Moving FROM anxiety TO A PLACE OF INNER POWER

Five years ago, I started feeling the rumblings of a calling. 

Seemingly everywhere I looked - from families, to workplaces, to politics - I was seeing a dynamic play out that I understood intimately as a white man: rising anxiety about what it means to live in an increasingly diverse society where whiteness and maleness are no longer the norm, and are in fact decreasing in cultural power. 

This anxiety was creating a lot of suffering for everyone. It was underlying so many issues, from workplace challenges, to marital discord, to addiction, to increasing political polarization.

Despite how pervasive this seemed, I wasn’t seeing many efforts aimed squarely at helping white people grow through and out of this anxiety, and perhaps even transform it into a positive force for growth and change. Instead, it seemed like white people were either lecturing other white people about how they should be, or just letting them flounder on their own. ​

This was personal for me. As a white man who had been immersed in a multi-racial social justice organization for more than a decade, I wasn’t immune to feeling this anxiety. If anything, I was intimately familiar with it.  

DEI strategy consultant Lily Zheng nailed it when she said that “the single one biggest anxiety that white male leaders have with regards to D.E.I. is not feeling like they have a future in the world that’s being created.” I felt this anxiety - about whether I (and my kids) would have a place in our future society - all the time. 

And yet I had few places or people that I felt comfortable turning to who I could trust would a) honor my feelings and experiences without judgment, b) help me work through them from this non-judgmental place, and c) help me develop and grow, and come to see for myself that my anxiety was actually misplaced. That, I actually had a lot to gain by engaging in the work for equity, diversion and inclusion. 

I had to go on this journey largely on my own, with a few friends here and there to help me, stumbling most of the way. It took more than a decade.  I eventually emerged in a better place - able to work more effectively across difference while remaining rooted in my own authenticity and internal power (although I still have so much to learn). But I think about how many others are still out there floundering on their own. It need not be this way. 

This is why I am leaving my job of 16 years and launching a coaching practice aimed at walking with white organizational leaders to transition to a deeper, more powerful understanding of who they really are and how they belong in an increasingly diverse world.

To be clear: this is not about teaching people the right things to do and say to be considered a good white anti-racist. Nor is it about calling people out for their behavior. My focus is on growing one’s inner power and capacity to see and create a positive future for themselves and those around them that is in deep alignment with a more just and equitable society.

Yes, you read this correctly. This is about growing white people’s internally-sourced power. Let me explain.

In “Power: A User's Guide”, executive coach Julie Diamond explains how people who have “positional power” (a role, title, or a social identity like whiteness or maleness that gives you some status of power) can come to rely on this external source of power to give them the feeling of power that they are unable to give themselves on the inside. It’s the lack of internally-sourced power that makes them so reliant on the externally-sourced power. 

Diamond argues that this lack of internally-sourced power, and reliance on externally-sourced power, is the number one reason people misuse their positional power. It’s also why even the mere thought of removing this externally-sourced power can be so threatening to someone who is so reliant on it.

I believe that it is the lack of this internally-sourced power - the power to see one’s future in an increasingly diverse world and be able to enact it in healthy ways - that is fueling the rising anxiety of many white people, and especially white men. And this is playing out everywhere, in both the private and public sector, on the left and right, in organizations big and small, with staff at all levels.

In so many ways, this is not at all surprising. When your social identity (as a white person, a man or any other social position of power) has for so long simply handed you a sense of your power, then it’s very easy to never have had to focus on developing the muscle of your own internally-sourced power. 

I believe operating from this internal seat of power is absolutely critical for any leader wishing to operate authentically and effectively in the multicultural world in which we are living, and is why a core focus of my coaching practice is about building this inner muscle.
In my next post, I’ll reflect on the fine line I’ve tried to walk throughout my decade-long growth journey as a white male leader immersed in racially and gender diverse settings, and some of the key learnings and developmental moves I’ve made.

​Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for my next post!