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« Ancient Mariners Feel the Heat | Main | Flow »
October 30, 2007 |Permalink |Comments (1)
The Power of Influence
Ummm, Naomi Dagen Bloom wrecks house.
I bumped this up from the comments.
your responses today at TGB particularly resonated for me, "let go of youth...embrace..." old age. many of my peers are emotionally challenged by that important notion. sometimes, as an active elder among younger people, i have to remind myself about that also.could i suggest an area of investigation for your blog? it would be the role of social action in the lives of those beyond retirement. in the current focus on volunteering as an important activity for elders--and it is--i believe it has great value to ourselves as well as our society. for some it means risk-taking that was desired but avoided due to employment constraints.
NDB,
A key transformation wrought by our longevity involves the purposeful surrender of POWER.
(By power I mean the ability to force or coerce others to take or refrain from actions they would otherwise prefer.)
In its place, INFLUENCE becomes a most useful instrument which can, when grasped firmly, be wielded with great skill.
(By influence I mean the ability to lead others to new and unique conclusions about the course of action they choose for themselves. Influence is, by definition, free from coercion.)
I went out onto the World Wide Web looking for an example of what I mean and I found this.
One final note. Any person who can not see the deep relationships that unite "peace, politics and yarnlife after 60"--- doesn't understand life. (smile)
Comments ( 1)
Influence and power . . .late in life . . brought up two things for me. One is "Leadership Without Easy Answers" by Robert (?) Heifetz, professor at Harvard Kennedy School, where he develops the theme that leadership comes not from power, position or coersion but from being able -- from whatever rank or position in life -- to help people move toward walking the talk. Three ingredients: timing where there is a situation that is creating pressure for change; ability to contain the urge or movement for change in a safe space, and three spreading the "power" among everyone, involving everyone in the momentum of change. His example for both successful leadership and failed leadership was in Lyndon Johnson. In civil rights, when he became president, he worked with civil rights leaders and told them to go do their thing, he would work with Everett Dirksen to move the Senate. When the blood began to flow in Alabama, Mississippi, etc., he resisted the early calls to send in the militias until the nation was revulsed at what it saw on TV and the southern governors came begging for help. Within 3 months the civil rights act of 1964 was passed. The contrary was his management of the Vietnam War, that destroyed his presidency. While the outrage grew, he closed in more and more within his own circle of advisors, failed to read either the military situation or the domestic uproar, and his leadership effectively collapsed. (One can think of contemporary examples).
My second thought was the example of my mother who capped off a very varied life with plunging into gay and lesbian politics in her state of retirement, Rhode Island, where she joined numerous groups, held meetings, went to marches, and organized a number of blue hairs and youngsters to corral all of the church leaders in RI to either support or remain in silent neutrality or non-opposition to the inclusion of sexual orientation as a criterion of discrimination. The bill passed! She also lectured in high schools on tolerance for gay and lesbian teenagers, teaching sensitivity classes. She loved her involvement. She loved her successes. She above all loved working with young men and women in a cause that she really thought worth doing. It gave her end of life a whole new dimension and recognition that her earlier accomplishments, wonderful but more quiet as they were, hadn't given her. I believe she exercised great leadership, particularly among the ministers, pastors, rabbis, and priests, to live by their credo that God (if there is such a thing) loves everyone.
Did she mature from "doing" to "being", I don't know, dementia caught up with her and left the question unanswered.