How Do You Feel About Power?
Do you know your power colors? How important is it to you to feel powerful? I suspect a lot of people are a little ambivalent about the whole concept of power.Â
Recently I was introduced to a feelings wheel with three negative emotions; sad, mad, and scared; and three positive emotions; joyful, powerful, and peaceful. In this episode, I’m talking about the relationship between anger and feeling powerful, then I’m going to share some strategies to help enhance your feelings of power, and finally how you can figure out your power colors.
For a deep dive into more of the ideas behind this episode, and this particular feelings wheel model, ou may want to listen to the Personality Hacker podcast episode 543, Emotions You Are Avoiding.
The first thing that surprised me in this is the idea that powerful is considered in this model to be one of the three primary positive emotions. The second was the connection between the feeling of mad or anger and powerful.
And here’s the pattern that stands out to me: people who tend to suppress anger also have a tendency to struggle with believing they have the power to achieve the impact they want to have in The world.
For sure, this is an area of growth for me. One of the ways I am working on growing this is to share with people how their actions impact me.
Personality Types Relationships to Feelings
You might think because I am a feeling type, that I’m Good at being in touch with my own feelings, But that’s not exactly true. Actually, Awareness of my own feelings is in my shadow, because my preferred function is extroverted feeling which is more focused on others, the group, and culture. There are only a handful of Myers-Briggs types who have a strength around being connected to their own feelings; if you would like to dive in to your personality type on a deeper level, I offer conversational profiling and can help you figure that out.
Hacks for Feeling More Powerful (Includes Wearing Power Colors)
- allow yourself to take up space. Stand big. (Do you ever struggle with the idea that you shouldn’t be able to take up space? I always thought that was just me, but I hear more and more people admit that they have this problem too.)
- related: certain yoga poses
- listening to music. I tried listening to some perky, powerful music and dancing (by myself, in my bedroom, with all the blinds closed) with really big moves, taking up alot of space. This really did leave me feeling more powerful, Plus it’s good exercise.
- wearing your power colors
Three Versions of Power Colors
- Your power neutral is the neutral that creates the most value contrast with your skin. That is black for someone with the very light skin and white for someone with very dark skin.
- A power color is an intense version of the hue that creates the most color contrast with your skin tone. This is the compliment, the complementary color, to your skin tone. If your skin tone is peach, your power color might be royal blue; if your skin is olive, your power color might be aubergine. This can be tricky for the untrained eye to see. Your power colors are just one segment of what you get in your Signature Color Palette Guide.
- Red as a power color can be anything from orange to Burgundy and all kinds of shades in between. The trick is, for women, whether you are going for romantic power, in which case you want to use softer fabrics and feminine styles, or more business world power, in which case you would want to use more structured fabrics and tailored styles.
I suggest for homework that you take a moment to journal or just consider your relationship to the feeling of being powerful.