What Everyone Gets Wrong About Power

You want influence over your own life. Maybe over decisions at work. Maybe in a relationship that's been running on someone else's terms. So you've been trying to take it — asserting more, speaking up, pushing back. And somehow it's made things worse. People pull away. Meetings get tenser. The person closest to you has become defensive instead of closer. You're more controlling and less powerful. Something about the direct approach isn't working.

What Everyone Gets Wrong About Power

Most people believe that power is something you acquire and defend. You get it by being dominant, by making your position clear, by refusing to back down. This model is everywhere — in business advice, in relationship counseling, in the stories we tell about successful people. It makes intuitive sense because dominance is visible. When you see someone command a room, or win an argument, or get their way, you can point to the mechanism. They were stronger, louder, more willing to push. The myth persists because it explains what you can see.

But this view misses something critical. It treats power as a scarce resource that one person gains by taking from another. That zero-sum logic leads people to grab for control in ways that actually erode their real influence. A parent who rules through fear has compliance, not respect. A partner who wins every argument has a spouse who lies or leaves. A manager who demands submission has employees who do the minimum and look for other jobs. The pursuit of power through dominance often produces the opposite of what the person actually wants: connection that feels real, decisions that are freely made by people who trust them, a team that goes harder for them because they want to.

A manager, mid-career, had built a reputation for being tough. She made decisions fast. She didn't tolerate disagreement. Her team did what she said, and the numbers looked good. But when a larger opportunity came up that required her team's full creative effort, they delivered what was technically asked for and nothing more. No ideas. No extra push. No ownership. She realized that the fear she'd cultivated prevented the very thing she needed: people thinking for themselves within her direction, solving problems she couldn't see, building something with her instead of just following her.

She had power in the narrow sense — she could fire them, they knew it, they complied. But she had no power in the way that actually matters: the ability to shape outcomes beyond what she could control alone. That requires something different from dominance.

She started small. In the next planning meeting, instead of deciding first and announcing, she asked what people saw that she might be missing. She didn't do it as manipulation — she asked because she genuinely didn't have all the information. The shift was visible within weeks. People offered ideas. They disagreed, but differently, because the conversation was actually about the problem instead of about her position. Within months, her best person, who had been interviewing elsewhere, decided to stay. The work got better. Her actual influence grew, even though she'd given up the constant assertion of dominance.

What Is Actually Going On

Schwartz's research in values theory, which began in 1992 and has been tested across more than 80 countries, found that human values exist in a circular structure. Some values naturally align — they support each other. Others sit opposite each other on the circle, in tension. Power, in Schwartz's framework, sits in direct opposition to values like fairness, concern for others, and equality. They're not compatible at the same intensity. When you prioritize one, the other diminishes. This isn't a moral statement. It's a structural fact about how human motivation works.

The misunderstanding of power comes from confusing it with authority. Authority is a position. Power is the ability to shape what happens. Real power doesn't require dominance because other people are cooperating. They're solving problems with you. They're bringing information you don't have. They're not playing it safe. That cooperation only happens when the other person isn't defending against you. When they feel you're trying to control them, Bowlby's attachment theory explains what happens next: they become defensive, compliant, or distant. The behavior changes, but the relationship changes too. The value exchange collapses.

This doesn't mean power requires passivity or that you accept poor performance or disrespect. It means the way you exercise authority matters more than the fact that you have it. The one thing to take away: power in the real world — the kind that produces sustained influence — comes from being trusted with others' wellbeing, not from controlling their choices.

What Changes When You See It Clearly

Once you separate authority from dominance, your choices shift. You can make hard decisions without making people fear you. You can disagree with someone without treating disagreement as disloyalty. You can ask for what you need without needing to prove you deserve it. None of this is soft. It's the opposite. You become more willing to have real conversations because you're not using the conversation as a power play. The other person is less defended, so you actually learn what's going on. You make better decisions.

In relationships, the pattern is even sharper. The couples who stay close aren't the ones where one person dominates. They're the ones where both people feel they have some say, some agency, some respect. The moment you need your partner to obey rather than choose, you've already lost what you actually wanted: a life with someone who wants to be there. The same applies to your kids, your team, people you lead. The hard way — the way that works — is to build authority on trust, not on fear.

If you're not clear on what your actual values are versus what you've inherited or what you think you should want, the My Values assessment will show you where power sits in your own hierarchy and where you're spending energy trying to live out values that conflict with it.