See the Series Introduction for Just Tao It, Part I: HERE
See the Just Tao It Series Introduction Tao/It on-ramp, PART II: HERE
See Just Tao It, Chapter 1: HERE

From my interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 36 (Unpublished):

Reduction,
relies on expansion.

Illumination,
depends on hidden.

Risen,
comes from ruin.

Taken,
returns as given.

What shows,
is shaped by what is not.

To hold the light,
let go of the fight.

To quickly go,
let in the slow.

To be mighty,
be gently.

—

I have lived on both poles of this polarity, serially, certain each time that I had finally found the right one.

Early in my career, I over-identified with Power. I had frameworks. I could diagnose a system in an afternoon and see a pattern a client hadn’t noticed in twenty years. I remember one meeting where I laid out everything wrong with a leadership team in about eleven minutes, watched heads nod around the table, and walked out feeling like I’d just done my best work of the year. I moved organizations forward, and I used that capability with a kind of confidence that looked like leadership and felt like effectiveness — right up until I noticed what it was costing. Questions stopped getting asked around me. People stopped offering the perspective that might have slowed me down. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to understand that the nodding in that room was never agreement. It was people who had learned that disagreeing with me cost more than it was worth. The relationships stayed professional and never deepened into the kind of trust real transformation requires. I was good at helping systems move. I was not nearly as good at helping them develop the capacity to keep moving after I left the room.

So I overcorrected toward Love. I got serious about inclusion, reflection, dialogue, shared ownership, making certain everyone felt heard. I remember walking out of a meeting once where we’d spent ninety minutes making sure every voice in the room got airtime, feeling genuinely good about it, and realizing on the elevator ride down that we hadn’t decided anything. Everyone left feeling heard. Nothing left the room different. For a while the whole approach worked beautifully. Then decisions started taking longer than they needed to. Clarity blurred. Conflict avoidance learned to dress itself up as compassion, and I watched systems slowly lose the capacity to move decisively at the exact moments that called for it most.

Both approaches worked, for a while. Both eroded trust, eventually. Both were the same mistake wearing different clothes: trying to solve a living tension by choosing one side.

Barry Oshry spent decades helping leaders see this same split show up inside their organizations. Martin Luther King Jr. named it in a single sentence I haven’t been able to shake since I first read it: Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.

Power differentiates — it gives a system boundaries, accountability, direction, the capacity to act. Love integrates — it reconnects people to shared purpose, to each other, to the whole those boundaries were supposed to be serving in the first place. A system, or a person, needs both doing their job at the same time. I needed both, and mostly still do.

I notice the same imbalance everywhere I look right now, in rooms much larger than the ones I used to consult in. Certainty gets rewarded as though it were competence. Volume gets mistaken for strength. Cruelty gets relabeled as toughness, and winning gets disconnected from the whole thing winning was supposed to protect. The Tao described this long ago.

Chapter 36 closes with lines that sound almost absurd inside a culture this loud: to hold the light, let go of the fight; to quickly go, let in the slow; to be mighty, be gently. I’ve watched those lines describe the leaders I trust most — rarely the loudest person in the room, holding power without ever needing to humiliate anyone to prove they have it. It’s a harder thing to pull off than domination, and it lasts longer.

I think about that first roomful of nodding heads sometimes. I’d like to believe I’d hear it differently now.

To hold the light,
let go of the fight.

To quickly go,
let in the slow.

To be mighty,

be gently.

Here’s a Polarity Map for Power AND Love:

My Chapter written with the support of Barry Oshry in And, Volume 2: Applications: And_V2_PEEK_C36_OSHRY

INVITATIONS:
How is Power And Love showing-up for you in these challenging times? If you want, try the AI-trained “Chat w/Cliff for Step 1, Seeing, CLICK HERE.

Want to go deeper into Polarity Thinking? See our online self-directed Credentialing and Introduction to Polarity Practice, CLICK HERE.