How to Control the Flow of Your Power

If you want to master your life, you must choose where you give and take power. And you must choose it every day. What is a Master? I’m not talking in the kinky sense of master/slave. I’m talking about self-mastery: your desires, your addictions, your thoughts.

Mastery is not a function of genius or talent. It is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge.

— Robert Greene

Those who have attained mastery over themselves are steeped in information and love to learn. They’re patient, thoughtful, calm. While they welcome feedback, they are rarely swayed by opinions or group consciousness. In essence, a Master has decided who they want to be and applied it to who they already are. This is great and dandy, brilliant food for thought, but not practical unless we can incorporate it into our daily habits.

“Control the Flow” Exercise

Let’s see in real time where your power is going. Grab a piece of paper and a pen. Draw a large circle. We have six categories to work with: Family, Friends, Career, Leisure, Health, and Emotion/Spirit.

illustrative diagram shows controlling where personal power flows

Allocate 100 units of power to work with every day, regardless of what happened yesterday or what will happen tomorrow. Assign each category a percentage of your time and energy. Jot these rough estimates on the side of your paper.

For instance, if you have a demanding job that sucks the life out of you, you’re going to give that category a high rating, like 65%. This leaves you 35% of daily energy to give to the other areas of your life. (No wonder you’re exhausted!)

Play around with these numbers until they add up to 100. Fill in your pie chart with the respective percentages. Bonus points if you use colored pencils. Want to get extra fancy? Make a digital chart. I used meta-chart.com for the graph below.

Once you’ve created this visual representation of where your power goes, take a step back. Look at it from a distance as if you were a tourist at a museum. This is your time, your energy and attention, your life on paper. Does it look right to you?

pie chart example of typical personal time and energy distribution
The more I played with this, the more advanced it became in relation to TIME. Can you tell I love my sleep? I admit to getting a little carried away. Besides adding Sleep, I broke down Family and Health.

More importantly, does it feel right to you? If you look at a specific category and think, I didn’t know I was giving away so much power to video games (or what-not), this is an area you get to tweak.

It doesn’t have to be a monumental shift of power. Your subconscious might take over and attack the problem without you having to do anything. Out of nowhere, you’ll feel like diverting more power to making healthy food choices or taking a painting class. No matter what, your psyche wants to be balanced.

When I look at my graph, Maintenance is high. This is my category for tending household chores. Strangely enough, I like cleaning and doing laundry, but I can outsource the tasks that deplete me, like the dishes. This extra energy can go into Health or Family. To be clear, my daughter is out of the house, living her best life, but we talk or text daily. I want to be fully present in those shared moments. I can’t do that if I don’t have anything left in the tank.

As every day is different, the numbers will fluctuate, but you’re aware of where the power is going. Awareness is power. You’re putting attention and energy into the cultivation of how you want your power to work for you. You control it, instead of letting it control you. When you’re aware of your power, it becomes very difficult to let anyone take it without your consent. Alarms will automatically go off if you feel a needy friend or a demanding side-hustle trying to take more than their share.

If you really, really want to get at the heart of where your power is going, do this exercise for a month. Every day, fill out the graph in the morning. Every night, check in to see where your power went. Do you agree/disagree with the flow?

Don’t be surprised if you start getting specific, if you’re thinking (maybe for the first time) like a mathematician. The more invested you become in seeing your energy used as the currency for your goals, the more precious it becomes.

Whatever field of activity we are involved in, there is generally an accepted path to the top. It is a path that others followed, and because we are conformist creatures, most of us opt for this conventional route.

— Robert Greene, “Mastery”

Mastery is choosing the same thing over and over. You want to be a writer; you write every day. You want to be a chef; you cook every day. You want to be a lover; you love every day.

Whether you “feel” like it at the time is often irrelevant. The days when it’s hard are typically days of high transformation. It is the Master showing up, catching the ego by the scruff of the neck, and removing the boulder from your path. This is what separates masters from victims, the calm from the anxious, the grateful from the embittered. It’s compound interest for the heart and soul.

Choose what you love, again and again. Nothing else can teach you confidence or power like self-mastery.

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