The 3 dimensions of "high-power"
I'm thinking this might be a helpful distinction.
There are 3 components of being high power, and all are equally important:
- Mental power, in terms of self-esteem, confidence, and the more self-development side of personal power including antifragile ego, growth mindset, and generally mindsets and values.
- Cognitive high power, in understanding and seeing power dynamics, it relates to power-intelligence
- Behavioral high power, in the way you speak, move, walk, stand, gain (or lose) status in groups, deal with other high-power folks (as equal, rather than as a sycophant), frame control, etc. etc.
Of course, these tend to move together, but they're different.
Having one but not the other may then lead to specific personality types.
For example, in the popular "alpha fucks beta bucks" article (and video) we described the "blue pill alpha", which would be someone with high power behavior, but lacking cognitive power awareness.
I'm thinking about whether it's worth it to dig deeper into this concept -and maybe describe the archetypes and list examples for each different combination-.
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I love this concept as it is good to evaluate where one stands and one's weak spots.
As an example, I will self-evaluate:
- Mental power: 7/10
- Cognitive high power: 6/10
- Behaviour high power: 4/10
So this helps me set the priority on reading "Power Cues". So I do think it deserves to be expanded on.
Thanks!
This is extremely useful.
As you say, I think that a significantly low-skill in one of these three areas is sufficient to block significant progression in the other two.
A possible development path
One possible self-development path may be for one to start from developing no. 1, and even succeed in making significant progress in this area relative to the starting point. However, lower skills in the other two areas mean that other people have an easy way of manipulating a person, as well as constantly chipping away at self-esteem and progress, and significantly slow it down.
To address this, one may then start focusing on some aspects of area no. 3 (behavior, body language, face expressions, posture), and make some progress here as well, but without understanding power dynamics this area is also badly affected and progress can be slow (it's difficult to keep good posture if one feels disrespected without knowing why).
Then finally may come the discovery about area no. 2 (power dynamics awareness). As you said in another post, even the ability to just "see" power moves has invaluable benefits and produces a significant acceleration effect on self-development (if anything, it allows one to distance from extremely power-bent power-movers and recover normal self-esteem and health).