Summary: A somewhat extensive extrapolation on Rollo’s Articles of Power, entailing a systematic interpretation of our daily actions. Most of this is very obvious stuff presented in a different way, perhaps more complicated than it needed to be. This post is equally for this community as it is for me, I’ve only been here for about a year and I still have much to learn. I needed to write this down to help further my own understanding, to help piece it all together. Feel free to critique, question, comment etc.

Body: From Rollo’s Rational Male:

Articles of Power The term Power has a lot of misapplied connotations to it. When we think of Powerful people, we think of influence, wealth, prestige, status and the ability to have others do our bidding – all of these are not Power. And as much as we’d like to convince ourselves that women are attracted to this Power, this is false. Because what I’ve described as aspects of Power here are really manifestations of Power. Here’s a cosmic secret revealed for you:

Real Power is the degree to which a person has control over their own circumstances. Real Power is the degree to which we control the directions of our lives.

Imagine yourself standing in your backyard; you’re here because you’ve decided that you’re going to practice throwing darts. Standing twenty feet away from you is a tree, and on this tree you’ve placed a bull’s-eye whereupon you will practice your dart throwing abilities. With your dart in hand you take your stance, you throw back your shoulder, arm, hand and dart, and swing them forward with precision and all of your strength. The dart leaves your hand with a flick and zips swiftly through the air traveling the distance and finally landing at the dead center of the bull’s eye. Your action of throwing the dart is power, the movement of the dart is the manifestation of power. Let’s break down what happened here.

1. The degree of control (Limiters): Your body composition, your strength, energy, mood, the length of your arms, how tall you are etc., these are the factors that determine how much control over power you have.
2. The control of power (Action): Or the exercise of power, is the speed and motions you took, the mental calculation to determine the direction, and the over-all movement of your body; these actions determine the control of power. Your will combined with your actions is real power, because they are under your direct control.
3. Influence (Manifestation): The flying of the dart through the air is the manifestation of your power.
4. The circumstances: The weather, the distance to the mark, the size of the bull’s eye, etc., these are what encompass the circumstance in which you have decided to throw your dart, the situation in which you have decide to exercise your power. The circumstances matter because once you have relinquished the dart from your hand you no longer have direct control over the dart; your actions have influenced the trajectory of the dart, but the dart flying and hitting the mark is not your power, it is the manifestation of your power.
5. The outcome: Is influenced by your use of power and the circumstances.

Now, instead of a physical example of the application of power let’s take a look at a social demonstration of such an event. I’ll use an anecdote from my job.

Working at an office I spend most of my time in front of a computer, my supervisor/co-worker (a woman) will sometimes try to catch me doing something unrelated to my job in order to reprimand me, typically with empty threats or general shit-tests. Because this is a place I spend a lot of time in, and the group of people who I interact with is so small (3 including my boss and myself) I get to witness and experience a variety of different treatments resulting from different factors, both from myself and from them. On to the example:

One morning at my job I had just finished a series of assignments, I tabbed out of the window to close an application which I had left running in the background, when suddenly my supervisor notices this from her desk and starts immediately accusing me of not working. Now I was in-fact doing my job, but my natural reflex to this random accusation was to tense up and start fumbling around trying to open up the work page. This of course made me look guilty, and inspired even more shit tests from her. I understand full well not to argue thanks to the 48 Laws of Power (Law 9) and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (“Don’t a complain, criticize, or condemn, & don’t argue, etc.,) and while thankfully I had enough common sense to keep my mouth shut, (where otherwise I might have tried to explain using logic) I could not help my physical reaction due to a very specific reason.

This sort of hounding is something she’s inclined to do on certain days more than others and I’m able to dismiss her accusations or just flat out ignore them without repercussions when and only when I’m feeling assured or calm. What’s more surprising is if I’m actually in the wrong when it comes to an accusation, I can still get away with it. Why? When I feel confident in myself, when I feel for lack of better term “manly”, I respond in a very serious no-bullshit tone, my body language is unaffected by these shit-tests because I’m expecting them and I just ignore her like you would a child. In other words I hold Frame. What happened in this scenario then? /u/Whisper didn’t make the post “If you don’t sleep, you might as well not lift,” for no reason, and that reason is precisely relevant to what happened to me here. I had violated my sleeping schedule the day prior and woke up feeling like hell. Sleep is a limiter, but unlike say, the body you were born with, it’s one that’s within your control (for the most part anyway.)

Now I’d like to draw some parallel between my first example and the latter.

Unlike in the physical world where we’re able to use our senses to actually see and verify where we’d like to throw the dart, in the “social world” we are blind. You are standing in a fog and the target is completely obscured. It is then up to you to identify where the control is, where the dart is, where the target is, what the circumstances are, and what the outcome should be.

So let’s break it down for the second example in dealing with shit-tests.

1. The degree of control(Limiters): How rested I was determined how much composure I had over myself, it determined my mood, my energy, my focus. If I had been well rested and felt confident I would have had a greater degree of control over my actions, and actions, in and of themselves, are power.
2. The control of Power (Action): I cannot make my coworker stop shit-testing me, I cannot make anyone do anything for that is outside of my control; it is not within my realm of power. What is within our control is our tonality, our posture, our words, and our overt behaviors, which in turn determines our influence.
3. Influence (Manifestation): "One important fact to consider, before I launch into too much detail, is to understand that frame is NOT power. The act of controlling the frame may be an exercise in power for some, but let me be clear from the start that the concept of frame is who’s ‘reality’ in which you choose to operate in relation to a woman." –Rollo The influence which your (ideally dominant/masculine) behavior has on others, this is Frame. But it is not power, how people comport themselves in reaction to this behavior, that is what it means to establish frame. Frame then is a manifestation of power.
4. Circumstance: The setting, both my coworker’s disposition and mine in relation to the job.
5. Outcome: If you set yourself up for the highest degree of control, you can exercise your power to establish frame to work with the circumstances you find yourself in.

Lessons Learned: Real power is always within our grasps, but we must not underestimate the management of our own selves at the basest levels; it is there where we limit our control over power and all the good thereafter.

Edit: Formatting.