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From my interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 7 (Unpublished):

For all It endures,
All is within It.

Those who align with It
endure.

They are content
to stand in the background
and set things right.

They are content
to step forward
and win without fight.

They plant each seed.

They shine their light.

They chop the wood,
carry the water.

They tend fruit and flower.

They endure—
not by force,
but by not needing
to claim power.

—

This is the polarity of Self AND Service—caring for your own development and needs while contributing to something beyond yourself. And in leadership, it shows up most clearly in how power is held.

They plant each seed, they shine their light. They chop the wood and carry the water. They tend fruit and flower, and over time something begins to reveal itself that is easy to overlook and even easier to misunderstand.

It can look like passivity from the outside. It can look like a lack of ambition, a lack of force, even a lack of will. But that misread says more about how we’ve been conditioned to see power than it does about what is actually happening. This is not the absence of power. It is the disciplined use of it. The kind that claims what is yours to do and shares what was never yours to keep. The kind that creates something beyond individual effort, something closer to what Barry Johnson, who developed the foundational framework of Polarity Thinking, points to when he describes Claiming Power AND Sharing Power as the source of relationship power—where 1+1 becomes 3 because neither person is trying to win at the other’s expense, and neither is stepping back so far that nothing meaningful gets shaped.

Most people don’t trust this. Or more accurately, they don’t see it clearly enough to trust it. Power, as we’ve learned to practice it, is something to take, to hold, to prove. And when Claiming Power to the neglect of Sharing Power takes over, it becomes Power Over. It works for a while. It produces movement, decisions, outcomes that look decisive. But over time, people withdraw, trust erodes, and the very system that was being shaped begins to weaken under the weight of that imbalance. The opposite drift is just as real. Sharing Power to the neglect of Claiming Power looks generous at first, even enlightened, but it eventually becomes absence. Nothing is held. Nothing is shaped. What required courage and direction never quite arrives, and the system pays for that too.

So the ones who endure do both, but they don’t do it as a technique. They do it as a way of being. They claim what is theirs to claim without overreaching, and they share what must be shared without disappearing. They don’t need to dominate to have impact, and they don’t need to withdraw to be trusted. This is where what modern leadership models have tried to describe as servant leadership starts to make more sense when you see it through this lens. Not as a soft alternative to “real” leadership, but as a disciplined practice of using power in service of something larger than the self. The leader is present, aware, and responsible, but not self-centered. They listen, not as a tactic, but because they understand that reality is distributed. They act, not to be seen acting, but because the moment requires it. Over time, this builds trust, not as an outcome to chase, but as a natural consequence of how power is held and shared.

You can feel the difference when you’re around it. There is less friction, less ego-driven performative-focus, less need to prove. People speak more freely. Decisions hold longer. The work has a kind of integrity that doesn’t depend on constant reinforcement. It’s also why the Golden Rule, as useful as it is, begins to feel incomplete here. Treating others as you would want to be treated still centers you. What this way of being points toward is closer to what’s been called the Platinum Rule—treat others as they would want to be treated. Pay attention to what others actually need and respond to that instead. That requires more awareness, more restraint, and, paradoxically, more power than imposing your own preferences ever will.

You start to notice it in places that rarely get credit. The scientist who checks the data again when no one would know if they didn’t. The analyst who holds the line when a simpler, faster answer would travel better. The public servant who keeps systems functioning in ways most people never see and only notice when they fail. These are not passive actors. They are people who are claiming power over their work while sharing power with reality, refusing to distort it for convenience, speed, or recognition. In a world increasingly shaped by information flows, algorithms, and incentives that reward speed over accuracy, that kind of discipline is not weakness. It is a form of stewardship.

Which makes this chapter particularly urgent right now. Because what’s being elevated as strength in much of the world—the strongman, the autocrat, the leader who claims power without sharing it—looks like power, sounds like power, and produces short-term results that feel like power. But it’s not enduring. It’s extractive. It burns through trust, institutions, and people, and when it finally exhausts what it was feeding on, it collapses. We’ve seen this pattern before. We’re watching it accelerate again. And the alternative isn’t weakness. It’s stewardship.

And maybe that’s the simplest way to say it. The ones who endure are not trying to win at power. They are stewarding it. They are shaping without over-shaping, influencing without overreaching, participating without needing to center themselves in the outcome. They don’t need Power Over to make a difference, and they don’t mistake stepping back for strength. They claim power and share it in ways that strengthen the whole, and because of that, their impact lasts longer than whatever moment they are in.

The system keeps moving. The question is whether we’re learning to move with it—claiming what is ours to claim, sharing what was never ours to keep—or whether we’re still trying to force it into patterns that can’t hold.

Self AND Service.

Not one or the other.

Both, over time, in ways that endure.

Here’s a Polarity Map for Self And Service:

 

INVITATIONS:

To use an “AI-trained Chat w/Cliff for Step 1, Seeing” CLICK HERE.

Ready for the Polarity Advantage? Go deeper into Polarity Thinking, see our online self-directed Credentialing and Introduction to Polarity Practice or in-person training with Barry Johnson and me at Kayser Ridge by CLICKING HERE.