"Stepping Into Your Power" Is A Phrase. Here's What It Actually Means

I want to write down the version of it that has actually held for me, and to push back on the versions that have not.

Here is my working definition, and I will spend the rest of the post defending it: power is the willingness to make a decision that costs you something and stand behind it in public, without needing the room to agree with you. Everything else people call power is performance.

What The Phrase Usually Means

In coaching circles, "step into your power" usually means believe in yourself. That is fine as a starting cue and useless as a working definition, because belief without a decision attached to it is just weather in your head. I have believed in myself the day before I made a bad call and the morning after I made a good one. The belief was noise. The decision was the thing.

In corporate settings, it usually means speak up in meetings. That is genuinely useful advice for a specific kind of person who has been over-deferring, and I have coached technical operators through exactly that muscle. But it collapses the phrase to volume, and volume is not power. Some of the least powerful people I have worked with talked the most. Some of the most powerful founders I have watched close a deal barely spoke for the first forty minutes of the meeting and then said one sentence that ended the negotiation.

In wellness culture, it usually means trust the universe and stop shrinking. I don't have a fight with that as a felt experience. I have a fight with it as leadership advice, because the universe is not the entity that has to look your CFO in the eye and tell them you are cutting a product line you personally launched.

All three of those meanings are pointing at something real. None of them are the thing.

The Version That Actually Holds

The version I have earned, and had to relearn every time I got soft on it, is closer to this: power is the ability to make a call that costs you the story you were carrying about yourself, and to stand behind that call in front of the people who liked the old story better.

A few examples of what that looks like in practice.

Selling Alpine Security in 2020 was, on paper, the outcome I had been building toward for years. In the actual room, the moment of signing was quieter than the years of preparing to sign. Power that day was not the surge of adrenaline people picture. It was the willingness to trade the identity of "founder still running his company" for the identity of "person who let the thing go on purpose." The first identity had been paying rent for me for a long time. Putting it down cost more than the paperwork suggested.

Starting Blue Goat Cyber a couple of years later was the same muscle in reverse. Power was not the confidence of "I've done this before, so I know it will work." Power was signing the first contract, hiring the first person, and taking on the risk again with a body that had, in the meantime, been rebuilt after a car accident I nearly did not survive. The story I could have carried was "you already had your shot, you don't have to prove anything." I decided against that story in public, by starting the second company, and I've been standing behind that decision every day since.

And on a smaller scale, in a Blue Goat meeting last month, power was being the least-liked person in the room for about ninety seconds while I told a client something they did not want to hear about their submission timeline. Nobody clapped. Two people were visibly annoyed. The decision was correct, and the willingness to be temporarily disliked for a correct decision is, in miniature, the whole game.

What Power Is Not

A lot of what gets sold as power is the emotional aftertaste of it, packaged and sold back to you as the thing itself. Being clear about what power isn't is, in my experience, more useful than another list of what it is.

Power is not volume. If you have to be the loudest voice to feel like the most credible one, you are performing certainty, not carrying it. Some of the calmest people I know have absolutely ended careers with a single email.

Power is not certainty. I have never made a real decision that did not include some genuine unknown. If I waited for certainty, I would still be sitting in an Air Force Academy classroom in 1994. Power is the willingness to act on a call that could be wrong, and to own the result either way.

Power is not the absence of doubt. Doubt is a passenger in every big decision I have made. Power is refusing to hand doubt the wheel.

Power is not a morning routine. I have a morning routine. It's fine. It has never once made a hard call for me. Anyone selling you the idea that your ice bath is your power is selling you a ritual and calling it a decision. Rituals are useful. They are not the thing.

And power is not other people's approval, delayed. If your version of "stepping into your power" quietly depends on the room eventually agreeing that you were right, you are still asking permission. You just moved the permission slip to a later date.

Why The Phrase Gets Used So Much

A phrase becomes popular in coaching circles when it lets people describe something true without making them pay for it. "Step into your power" is beautifully non-specific. It sounds like a decision, but it does not require you to name the decision, or the person you would have to look in the eye, or the story you'd have to put down.

That is why it feels good to say and why it rarely changes anything.

Compare it with "decide, out loud, in front of the people affected, and don't take it back when the room gets cold." Same territory. Very different phrase. Nobody sells a course called that, because it stops sounding like a feeling and starts sounding like a bill.

The Technical Operator Version

A lot of the people I coach are engineers, security leads, and clinical safety folks who came up on the technical track. When they hear "step into your power," they hear vague, which is a kind of insult to how they were trained to think.

Here is the translation that works for them: power is the willingness to be the person in the meeting whose job it is to say the thing no one else will say, on the record, without softening it into a question. Not louder. Not more emotional. Just first, and clearly, and with your name attached.

It is one of the muscles I write about in The Secure Methodology. Technical people do not usually "step into their power" by acting more like an extrovert. They step into it by getting comfortable being the temporary source of tension in a room full of nodding, because the tension is more honest than the nodding. If you can hold that ninety seconds without collapsing back into agreement, you have most of the muscle already.

The Redefinition Nobody Wants To Talk About

There are seasons where power is smaller than the word usually implies, and if you refuse to redefine it downward for those seasons, you will call yourself weak on days you are actually being extraordinary.

For the first months after the accident, my honest version of "stepping into my power" was getting out of bed and walking to the kitchen without asking for help. That is not a metaphor. That was the decision that cost me something and had to be stood behind, sometimes multiple times a morning. Anyone who had told me in that window that I needed to speak up more in meetings would have gotten a look I try not to give people.

This matters because most leaders will, at some point, go through a season where the size of their available power is not the size they are used to. If your only definition of the phrase is the peak version, you will spend that season believing you have lost it. You haven't. You are exercising it in a smaller room. The muscle is the same. The weight on the bar is not.

Related reading on this: I Am Statements And The Identity You Step Into covers the interior of this move; How To Reframe A Hard Thought In Four Steps is the mechanic you use when the old story about your capacity keeps arguing back.

A Small Test You Can Run This Week

If you want to check whether you have actually stepped into your power on a given topic, or whether you are just narrating it, ask yourself three things.

One, is there a specific decision attached, with a date, or is there just a feeling attached? If there is only a feeling, you are not yet in the room; you are in the lobby.

Two, does the decision cost you something you would rather keep, whether that is an identity, a relationship, a revenue line, or the approval of a particular person? If it costs you nothing, it is not a power move. It is a preference.

Three, are you willing to stand behind the decision in public, without needing the room to agree with you inside of thirty days? If you need the vindication, you have not stepped into your power. You have stepped into a bet on future applause.

Zero out of three, keep working. One or two out of three, you are close. Three out of three, you already know, and you don't need a phrase from a podcast to tell you.

The Part That Stays With Me

I have been in rooms with people who talked constantly about their power and had never made a decision that cost them anything. I have been in rooms with people who barely used the word and had made three of them before lunch. The gap between those two rooms is the entire subject.

Stepping into your power is not a mood. It is a decision, made in the open, stood behind in public, at a price you are willing to pay. That is the phrase, translated out of the container word it usually hides inside.

Once you carry that version of it, the other versions get quieter. You stop needing to feel powerful before you act. You start acting, and the feeling, on the days it shows up at all, arrives late and slightly out of breath, having missed the part that mattered.