Power that Heals
In a world full of polarization, what kind of power are you truly seeking? And more importantly, which kind of power can you not afford to lose?
Reflections on power beyond titles and fear — toward healing, connection and building together.
There’s a lot of talk these days about how power is being used — and misused. From politics to the workplace, power shows up as a force that divides as much as it connects. But underneath the headlines, the outrage, the polarization, the hate — something deeper is going on.
When we see hate, we’re often seeing just the outermost layer. Peel it back, and underneath the hate is usually anger. Beneath that, fear. Then pain. Grief. Loss. And at the very core: a profound sense of powerlessness. A feeling that we have no ability to affect what matters most.
Anger is often treated as dangerous or unproductive. But it can also be a powerful resource and a signal — an emotional flare pointing to something you care about being threatened. Community, justice, truth. If you understand what your anger is trying to protect, it becomes fuel for something good. Something healing. Something powerful.
But misdirected anger is a waste.
It’s like pouring rocket fuel into the wrong machine — arguing, canceling, punishing. It leads to scapegoating and lashing out. Misdirected anger sends us on a crusade against “bad people” or down a rabbit hole of technical fixes when what’s needed is something more adaptive, more relational, more human.
What if the deeper work is about dealing with the helplessness that sits at the root?
To do that, we need a more nuanced understanding of power. Not just who has it and who doesn’t, but what kind of power we’re talking about — and how we build it.
Power isn’t just what you have. It’s something we build — together.
Real power isn’t the authority someone wields over others. It’s not a title or a platform. Those forms exist, sure — but the more enduring and generative power is relational. Something we build with others, not something we hold over them. At a transactional level, relational power comes from providing people with the direction, order, protection and expertise (DOPE) they (and we all) crave. But it’s not just about that. It’s also about elevating people’s needs, desires and capabilities such that they seek higher ideals and better results than what the people currently in authority are capable of providing.
And when we act together, we organize power.
Organizing power is what happens when people join in common cause. As the saying goes: we’re not powerless, we’re just not yet organized. The civil rights movement, climate justice coalitions, community mutual aid networks — all remind us that the most formidable power often comes from people coming together. If you’ve ever seen this kind of power, you know it’s real, and transformational.
In a noisy world, even your attention is a form of power.
Where you place your attention — what you choose to witness, nourish and engage — is your essential, and perhaps only, choice. In a world designed to hijack and monetize your attention, reclaiming it is revolutionary. Attention is power. Reclaiming it is the first step toward rediscovering your own capacity for freedom (one of my working definitions of leadership). This is why I periodically engage in a news fast.
We also carry other forms of power.
Structural power. Physical power. But also creative power and inner power. The latter aren’t soft extras — they’re foundational. They’re the roots beneath our capacity to hold steady, to imagine a better future, and to persist in the face of despair.
So where does this leave us?
Start with this: reclaim your power by naming it. Of all of the above forms of power, structural power is the only one you can lose. The others you can grow by joining with others and by noticing who and what you attend to.
When anger comes, listen closely to what it’s trying to protect and then ask yourself what will heal, not harm.
Let me be very clear-eyed: healing power is radical — perhaps the most radical approach anyone has ever taken to address hate. Marvin Gaye (and many others) said it best: Only love can conquer hate. If you think that sounds soft or fuzzy, try it even once. Few things are as difficult as exercising the power of attending to the root of hate when every cell in your body yearns for revenge.
But don’t force yourself to do it. Force is just another form of fear-based power.
Instead, if revenge is what you truly want, trust that — and then take a critical look: does it really solve the problem, or just push the pain further down the road, waiting for the next fight to fight, the next war to wage.
If we want a world with less polarization and less hate (do you?), we have to build the kind of power that heals. Sometimes, the most powerful love is the kind that’s willing to act — from anger, yes, and also with a spirit of mercy born of clarity, courage and care. And sometimes, whether we’d like to or not, we need to walk every other path until we find the one that leads toward that which truly sustains us.