What's our responsibility to ourselves and each other?

I’ve been thinking a lot about power lately.

And, truth be told it’s partially because of what I’ve been watching unfold around the District 1 City Council election here in Tulsa. Now this is not a political piece of writing. I don’t live in District 1, so I don’t have a vote in this race, and I’m not interested in telling the people who do what their decision ought to be. I have a perspective that I’m willing to share privately with those that ask but I’m not here to endorse or promote one candidate or the other. 

But I am here to share my perspective as a human living in Tulsa for the last 12 years.

Watching the conversations, disagreements, loyalties, frustrations, and questions surrounding this election has brought me back to something I’ve been thinking about for the last couple of years:

What does our personal relationship with power require of us when we are also responsible to the collective?

One of my favorite reflections on power comes from Hiro Boga, who writes:

"Power is not evil ~ far from it. Power is simply the ability to make things happen.

Power is the active form of love. It is also the first quality to emerge from formlessness into form ~ it is the soul quality that makes all forms possible. You cannot make anything without taking action.

If you’re afraid of power, if you consider power-over as the definition of power, if you believe that power is a corrupting force, you’ll shy away from using your power to act on your vision of a freer more just and inclusive world (to offer just one example).

You’ll also struggle to create what you want in your life and business, because every creation requires power to bring it out of the realm of ideas and imagination into physical form.

Now is the time to befriend power. If you don’t, those who abuse it will define it for you.

-Hiro Boga

Power is the active form of love.

I love this definition because it begins somewhere different than many of our conversations about power. It doesn't begin with a title. Or authority. Or control. It begins with capacity. The capacity to act. To choose. To create. To speak. To influence. To imagine something that doesn't exist yet and participate in bringing it into being.

In that sense, power is innate. It’s in us already. We have everything we need in order to be in a relationship with it. To harness it, to witness it, to cherish it.

So if power is innate, then the question isn't simply "Who has power?"

The more interesting question might be: What does having power make us responsible for?

Because none of us exercises our power in a vacuum. The same way my choices affect other people, so does yours. The same way my voice exists alongside other voices, so does yours.

What I create becomes part of a world other people get to create in, too. And that means my individual power exists in relationship with the collective.

That's where this gets fun to think about.

I believe deeply in individual agency. I want people to trust themselves. To know themselves.

To understand what they need in order to thrive in life.

To use their voices.

To stop outsourcing their inner authority and waiting for someone else to give them permission to become who they already know and/or want themselves to be.

But I don't believe individual agency absolves us of responsibility to one another. 

I can belong to myself and still belong to something bigger than me.

My freedom doesn't erase your dignity. My agency doesn't eliminate my accountability.

Your freedom doesn’t erase my dignity.  Your agency doesn’t eliminate your accountability

And for real for real, my ability to make something happen doesn’t automatically mean that I must.

What's more important is that when I do choose to act, I do so with intention and care.

I’ve been wondering if maybe that's part of what power requires of us:

to have more intentionality and care.

And community leadership makes that tension visible.

Community leadership requires the willingness to step forward and to say "I'll take the responsibility. I'll make the decision. I'll put my name on it. I'll risk getting it wrong. I'll serve"

We also need leaders who are willing to say "I'm not going to believe my own bullshit" - Brian "Tosh" Chontosh. Credit where it’s due: I first heard Tosh say ‘don’t believe your own bullshit’ on a camping trip at his ranch in Colorado, and clearly it lodged itself permanently in my brain.

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To add to the complexity - there are moments when leadership requires conviction. When someone has to make the call. When consensus isn't possible. When standing firm is exactly what responsibility demands.

And at the same time, leadership also requires us to listen. To make room.

To know when to make space for what someone else is creating.

To recognize that being capable of leading doesn't mean we must always be the person who leads. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is create the conditions for someone else's power to emerge.

To be clear, I’m not saying that either stepping forward or stepping aside is inherently more virtuous.

Sometimes staying is an act of service.

Sometimes leaving is.

Sometimes leadership means holding your ground.

Sometimes leadership means making room. 

The work is developing a relationship with our own power while intentionally honoring, validating, and respecting the power of others.

And elected office makes all of this particularly interesting to me.

An elected official has decision-making power that the rest of us do not have.

But that authority exists because a community has entrusted them with it.

Which means elected power is simultaneously individual and collective.

An elected official has their own personal convictions, judgment, experiences, values, ambitions, and vision.

And they are responsible to people with their own needs, histories, hopes, disagreements, wounds, and visions of their own. And all of those matter.

So what does responsible elected power look like?

• How do you lead with conviction while remaining accountable to people who disagree with you?

  
  

• How do you exercise the authority of your position while remembering that the power underneath that position ultimately comes from a collective?

  
  

• How do you know when leadership requires you to step forward, stand firm, collaborate, make room and/or step aside?

And maybe that's where another distinction about power becomes useful.

Hiro Boga warns about what happens when we understand power primarily as power-over.

I've been wondering about the alternative: What does it actually mean to practice power-with?

I don't think power-with means pretending everyone has the same role. We don't.

I don't think it means only certain groups get their way.

It doesn't mean abandoning expertise, boundaries, conviction, dignity, belonging and connection, or adaptive leadership in pursuit of endless consensus.

So power-with can't simply mean we all have equal say in everything - or can it?👀

Maybe power-with means recognizing that my power does not require your powerlessness.

Maybe it means exercising my agency without denying yours.

Maybe it means understanding authority as a responsibility rather than ownership.

Maybe it means asking not only, "Can I make this happen? but also, Should I? And, What am I making possible for the people around me?"

I think that’s the tension I'm actually sitting with as I watch this election.

Not who deserves power.

Not whether power itself is good or bad.

But what kind of relationship with power does a healthy community require from all of us, especially the people we elect and entrust with more of it?

I don't have a neat answer.

But I think there's something really important in the space between individual agency and collective responsibility.

Between stepping forward and stepping back.

Between using our power and making room for the power of the people around us.

Between power-over and power-with.

Because if power really is our innate ability to make things happen, then perhaps the question isn't whether we should be powerful.

We already are.

The question is what we are willing to be responsible for because of it, and what becomes possible when we choose to be powerful together.