Gentle and powerful

Is it possible to be both?

I was listening to a podcast the other day and I heard the sentence, “Cultivate your gentle and powerful voice.” The phrase "gentle and powerful” stuck with me because it seems like both an oxymoron and also a highly desirable combination.

Power, as I’ve experienced it, means the ability to make things happen in the world when you want them to. It is almost always accompanied by money in our culture. The gentleness I’m envisioning is the the quality one would bring to caring for an injured bird, encompassing soft tone and touch and an infusion of compassion. Gentle and powerful. It is not the archetype of power that dominates today. But is it possible?

My discomfort with power has often stemmed from the lack of gentleness. For example, once when I was running my startup, I went to lunch with an important man, as one does. I had a busy day leading up to the lunch, and so I didn’t do much preparation (which I normally would have done. But it was just a lunch, not a presentation. I am pre-defending myself. I need you to know I am usually prepared for things).

Within minutes of us sitting down, this man mentioned two people I knew, and I indicated off-handedly, and with surely the most casual, positive tone, that I had no idea he was connected with them—what a coincidence! He looked down at me, literally and figuratively, from across the table.

“Do you even know who I am?” he asked. Unsure how to answer the question, I said,

“No? I guess?” He looked me in the eye and said,

“Here’s a tip. Before meetings, do your research.”

In that moment I morphed into the most base creature on earth, the most stupid, the most nobody, the most failed, horrible, stinking puddle of worthlessness. I’m sensitive, you see. And power so often comes with this type of hard edge. I’m the important one at this table, power seems to say, I’ll do what I want.

I just wonder, does power have to be so harsh? I care about this because I remember how power made me feel so often, like I was worthless, even as someone with so many advantages in this world. I think this endemic harshness radiates hurt throughout the system. It’s one reason I had to extricate myself from that whole game. But I’m still not ready to give up on power, I’m rather interested in considering a new vision for what it could look like to be powerful. Of which gentleness could be an interesting part.

When I run through my mental rolodex of powerful people I met while working at McKinsey & Company, while going to the World Economic Forum in Davos, while starting and selling a company in Silicon Valley (all that to say, I have met more than my share), I can only think of one or two that I might describe as gentle. Even then, what I saw in them was really streaks of gentleness, not equal parts power and gentleness. I, too, was mostly not gentle. It felt impossible to get by in that world being gentle.

When I think of what it would look like to truly be both powerful and gentle, the first thing that comes to mind is a tree. A redwood tree. A redwood tree is a being that stands tall, that is unapologetically alive in the world. It is immovable, it is persistent, it is even competitive. And yet a redwood tree is nurturing, it is giving and silent and patient and sturdy. It is flexible and cyclical. It provides generously for other beings.

I don’t know exactly what it would look like to wield power like a redwood tree within the context of my culture, but I am interested in looking for examples and experimenting with the idea.

Do you know any powerful people who lead like redwood trees? I would love to hear about them.

—Rae