We aren’t always cast in the roles we desire-or the ones we feel prepared to play. Like actors, we all make choices about how to use the power that comes with our given circumstances.

Actors aren’t the only ones who play roles for a living. Moreover, it’s not just how much power we have but how we use it that determines how powerful we actually are. But, in fact, true power is often much quieter and more deferential than we realize. We often assume that power flows to those with the loudest voice or the most commanding presence in the room. It’s a part you play in someone else’s story. Power isn’t a tool for self-enhancement or a resource for personal consumption. Rather, it’s about how much we are needed, and the degree to which we fulfill our responsibilities. But it isn’t a function of status or hierarchy. That’s because power exists in every relationship, by virtue of the roles we play in others’ lives.

Although we all feel powerless sometimes, we have more power than we tend to believe. “A refreshing and enlightening new perspective on what it means to be powerful.”-Susan Cain, bestselling author of Quiet Grounded in over two decades’ worth of scientific research and inspired by the popular class of the same name at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Acting with Power offers a new and eye-opening paradigm that overturns everything we thought we knew about the nature of power. This eye-opening look at the true nature of power explores who has it, what it looks like, and the role it plays in our lives. There is so much we get wrong about power.

Acting with Power by Deborah Gruenfeld