Once upon a time, I dreamed of being President of the United States. Not because I wanted to be of service, but because I wanted to be in charge.
I grew up in a military family overseas which means I was steeped in hierarchies of power. The higher your rank, the greater your power. President was the highest rank — Commander in Chief — so that’s where I set my sights. Because as a young female person born in the early 1970s, I did not have power. Or, rather, I did not perceive the power I had.
As a child, I was at the mercy of my parents. They had the power, not I. I would say this is true of most children in my generation (Gen X) and earlier. These days, I see promising trends in parenting that validate children’s knowingness and help them locate their agency. Still, metaphorically speaking, it is unwise to hand the wheel of a car to someone who does not know how to drive. So it makes sense that my parents would hold the reigns, to a certain degree, in my childhood.
But as someone with a strong drive for autonomy, it rankled me that so many outside forces called the shots in my life and not me. In particular, I felt unhappily controlled by my father’s military career.
It’s common for military families to move often. On the one hand, I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to live in Germany for many years. I’m especially grateful that I was able to attend the International School of Düsseldorf as a teenager, where I participated in math competitions in different European cities and played in soccer tournaments in countries as close as neighboring Austria and as far off as Greece.
On the other hand, I count our constant moving during my childhood as one of my core wounds. It was painful to move every three years or less. By my count, I attended 10 different schools between Kindergarten and 12th grade. Every time we moved, my heart would break.
I suffered from a sense of rootlessness, and even decades after I left my family of origin, this pattern of constant moving continued to influence me. In fact, until I moved to Oregon in my mid-40s, the longest I’d ever lived at any given address was three years. I was forever yearning for a sense of “home.”
This shifted a few years ago when I asked my young daughter “What is your favorite place?” to which she replied “You.” I had never thought of myself (or anyone) as a “place” before. That night changed the shape of my motherhood and it changed my relationship to home. Home wasn’t something to achieve, it was something I had become.
In my 20s, something very similar happened to me in my relationship to power, and I dropped all interest in becoming President. Honestly, I had lost interest long before then — as I am not particularly adept at politics. But the rank I had craved as a child who felt powerless became irrelevant as I discovered that power is not something to achieve but something to be.
I came of age in San Francisco in the mid-1990s while participating in a community that practiced feminist, earth-based spirituality. This community did a really good job of modeling shared power and co-leadership. Within its teachings and approaches, I expanded my understanding of power as strictly power-over (as in the military) to also include the power that dwells within each of us and the power of essential life force energy.
As I sourced power within myself and began to partner with life force energy toward my own transformation and healing, I could feel that power wasn’t something to try to obtain out there. It was an aliveness I was cultivating in here.
When my understanding of power began to change, my understanding of leadership shifted away from the idea of being in charge — as I had desired so deeply as a child — into a new understanding of leadership as being in partnership and being of service.
I still have a strong desire to be in charge of my own life, but most decidedly not in charge of the lives of others. In the classes I teach and sessions I facilitate, my aim is to support people claiming their own sovereignty, agency, and power — not to accord with mine. As I often say to my clients and students, if what I say doesn’t resonate, discard it. My desire is that every person understands, feels, holds, and wields their own power — their own life force energy — with wisdom and grace.
As it relates to my childhood dream of being President of the United States, I am grateful that humans have so many intervening years between wounded impulse and actualization. I wish for all of us that anyone who desires the rank of Commander in Chief — of this country or any other — comes from a place of being in service rather than being in charge. The world doesn’t need a wounded child driving the car.