STAGES OF PERSONAL POWER

STAGE 1: POWERLESSNESS: Secure and dependant, low in self-esteem, uninformed, helpless but not hopeless. Held back by fear.

STAGE 2: POWER BY ASSOCIATION: Learning the ropes, learning the culture, dependent on leader, new self awareness, stuck but moving. Held back by need for security.

STAGE 3: POWER BY SYMBOLS: Ego-centric, realistic, competitive, expert, ambitious, charismatic. Held back by confusion and not knowing they're stuck.

STAGE 4: POWER BY REFLECTION: Competent, reflective, strong, comfortable with personal style, skilled at mentoring, showing true leadership. Held back by ego control and not recognizing need for life purpose.

STAGE 5: POWER BY PURPOSE: Self-accepting, calm, visionary, humble, confident of life purpose, generous in empowering others, spiritual. Held back by lack of faith and having too much to lose.

STAGE 6: POWER BY GESTALT: Comfortable with paradox, unafraid of death, powerless, quiet in service, ethical, on the universal plane. Held back only by human constraints.

Gestalt psychology (also Gestalt of the Berlin School) is a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies; or, that the whole is different than the sum of its parts. The classic Gestalt example is a soap bubble, whose spherical shape is not defined by a rigid template, or a mathematical formula, but rather it emerges spontaneously by the parallel action of surface tension acting at all points in the surface simultaneously. This is in contrast to the "atomistic" principle of operation of the digital computer, where every computation is broken down into a sequence of simple steps, each of which is computed independently of the problem as a whole. The Gestalt effect refers to the form-forming capability of our senses, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves.