Why Surrender Might Be the Most Radical Act Right Now 

The world is watching power move. And it is moving violently across our screens and our information feeds. And as a result, the dominant narrative is the same: fight back. Stand up. Hold your ground. And there is a part of me that feels that in my bones. A fire that says yes. This how we survive this. 

But there is another part. Quieter. Older, maybe. A part that wants to do something else. 

It wants to surrender. 

Not to the chaos. Not to the people wielding power like a weapon. But to the moment itself. To sit inside the beautiful, horrible messiness of right now and ask what it is trying to teach us. 

I know how that might sound. Soft. Passive. Maybe even naive, given what is unfolding around us. But here is what I have learned after twenty-five years of watching power move through organizations, through relationships, through rooms where decisions get made: Surrender is not the opposite of power. It might be its most sophisticated expression. 

Let me be specific about what I mean, because surrender has been colonized by a language that makes it sound like giving up. This is not giving up. This is giving in. To the discomfort. To the not-knowing. To the exquisite tension of being alive in a moment that refuses to resolve itself neatly. When I say surrender, I mean the willingness to sit with what’s messy. To resist the urge to make it make sense before it is ready to. To let the moment be exactly as uncomfortable as it is and to stay anyway. That is not weakness. That is a muscle most leaders have never trained. 

Here is where it gets interesting. Here is where the paradox lives. Because you cannot hold this space, this surrender, without also holding the fight. They are not opposites. They are partners. And the ability to hold both at the same time, without collapsing into either one, is what I have come to understand as the deepest form of conversational intelligence. Both/and. Not either/or. Fight and surrender. Resistance and receptivity. The fist and the open hand at the same time, in the same body, in the same breath. 

I have watched leaders try to do this and fail. Not because they lack conviction or courage. But because they have been trained to believe that power is a single gesture. A stance. A posture of strength. But consider this, what if power is actually a quality of presence that can shift fluidly and responsively between standing up and standing in? 

Standing up is visible. It’s loud. It demands to be seen. 

Standing in is quieter.   

It requires you to be present to what is actually happening not what you wish were happening. It asks you to absorb, to receive, to let the moment move through you before you decide what to do with it. And here is the thing nobody tells you: standing in is often where the deepest choices get made. 

 The conversations that change things, the ones that shift something fundamental in a room, in a relationship, in an organization they rarely happen at the moment of confrontation. They happen in the space after. In the surrender. In the willingness to say: I don’t have the answer yet. But I’m not leaving. I am going to sit here with you in this mess and see what emerges. That is power. Uncomfortable, unglamorous, deeply human power. 

So as the world watches power be wielded in toxic and deadly ways, as every instinct in our collective body says fight, resist, push back I want to offer something else. Not instead of the fight. Alongside it. An invitation to also surrender. To the moment. To the learning. To the possibility that what is happening right now holds something we cannot yet see and that the only way to find it is to stay. Not standing up. Not standing down. 

Standing in. 

That might be the most radical power move of all.