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Your best traits are the ones that stop you growing
Strength keeps working, and that is exactly the problem: it never asks you to learn anything new.
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01 What strength is
Strength is not one quality. It is seven you happen to practise
Powel builds her definition from positive psychology. Strength is resilience plus six character strengths taken from the VIA classification: bravery, perseverance, honesty, leadership, self-regulation and hope. Resilience is itself a compound of ten factors, including optimism, a moral compass, social support and physical fitness.
None of it is fixed at birth. Southwick and Charney found genes and environment about equal in importance, and neuroplasticity does the rest: the nervous system reorganises itself in response to what you actually do. Pathways you use get more efficient. Pathways you neglect start to shut down.
That is good news and a warning in the same sentence. The traits you practise are the traits that grow, and the ones you never reach for quietly get harder to reach.
Practise a strength the way you would practise a skill. Powel's example for honesty: the next time someone holds up a shirt in a shop and asks what you think, tell them the truth if it does not suit them.
02 What meekness is
Meekness is humility pointed outward, not submission
The Middle English meknesse meant the virtue of humility, and later softness of temper and gentleness. Powel argues the modern reading of meekness as submissive is a recent distortion, and suspects it comes from a culture that treats modesty as a fault rather than a virtue.
Humility is the foundation, and Kesebir describes it as a healthy relationship with three things: with yourself, with other people, and with reality. From that base come fairness, love, kindness, social intelligence, appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude and spirituality.
Powel's examples are Nelson Mandela, Princess Diana, the Dalai Lama, who describes himself as "a simple Buddhist monk", and Rosa Parks. Each of them shows what she calls a quieter kind of resilience: the strong claim their survival as their own doing, while the meek credit something outside themselves.
People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically… No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.Rosa Parks, quoted in the book
Keep a small notebook by the bed. Before sleep, write down three things you were grateful for that day. It can be as big as your partner's love or as small as a colleague making you a coffee.
03 The mechanism
What made you successful is what stops you growing
Powel borrows the paradox of success from organisational studies, where Danny Miller called it the Icarus Paradox. Businesses stretch to excess the very things that made them successful, and that excess is what brings them down. She applies the same shape to a person.
A strong individual notices what works, credits their signature strengths, and reaches for those same strengths next time. It usually pays. But the payout is short term, and it keeps the loop turning. Nothing new is ever tried, so nothing new is ever learned.
That is the trap. Growth is the one goal these methods cannot reach, because growth requires using the strengths you have not been using.
Contradictory yet interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time.Smith & Lewis, 2011, on what a paradox is
04 Why it holds
You keep hitting the target without asking who set it
Argyris and Schon separated two kinds of learning. Single-loop learning measures your performance against a standard and adjusts the performance. Double-loop learning goes back and re-examines the standard itself.
Powel argues the strong get stuck in the first kind. They meet the target, adjust, meet it again, and never ask whether the target still describes the person they want to be. Many of those standards were never theirs to begin with: they arrived from society's picture of what a successful life looks like.
Her example is Kate, a police officer chasing promotion to detective because her father was one. Kate is brave, perseverant and self-disciplined, and she uses exactly those three traits to pursue a goal she never chose. She is climbing, and she thinks climbing is growth.
Pain awakens us to the need for action; but comfort fosters complacency.Danny Miller, 1990
05 Why it hides
When the stagnation surfaces, both explanations are wrong
Sooner or later the strong person notices that something is not moving. Powel says they then swing between two readings of their own character, and neither reading gets them out.
In the first, the strengths become the fault. It is easy to twist them: bravery reads as foolhardiness, perseverance as stubbornness, honesty as tactlessness, leadership as bossiness, self-regulation as an inability to loosen up, hope as blind optimism. In the second, the strengths stay trustworthy tools, so the answer is simply to apply them harder.
Underneath both sits a habit Miller called retrospective rationalisation: we credit ourselves for success and blame the world for failure. So the common factor stays invisible, and the loop keeps running.
06 The way out
The meek traits are your lower strengths, so practising them is growth
This is where the book's two halves lock together. Powel points out that the strong person's signature strengths and the meek person's barely overlap. Bravery, perseverance, honesty, leadership, self-regulation and hope sit at the top of one profile. Humility, fairness, kindness, social intelligence, gratitude and awe sit near the bottom.
Growth, in her definition, means developing the strengths you have neglected. So the two facts meet: the traits of meekness are precisely the ones a strong person has left latent. Working on them is not a detour from growth. It is the definition of it.
Meekness also escapes the paradox for a second reason. Humble people look outside themselves for answers, fairness makes them weigh other views, and social intelligence lets them see their own lesser strengths honestly. They keep finding new routes because they keep asking.
There is little crossover between the definitive strong person's signature strengths and those of the exemplary meek person.Gianna Powel
From the book's list of twenty-five random acts of kindness: say hello to people in the street, check in with someone you know is struggling, or ask a neighbour who struggles to get out whether they need anything from the shop.
07 Where to start
Start with values, because goals are never where you are standing
Steven Hayes, who founded Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, makes the point Powel builds her practical chapter on: purpose cannot be found through goal achievement, because a goal is either already met or not yet met. It is always behind you or ahead of you.
Values are different. They are ways of being rather than things to finish, so they sit in the present, and you can never complete one. That is what makes them a steady source of motivation. Goals then come back, but chosen ones: the only goals to drop are the ones you were told to want.
The rest of the chapter builds outward from there: naming feelings with a feeling wheel, mindfulness and savouring, the meditation on your place in the universe, random acts of kindness, gratitude journalling, the four Rs of self-forgiveness, cognitive defusion from negative self-talk, and mindful nonviolent communication.
On the first, write your current goals without judging where they came from. On the second, spend at least ten minutes writing your core values; if you get stuck, ask how you would like to be remembered. Then compare the lists. Do the goals serve the values, or were you just told to want them?
08 The whole book
Two profiles, one trap, and an exit hiding in plain sight
Powel is not arguing that strength is bad. She is arguing that strength alone cannot grow, and that the traits it lacks are the ones it needs.
Strength
Resilience plus bravery, perseverance, honesty, leadership, self-regulation and hope. Learnable, useful, and genuinely good for well-being.
The paradox
Success rewards those same traits, so they get used again and again. Options narrow, single-loop learning sets in, and growth stops.
Meekness
Humility, fairness, kindness, social intelligence, gratitude and awe. Outward-facing, so they keep opening routes rather than closing them.
The exit is not a new set of skills. It is the set you already have and have never used, and Powel ends where the book began: the meek truly shall inherit the earth.
Adapted from The Paradox of Strength: When and Why Meekness Is Not a Weakness
Gianna Powel · © 2022 DVFZ Training Consultancy Services · 61 cited sources in the source edition