DailyJim: The courage to be powerful: If I want to be more loving, I must be more powerful

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Tuesday, March 4th, 2025, and today I want to talk about the courage to be powerful. If I want to be more loving, I must be more powerful. So I'm going to start by reading quite a long passage from a speech that Martin Luther King Jr. Gave in 1967 in Atlanta. I think it was titled, Where Do We Go From Here? And so it's a bit long, but stay with me. Talking about love and power, his famous quote on love and power.

Let's see. So he says, now the problem of transforming the ghetto, therefore, is a problem of power, a confrontation between the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to the preserving of the status quo. Now, power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change. Walter Ruther defined power one day. He said, power is the ability of a labor union like UAW to make the most powerful corporation in the world. General Motors say yes, when it wants to say no, that's power. Side note, relevant for me, my dad worked for General Motors for 40 something years. Now, a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns. And so often we have problems with power. But there's nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base, and one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused the philosopher Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was the same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject Nietzsche's philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best, power at its best is love, implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love, correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on. Now what has happened is that we've had it wrong and mixed up in our country, and this had led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral suasion devoid of power, and white Americans to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience. It is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes, the same destructive and consciousless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality, which constitutes the major crisis of our times. And then he goes on to talk about guaranteed annual income, which can be a topic of another day. But that that passage right there martin luther king talking about to be powerful we must be loving to be loving we must be powerful.

And I think, speaking from a personal perspective, I've not often desired to be very powerful, or at least not in the forefront of my mind or my heart.

What I think I've wanted the most is to be more loving.

Even so much that I went to a leadership training years ago, this was probably 2016, in California, led by George Colreaser. He's a former hostage negotiator who is a business professor in Switzerland. I believe transformational leadership or something along those lines.

And I was fortunate to do an exercise there. And I think they asked me what I was the most afraid of. And I was most afraid of being powerful. And they had me get down. He had me get down and try to just experience the feeling of being very powerful. And I went back to my football days and I got down in what they call a three-point stance you know American football players get down and and he had a couple people stand up and hold this foam mat and he said go and I pushed off and I pushed I think three people backwards towards the end of the room like screaming rah getting back into that powerful feeling that I haven't had, or haven't let myself feel in a very long time. And I reflect on that now as I think about trying to be very loving.

There's a limit if we don't have that power.

Now, power can come in many different forms. Maybe the feeling of power, right? Feeling powerful is one way to put it. But there's also, so that's maybe physical power, emotional power. There's also financial power. There's also maybe stylistic or fashion power or sexual power or social power. Many different ways that we can get power. And I think I've had fear of becoming more and more powerful.

Maybe it relates to back in the day when I was in school, and this may seem too honest for some people, but when I was in high school playing American football, I believe I was actually anorexic.

And I don't know how, hey, this is a bit vulnerable to share, but maybe easier to share on an audio only podcast. But one day the football coach called my mom and said that he was worried about my health. And I think what happened was that I got so focused on not necessarily being like really, really big and powerful, but like having so much control. And I got so scared at how much I, you know, in retrospect, how much I could disconnect from love and disconnect from emotions and really override the hunger that I had and override so many desires that my body was having just to try to, you know, fit this physical image or this powerful image that I had in my mind. And so I think a lot of times over the years, I've become afraid of being that powerful or, you know, just thinking that, you know, I was really powerful in school. I was very good academically. I got really good grades. I had a lot of friends. And in some ways, fearing how power can bring disconnection or thinking that power can bring disconnection and therefore fearing it.

And yeah, it can, but it also can bring love and connection. So let's take, for example, if I have no physical power and somebody falls down and they are hurting and they need to get up, how loving is it for me to be like, oh, look at the person, they're on the ground. I can care deeply for them, but would it not be more loving if I had the physical strength, the physical power to lift them up and carry them to the hospital or carry them to safe ground.

Would it not be more loving if I had the intellectual power to know how to carry them? To know where to go. To have the social power to know the connections to get them help. To have the financial power to be able to pay for their hospital bill.

To have the political power to be able to change how hospital billing works. Or change the environment that caused such an accident. For example, here in Kenya, if you go to the emergency room, you have to pay cash, whereas before you get services. Where in the U.S. there's a law that says you have to be treated before they even ask for payment. I believe that's the law. So the political power to change the environment, to change the rules of society, the cultural power to be able to change the unwritten rules, to change how we interact with each other, to change how we deal with conflict, to change how we communicate with each other. Would that not be more loving?

So I think often I have feared being more powerful because I've associated being more powerful with being less loving, right?

And I imagine there are people out there who fear being more loving because they associate it with being less powerful. Because they fell deeply in love with somebody and they became powerless and completely dependent and that person left and they were in shambles, they felt helpless. And they say to themselves, I'm never doing that again. Because I, if I fall in love, I will become powerless and I am never giving up my power again. But what if this is just a myth? What if maybe at the low levels, this is how it is, but when we get to really high levels of power, really high levels of love, if we want to go even higher, they need to reinforce each other.

And that's what I'm starting to see for myself. If I want to get even more loving, I need more power. I need more power. I need more physical power. I need more social power. I need more political power. I need more cultural power. I need more financial power.

Not just financial power, all of these powers. It's easy for me to focus on one power and say the financial power. Let me be more financially powerful. That's because I'm scared of being a celebrity, terrified of being a celebrity. But if I reframe being a celebrity as the opportunity to speak in front of a crowd and share messages and maybe change the way that they see life and change the way that they resolve conflict in their families, the way that they communicate towards themselves and towards others, then make me a celebrity. Let's go. Let's go. Get me the fame because fame is what? Nothing but social power, I would imagine. And so give me that social power so that I can use it again with a purpose to be achieved, to use it to create more loving conditions, to create culture that is much more loving and kind and reconciliatory, redemptive.

So this is me speaking to you as much as it's speaking to myself and reflecting on this idea of why have I been so afraid to be powerful? And I think it really stems back to what Martin Luther King was talking about, almost 60 years ago, 58 years ago, where he said we've had this concept that love and power are polar opposites, but they are not. They can mutually reinforce each other, especially, I believe, when we want to get to the high levels. You want to be super loving, you got to be super powerful. You want to be super powerful, you got to be super loving. There's no way to do it without, I believe.

And so this is, again, me speaking to you, speaking to myself, and going, wow, it's 12 minutes too late.

And recognizing that if my goal is to be more loving, how do I get more power, financially, socially? How do I ask people to give me more power? How do I ask people to connect me to radio stations, TV stations, put me in the spotlight? How do I ask people to give me tips on how to get more physically strong? How do I ask people to learn how to understand more medical power? So learning CPR or EMT training, how do I learn these skills so that I can be even more loving towards people? And for those of you who are listening think you don't want to be loving you want to be more powerful just recognize how being more loving could increase your power who are more powerful people the ones who are feared or the ones who are loved so who has more impact on the world.

Maybe the fear in the short term but the ones who have the really really high level of impact to the ones who are really loved. So that can be a topic for another day. Anyways, so that's the topic for today. I hope it helps you reflect on your life as well. And I feel more confident and frankly, more courageous to go towards power right now. It's okay to fear power because yeah, it could be disconnecting, but it can also be really connecting. So it could make me less loving, but it could also make me a lot more loving. And I think if I want to reach the top levels, I need to have more power. So I need to feel it more. All right. I'll talk to you all tomorrow. Bye.