Read an Excerpt
Introduction: About Power
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
—Alice Walker
Women today have more opportunities than our mothers and grandmothers ever had, and yet the societal structures we must navigate to claim and own some of these opportunities can still lead us to question our abilities and our power. For many women, “power” is abstract. Many of us have been and continue to be intimidated by it. Throughout this book you will find that I have not used concepts of “soft power” or “personal power.” This is deliberate. Power is power. We do not need to “feminize” it to make it more palatable; we need to redefine it. I want us to reacquaint ourselves with this word in a positive way.
Countless women were raised like me to believe that power belongs to others, that it is destructive, and therefore they had no interest in exploring or owning power for themselves. My relationship to power has mainly been one of powerlessness.
In my experience, power was White—either a White man in a suit, or a White woman who was blonde and thin. A college education also meant power—if you had a degree, you had more power than someone who didn’t. Being able to get a college education was linked to privilege, which was linked to Whiteness, which in turn was linked to power.
At school I was Black, female, and overweight, and a college degree was not an option for me. Power, as it appeared to me then, was not a concept I recognized for myself. Over time I have needed to explore and define power on my own terms.
Julie Diamond is a woman whose work I admire when it comes to the subject of power—she is a leadership coach who has spent more than thirty years working in the world of human and organizational change. She is also the author of Power: A User’s Guide, in which she writes: “Power is neither good nor bad; it is energy, a human drive to shape the world, influence others, and make an impact. We need power. Power may be difficult to master, but it’s vital to have. It’s generative and creative.”
I like her explanation of power; it’s so much more inclusive than what I had experienced or been led to believe. Add to that the Oxford English Dictionary definition of power—“the ability or capacity to do something or act in a particular way”—and we have something positive to work with. We all have the ability to do something or act in a particular way. So power is for all of us; it is not for the select few.
In my book The Gift of Asking, I talk about the struggle many women have with asking for what they need and want. One of the reasons for this struggle is the belief that to ask is to rock the boat, to no longer be seen as a “good girl.” Being “good”—not asking for more, pleasing others, doing what we are told, and looking “good”—is a way for women to hold ourselves and each other powerless.
I have coached hundreds of women in my one‑on‑one practice and thousands of women in group settings. These are women in CEO roles, women running their own companies, entrepreneurs, managers, women on the land, professional athletes, yoga teachers, activists, social workers, and coaches—women in various positions in diverse industries. Rarely do these women start working with me to explore their power, but in the coaching process most uncover their relationship with power in the same way they uncover their relationship to asking. They explore the times they owned their power, when they had their power taken away, when they gave it away, how they have stepped into their power, and how life changes when they own and harness that power.
I am writing this book now at a place in my life where I am no longer going to pretend I don’t have any power. And I am definitely no longer interested in being a good girl. And my intention is that by the end of this book, you’ll step out of your version of being a “good girl” and step into becoming a fully expressed woman.
Power that is created by a system based on a person’s gender, privilege, and “granted” status makes us believe it only belongs to a chosen few. And the continuity of this system depends on the chosen few inviting others who look like them and have the same upbringing as them to the power table. The rest of us are excluded. If you are reading this book, you are undoubtedly one of “the rest of us” and you know how the system works. You know how it affects us every day—the world we live in has been set up to keep us small. For many years I heard “The system is broken,” but this is a rose-colored way of looking at things. It gives the impression that there was once, in the “days of old,” a system that served everyone equally, and somehow one day, or even over a period of time, that system collapsed. But let’s take off the rose-colored glasses and confront the truth. The system was meant to be this way; nothing got broken. The system was set up for men, it was set up for Whiteness. And the tragedy is that within that system, many of us have felt broken.
Whether you are reading this as a woman, a woman of color, a queer woman, a nonbinary person, or a disabled woman, you know. We all know what it feels like to be told we are broken. We internalize these myths—and when we do, we are complicit in the system and we keep ourselves exactly where we are told we belong.
I have learned, as many women have, how to live and lead “as an apology.” Let me clarify what I mean here:
· I learned how to make myself small by not sharing my opinions, for fear of not being liked, because we are led to believe that being liked is our most important value.
· I learned to pretend I didn’t have needs and wants because I didn’t want to be told I was needy or difficult.
· I learned how to be a “good girl,” to only do what was expected of me and toe the line.
· I learned how to apologize when speaking, diminishing the power of my words by smiling, or giggling “to soften my meaning” or my voice, or by actually apologizing before I spoke: “I’m sorry to say this, but . . .”
· I learned how to deny my leadership capabilities because my mind was fraught with the possibility of judgment and failure.
· I learned how to live “as an apology” as a Black woman navigating predominantly White spaces.
This was my version of living and leading as an apology. What does your version look like?
In contrast, what does living and leading without apology look like?
· It means that we take up space, without apology.
· It means that we communicate our needs because we are worthy of having our needs met.
· It means we operate in the world as full expressions of ourselves, creating our own unique paths.
· It means we own our opinions and voices, without diminishment or apology.
· It means that if we want leadership, we can step into leadership knowing that judgment and failure are part of the deal.
· It means that if we are called to leadership, we don’t assume we are not good enough. We understand we will learn as we go.
· It means that we stand proud in our racial identity and ethnicity, and support others to do the same.
Now is the time to elevate our individual power and the power of other women, because the world needs women to own their power like never before. It is time we own our ability to “do something or act in a particular way,” to build a better system from the inside out.
The shift from external to internal
I wrote this book to show you how I shifted the Power Stories I had about myself, so you can do the same with your own Power Stories.
Let’s start by thinking about “external” power.
In 2019, I trained with Dr. Brené Brown to be a facilitator of her Dare to Lead™ leadership program. Brené Brown is a research professor and her work focuses on shame, vulnerability, and courage. She talks about the “power over” model, where people use shame and fear to wield power over others. We can see the results of this form of power everywhere, across the world, and the results of the fear of losing that perceived power. This is a power that sits outside of oneself. It can be taken away at any moment, which is why the wielders of this form of power hold on to it so tightly. Their perception of their own power is so fragile they need to use shame and fear to keep hold of it.
We don’t need more of this kind of power in the world, and historically this form of power is created and perpetuated by men. Even back in the eighteenth century, the English writer, philosopher, and women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft recognized this, declaring, “I do not wish women to have power over men; but power over themselves.”
This form of power has led us to believe that there is only so much power to go around. In this system, if you have power, I can’t have it, and vice versa. Many women who work or have worked within patriarchal structures have seen this form of power play out in every way. Some of these women were smart enough to know that they would need to play the “power game” to achieve their career ambitions. But to succeed, they had to perpetuate the idea that power was scarce and they “needed to protect their patch”—and perhaps as a result they were not able or willing to support other women in their careers. On top of that, the women “in power” would have felt isolated in a structure that was not built for women to thrive. There are many downsides to this type of power.
But power does not have to be an external force. When power is an internal force, it is an abundant resource: I can have it and you can have it too.
The power I want to guide you to cultivate through this book comes from building an internal force. A power built internally is stronger than any power bestowed from an external force.
Imagine a wall. Not fully formed.
To begin its life, a wall needs bricks, and bricks need to be made out of clay. Let’s imagine that what forms the clay are your lived experiences, your ethnicity, your culture—everything that has made you who you are. But the clay needs to be formed into bricks: it is molded, like you have been, by your unique talents and accumulated skills over time. And what holds a wall together? Mortar. The mortar is your values—our values hold everything together.
Some of your wall will be built extremely quickly depending on your wall’s location (where you were born in the birth lottery) and the help you receive from others (family, teachers, mentors). Other bricks will take decades to find their place. But they do have a place.
And your wall will be attacked: sometimes on purpose and sometimes by accident, sometimes by individuals and sometimes by a system or an environment that is out of your control. Your wall—our power—will feel damaged and broken until you remember that you formed the clay and the bricks and the mortar that built the wall in the first place, which means you can rebuild your power and reinforce your wall again and again and again.
Sometimes you will need support, as cracks start to show, or as the foundation is weakened.
Sometimes you may need to make a new blend of mortar—redefine your values—at certain stages in life, but it’s still your wall.
You are the builder of your power.
Writing this book
I have a deep relationship with words. I have an ear for words that are said and words that are unsaid.
It surely comes from being a professional coach for nearly a decade, but it also comes from growing up in a culture where only the “correct” and “proper” things were meant to be said. A culture where manners and niceties were respected more than the truth. A culture where I had to mind everything I said because of what was said about me and my “kind,” because of what I was told about me and my “kind,” and because of what I learned to believe about me and my “kind.” I have a hearing for words unsaid because I am Black and English by birth.
When the title of this book came to me, I felt emotional, and nauseated. As soon as I’d thought of the word “power,” my next thought was, “Who do you think you are to write a book about power?” And that was when I knew I needed to write it, because this is the book I was too scared to write.
When I sat down to unpack and write some of my stories for this book, I realized how often my powerlessness was to do with my race rather than my gender, though the two are very much connected. I have lived in this Black skin for nearly five decades and I have experienced many forms of racism. This includes having the N‑word blatantly shouted at me from moving cars, all the way to the microaggressions (the daily, subtle slights I’ve experienced because of my race, which compound to cause harm) that are delivered with such subtlety I sometimes wonder if I am imagining them. It is possible for a person to gaslight themselves: to question their own reality if their lived experiences are routinely questioned by others.
As I began to write the stories of my life that involved the themes of power and race, a little voice within said, “If you write too much about being Black, it will make the White readers uncomfortable, and they won’t like the book.”
As a Black person, I have found it difficult to write about some of my lived experiences. I knew that if I was to write without fear, I had to tap into writers I admired. I am thankful to Maxine Beneba Clarke for writing The Hate Race, a memoir of growing up as a Black Afro-Caribbean woman in Australia in the 1980s. And as I embarked on writing this book I knew it was time to read Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, because I had a feeling author Reni Eddo-Lodge had put into words what I have struggled to say and write in the past. I participated in online writing courses with Roxane Gay and Ashley C. Ford to help own my life and my voice. These are two well-known and highly respected authors, both Black women, who write about their lived experiences without apology.
Apart from the broader experience of being a Black woman in a Western country, also know that “not wanting to upset the White people” comes from my childhood as a Black girl fostered to five different White families for my first eighteen years of life.
I was born in England to middle-class Nigerian parents in the 1970s. I was one of the tens of thousands of Nigerian children who were fostered in England. Nigerian parents fostered their children to White families through a network of “unofficial” caregiver families. My parents were like any others—they made decisions they thought would give their children the best opportunities in life. The ultimate plan for all of us children was that we would return to Nigeria and become its English-educated doctors and lawyers. I would see my birth mother during the school holidays when we would stay with her in her flat in London when she was in the United Kingdom. I have only one memory of spending time with my father—a great memory of a vacation in Paris, but only the one memory.
For the record, I have never resented my parents for the decisions they made about my life. I have had other feelings, but never blame or resentment. I knew why they did what they did, and I know their choices came from a sense of parental duty and wanting to give the best to their children.
