Philanthropy failing because it came from a place of guilt?

Oh, I was in Nicaragua at one point, and there was a group of Canadians there that were had brought a whole bunch of clothing for this village, and they all felt really great about themselves. And, you know, when I asked them why they did it, they were all like, "Oh, I just feel bad that we have so much, and I wanted to spread it." And, you know, it's— there's nothing wrong with it, but it just isn't successful. And I remember sitting with them and saying, "Hey, you know, there's all these turtles here that are going extinct and all these people." could be saving the turtles. What, what if they earned the clothing by helping the turtles? How does that change this whole system? And what it does change is it makes people have an equal exchange, and so they feel empowered. And if somebody's just giving them stuff without an exchange, then it is actually quite disempowering because now you have power over them because they need you to give them stuff. So you see that, you saw it like in the '70s in Africa, you saw where like food drops would happen. And then when the people who had the walkie-talkies that helped the food drops happen went away, the native people like tried to build fake walkie-talkies and act like the person with the walkie-talkies to get the food to drop. It's like, you're not teaching the person how to fish, you're giving them fish. And that's usually how the, when people act out of guilt, that's usually how it works. 'Cause they feel like they have to give. And good philanthropy is an exchange. It's not a gift. It's a recognition that you're getting as much from it as you're giving.

That segues to another interesting thing from kind of earlier in the conversation about your empowerment is something that you have to give up. Like you choose to give up your empowerment.

Yeah.

And let's talk a little bit more about that.

So there's a choice that you make, and every time that you feel like you've been disempowered or that someone has power over you and you can't be true to yourself, then what's actually happening is that you are choosing to avoid a, a potential bad consequence. And that's a choice that you're making. So you have to choose that for it to be the case. Mandela had everything taken from him except his life. He was crushing rocks, he was beaten. It was not pretty for him. And yet he stayed empowered. He continued to make choices and knew the choices that he was making despite the consequences.

How does that work in daily life, like with a job or, you know, with perhaps with a receiver of philanthropy trying to become empowered, but finding that the moment they become empowered, they stop receiving you know, gifts. And so it's easier not to.

It's— yeah, it's really true. It's harder to raise money for something that's deeply empowered too. It's interesting that way. But then again, the people who truly feel empowered don't need to raise as much money. They have other ways of making things happen. Yeah, it's a good question. How does it happen in daily life? One of the ways that I work with my clients on this often that makes it really acute is— and I mentioned it a bit in there— beginning, but I'll use a different example. It's like a husband that's deeply unhappy in this marriage, and I'll ask the question, well, what if you act exactly how you want to act and see if they leave you, see if the divorce occurs? That's an empowered act. It's like, oh, I'm not going to compromise my authenticity, my truth, to keep your love. I'm not going to compromise my authenticity and my truth to keep the job. I'm not gonna compromise my authenticity and my truth to avoid the conflict. And that's when people feel disempowered is when they don't make that choice. And that's when people complain about somebody having power over them.

Right, like believing that we're not gonna be able to find another job if we leave this job, or like believing we're never gonna find another partner if things don't work out with this one and we don't conform to this, structure we're in, right?

Yeah. And then that, that, that becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly when you're dealing with like one-on-one relationships. But then when it comes to like being in a company or being in a country or being part of a geopolitical system, it becomes a little bit harder to see because you're— the change that you're creating is just less palpable. It's because you're, you know, it's a numbers game. And so it becomes harder for people to see in that way, but that's an intellectual thing. On an emotional and a gut level, you feel it right away. You know it right away when you are acting empowered in those situations. Say, "Oh, I'm going to be this way." And I see it all the time. You know, it's like if you look at the people who are breaking the social norms in a way that is liberating for them, that are the front runners or the trailblazers, if you look at those folks, they are the ones who are not buying into the consequences.

And it's contagious then. Like if you're looking for a social change, you know, it requires empowerment on a population level. And it might feel from a disempowered place that if you're the only person who becomes empowered, you're just gonna get steamrolled by the system. And yet you look at examples like MLK and it's one person was empowered enough to have like a halo around them creating more empowerment and enough people—

And he died, right? So there was somebody who had a gun and that's real power and it affected change. And he had real power and it affected change. And both of the man who shot and the man who got shot in this particular case, both affected massive change in the world. The difference between the two is one felt empowered and one felt disempowered. And so the change that we effect when we feel disempowered usually doesn't serve ourselves or humanity.

Hmm. So yeah, that reminds me of like the archetype of the rebel, somebody who, feeling what they think is power, ends up destroying their life and others in the name of their truth. You know, whoever shot MLK was— felt like they were following their truth. And you see this all the time. Let's talk about that.

Yeah, it's really hard to see the difference sometimes, especially when you're in the middle of it. And it's subtle until you see it. And when you see it, it's clear. If you are in blame for another person or shame for yourself, then you are disempowered and you are trying to accumulate power. If you are not in blame for others or shame for yourself, then that is empowered. That's the emotional way to know where you're at.

Or guilt, I guess. Guilt and shame can be distinct— distinguished as well, a little bit.

Yes, guilt and shame, we'll put them together. Those are such Semantically, that's a very interesting thing and it's very culturally based. But yes, guilt, shame, blame, all that stuff is the good indicator that you're disempowered.

So yeah, earlier we were talking about the drama triangle with the bully and the victim and the savior and how that's based in fear. Can you relate that to blame and shame?

So oftentimes that fear is based on the sense of helplessness, and that sense of helplessness is because we believe the story of blame and shame in our head. When you feel like someone else is making your life X, Y, and Z way, then you're in blame and there's a helplessness and there's a fear that you will lose complete control and therefore you need to have control over. Or there's a shame, like I'm inherently bad and there's no way out of that. It's a deep feeling of helplessness and we're scared of feeling that helplessness. So we then move into the drama triangle or the fear triangle. So that's how it works. It's that helplessness is the feeling of that blame and shame felt all the way through that we don't want to feel. And that's the amazing thing about feeling helplessness. Feeling helpless doesn't make you more helpless. Feeling helpless makes you more capable. And it's so counterintuitive, but if you do it, you know it, right? Because so much of our decision-making process is based on trying to avoid an emotional state. The emotional state of helplessness is one of the ones underlying most of our avoidance.

Right. So what are some of the indicators for each of these particular roles? If all of them are fear state kind of being set into place with blame and shame, and we need to feel helplessness to get through them. What are some of the indicators for some of these particular roles, the victim, bully, and savior?

The reason I don't call it the drama triangle very often, and I'm more prone to call it the fear triangle, is because the victim, bully, and savior correspond with fight, flight, or freeze, which are the states of fear. And fight is pretty obviously bully, right? It's like, when I'm scared, I fight. When I'm scared, I freeze. That's more victim. And when I'm scared, I fly. That's savior. And it— that's the harder one to understand. But what happens is I run away from myself and my own experience, and I try to fix you so that I can feel safe. If I can make it so you don't get drunk, I'll feel safe. If I can make it that you are happy, then I'll feel safe. And so I'm running away from myself, going into you to try to fix my issues. And so that's why I call it the fear triangle. And there's a feeling for each one of them, right? That is kind of the indicator. And the indicator is if I am feeling all alone in it, that's the bully. And if I feel obligation, that's the savior. And if I feel stuck, that's the victim. And in actuality, we'll feel all three of these things if you really slow it down for a minute. And you'll notice that you'll feel all 3 of these things in a moment of fear. You know, my wife comes home, she's in a horrible mood, and I feel helpless that now my mood is gonna be screwed up and the house is gonna be screwed up and, you know, the kids are gonna be screwed up. I'm like, "I can't do anything." I might feel alone, like, "Oh God, I can't do— I'm the only one who has to fix this thing." And then I feel, "Oh my God, I gotta do something for her so that she feels better." And then I'm like, "I'm stuck with this thing." You know, it's like all 3 of them can happen slowly or quickly, but there's one that usually we dominate in situations that are dominating us in situations, right? Most people tend towards fight, flight, or freeze most of the time.

Yeah, I personally tend towards the, the savior.

Yeah, I have tended towards, um, both savior and bully. Those are the two places I'll go depending on the circumstance. Yeah, and often in quick succession. Right.

Let's talk a little bit more about how this works in companies and in teams.

So it works in a number of ways. The first is you see this happening all the time in companies and teams is that somebody's acting like the victim or some group is acting like the victim, some are acting as a savior. There's different ways that they're trying to create control. The less empowered the team feels, the more drama. And that's a great, like, as soon as you walk into a team, if it's super political, it's just like, wow, everybody feels disempowered. You just know it. And if somebody where everybody feels empowered and they feel like they can affect change, there's so little politics that are going on. So it's a great litmus test.

Right, 'cause politics is that control mechanism.

Correct, yeah, it's that fear, right? Drama, right? And that's the thing that you see in, politics everywhere, you know, and I don't mean politics as in people running countries, I mean politics. It might be people being political, right? It's a deep expression of fear and people trying to capture power. And it's because everybody feels helpless and feels like they're not actually able to affect change in a way that, that's meaningful.

So how do you affect this kind of change in a company, whether you're, whether you're leading the company or you're within the company? Or, you know, at the bottom of some ladder?

Well, this is the tricky bit, right? Because as a leader of a company, you want your people to be empowered, and you also, often out of fear, want to limit their capacity to affect change, right? I don't want the male, the new male clerk to decide you know, what my initial public offering price is gonna be. So it's this constant balance of people feeling empowered, you wanting people to feel empowered, and at the same time, a fear of having that power kind of run away or this lack of control. And this is the balance and the subtle war that's happening oftentimes with leaders. And you'll hear it all the time because they'll say something like, "I wish everybody would act like the owner of the company." And they mean that to a point, meaning they want everyone to take responsibility like that, but they don't want everybody to have all the benefits and they don't want everybody to have all the choice that they have. So it's this very interesting balance that happens. And what you see is if the, what's happening in those companies is that the empowerment and the roles have gotten confused. If everybody can feel empowered in their role and their role is defined and how decisions are made is defined, then people feeling deeply empowered is incredibly good for a company. And as soon as those roles aren't defined well, as soon as people don't know what they have to do to be successful, uh, then a whole bunch of empowered people just creates a lot of a lot of mess.

So it sounds like there's a bit of a paradox here where having well-defined roles and well-defined processes is structure, and that could be something that people feel has power over them. But then also what you want is them to feel empowered to push back and change that structure or work fully within the structure and also perhaps challenge it. But if you don't have structure, like clear goals, criteria for success, loving accountability, transparency, then what happens there? There's a powerlessness in having no structure.

That's right, yeah. So if there's no way to affect change or make decisions, then what you'll have is this crazy politics with people trying to get power so that they can feel safe. So yes, you wanna have some sort of structure that allows itself to change. And has structure that doesn't change without very specific things happening so that people can feel safe, that they know what to do, that they know what success means. And this doesn't matter if it's AA or Enron, right? So in AA, it's like there's a very particular structure that has to happen. There's 12 steps and There's the way that the meetings get run and that structure happens, and, and it's important, or people can't feel safe in those environments. In Uber, there's very particular structures in place. There's, I'm going to rate you 5 stars or not, I— and there's another structure of making sure that drivers don't rip other people off by tracking them on Maps. Those structures are really incredible, incredibly critical, or people don't feel safe. Will those structures need to change over time? Absolutely. But you need the structure for people to feel safe and know what their roles are. And there needs to be a, you need to be able to make room for people to grow and change their roles. The Constitution of the United States does a pretty good job of it too.

Yes, that's a structure.

Yeah. And so that's the balance that you're constantly looking for is like, how do I create? The amount of structure that makes people feel safe, but also gives them autonomy and gives them the capacity to feel as empowered as possible.

And includes mechanisms for that structure itself to be updated to match reality.

Absolutely, absolutely. Right, that's it. And so that's how looking at companies, and what you see typically is the more transparency and the less structure that creates safety, like the more elegant the structure is that creates safety, then the more successful the company. So taxicabs becoming Uber is an example of this. Less structure, less infrastructure, but creates actually more safety. It's the same thing that happened with like GM and Toyota. Like Toyota created— became more decentralized than GM, which was at the time the most centralized company. So that decentralization but still maintaining the structure is what usually gives those companies a competitive advantage. And the reason is because it creates more empowerment with the employees.

Seems like this would also promote scalability for a company, because if you have 100 empowered decision makers instead of 3, then more decisions can be made and more information can be processed.

That's exactly right, yeah. And so you saw that there's a— I can't remember, it was one of the Malcolm Gladwell books talked about how in this war game, that the Pentagon does that like this small band of people beat the US Army because their decision-making was happening at the bottom. But there was some set of principles, some set of structure that they could all operate within. And that's basically how you do it. I think it was in David and Goliath was I think his book. And so you see that all the time and you see it in business books as well, like, Reinventing Organizations where this same kind of principle is there.

Yeah, another war game example, just war example would be when Rommel first encountered US troops in Northern Africa, he was like, "Oh wow, these guys are totally green and completely disorganized. It'll be a cinch." And then not long after he was writing letters back to Germany like, "Wait, don't underestimate these people. You can cut off an entire unit from their command and somehow they'll still figure out how to fight." But this isn't just an external thing.

This is an internal thing as well. When you become more empowered, you start operating on a sense of a set of principles, and that set of principles you're going to operate on whether it's comfortable or not. So if I have a principle that basically says I am not going to work with assholes, and somebody says, here's a billion dollars to work with an asshole, I'm going to say no. It's a set of principles. I'm not going to operate any differently than that. If I I have a set of principles, and it's like, I'm gonna be transparent with people and tell them my truth despite the consequences. That's my set of principles. I'm going to do it no matter what. And that's when all the drama in me starts disappearing, right? And that's when I feel empowered, is I've given myself a structure that it doesn't change very readily, you know, it takes some time to change that set of principles, but I'm going to operate in that way no matter what. And that helps me feel deeply empowered, which is strange, right? It's like a set of criteria that I live by that actually makes me feel empowered.

Yeah, it's as though this entire process of inquiry into values is to create a more and more consolidated, elegant structure by which we live our lives so that we don't have to think about the complicated consequences and how the consequences are gonna play out of what if I say this to my boss or speak my truth here or leave this job, it's just, This is simply how I want to live, and that's— I'll accept the consequences if that's what it takes.

That's exactly right. Yeah. And so that set of principles is what frees us. And if you look around at the people who you just are like, holy crap, they had— they didn't have resources, but they were empowered and they changed the world. It's something else they all have in common. They were living by a set of principles internally and externally. Not perfectly, obviously. We're Humans were not made perfect, but it's, you know, generally how one lives their life. And when you see somebody who's living by a set of principles, you'll also notice that they never are blaming other folks, that they're never feeling like— they're never worried about somebody's power over them. They're addressing it.

And that also will affect your opportunities as well. Like when I'm hiring, I'm much more interested in the resourcefulness and the ownership, like the self-ownership of the person rather than, you know, the skills listed on their resume. And people really detect that in any other, any counterpart that they might work with.

That's right. I'd rather pick the right mentality than the right skill set, for sure. I'd obviously like to pick both when I can. But yeah, that's right. So this is what happens internally, as like I said, as well as externally, the drama internally goes away when we feel empowered internally, when we don't feel like the— that we will make the choice even if it's uncomfortable. So even if I have to feel helpless, I'm going to make that choice. Even if I have to— I'm not going to have power over somebody else or try to have power over myself. I will rather feel the discomfort of the fear and the helplessness. I'll rather enter into the shame I would rather allow my own destruction as far as the destruction of my identity, my identity as one who's put upon, or my identity as one who's valuable. I'd rather allow that to be destroyed rather than move into fear and act from fear and try to have control over somebody. So it's an internal and an external thing. And when it's when you figure it out internally, you have no choice but to act it externally. So if you feel like you are subjugated by something externally, then you also feel like you're subjugated by something internally.

That sounds like a great point to wrap this up on. Thank you very much, Joe.

Yeah, pleasure, Brett. Thank you very much.

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