Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: what actually separates a power game from simply doing your job? Dr. Yasemin Yazan, Vera and Jürgen dig into a distinction Jürgen has waited the whole series to make, drawn straight from his own profession: control just measures a gap against a norm, but the moment “I want to steer things my way” enters the picture, that is where power actually begins. The room also works through a genuinely live case study — an anonymous chat commenter who tore into the host mid-session the day before, dissected here as a textbook self-presentation tactic rather than a personal grudge, plus a candid note on how discussing bad actors so much might just be making them stronger. Jürgen closes with a small but real update to his own thinking: control only turns into power through the consequence that follows it, not through the mere appearance of watching.
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
Good morning, and a good start to the week, the host said, opening today’s room continuing with power games and relationships. Today’s question: how do power and control determine our interactions and relationships? She was genuinely curious how today would build on what they’d already touched on over the previous two days, since she suspected there was still plenty more to explore, especially zooming in more on power and control specifically within interactions and relationships. As always, everyone was warmly invited to join and bring impulses and examples into the exchange. For first-time visitors, a quick reminder that the room is recorded throughout and published afterward, so joining counts as agreeing to that. Three small room rules for anyone joining her on stage: a profile photo you can be recognized in, a first and last name, and at least one sentence in the bio. Anyone who’d rather not, or can’t speak right now, is welcome to use the chat instead, and she’d pick up on comments from there too.
Vera opened: good morning, and glad to be the one breaking the silence. The topic felt general enough, not too academic, that she felt comfortable jumping in even though she’d missed the previous morning. In her view, power games show up in every relationship, whether romantic, parent-child, or professional — ultimately it so often comes down to who gets the last word, whose opinion or proposal or wish wins out. The word “games” softens it a little, but she thinks it’s always there in some form.
Absolutely, the host agreed — we see this everywhere in various forms. They’d touched the day before on how we take on different roles depending on context, and that can shift accordingly — meaning in a given context, even with the exact same people involved, one role might show stronger dominance in one situation and a more passive stance might surface in another. So it varies by context and by the roles we’re operating in. There’d also been a nice example in the chat the day before, worth revisiting for anyone who missed it — they’d done their “digital campfire” format, discussing various techniques, often used quite deliberately. During that, someone had dropped a few comments in the chat, essentially attacking in a fairly aggressive way, then vanished again. Genuinely fascinating, since nobody was paid or invited to keep that going — it just happened to occur during that particular room, letting them pick it up from the chat and examine it from a meta level. Which shows that this dynamic shows up everywhere, regardless of whether it’s a Clubhouse room, social media, a team at work, business negotiations, or privately within family — and not just our own immediate family, but also the parent-child dynamic with our own parents, where we take on yet another role. Did Vera have examples from her own life, or aspects worth exploring further?
On power games specifically, Vera said — she’d once been in a relationship, not a particularly long one, that tried a certain kind of power play, using that almost blackmail-like line, “but you love me, don’t you.” It worked two or three times, and then the relationship ended, naturally. But she considers that a genuinely clear power game, almost blackmail, you could say. And in parent-child relationships specifically, parents inherently hold legitimate power — which is fine if used positively, but eventually children also start testing their own power over their parents, often because parents feel a certain guilt around things like leaving their kids in someone else’s care. Children learn very quickly that they can exercise power that way too, playing on guilt and making demands.
Wonderful, thank you so much, the host said — and that’s genuinely worth looking at more closely, since not everything is automatically a power game either. Sometimes we feel pressured by our own expectations of ourselves, or by family dynamics, without any actual power or power game being exercised at all. And other times, something is quite deliberately used, and we end up feeling genuinely cornered. Since Vera brought up the parent-child dynamic — we probably all recognize, from our personal lives, that when someone asks for help, even when we’re already stretched thin on time, it’s often hard to say no. That doesn’t necessarily mean a power game is at play, but there is also that constellation where someone turns on the waterworks, or uses that blackmail-like phrase Vera mentioned — “but you love me” — playing it out on the relationship level itself. Genuinely interesting to translate this into other contexts too, and see how it plays out differently, since in a private, family setting, there’s also a very close bond at play that surely factors in, versus a professional relationship where that intense closeness usually isn’t there. So there could be real differences in how this plays out. Vera, anything more to add there?
In a professional setting, Vera said, there’s often a certain dependency too, and the moment that dependency exists, the company or employer, supervisor, whoever, automatically holds a position of power they can exercise — and do exercise. Which plays out differently in family life, of course — children obviously depend on their parents regardless, and there can be dependency within a couple’s relationship too, and there as well, power gets exercised in practice.
A genuinely important keyword, the host said — dependency, worth picking up here. We surely have dependency in different forms and shapes: at work, that might look like fear of losing your job, especially in hierarchical settings, but there’s also social dependency — things like belonging play a role here, wanting to belong or be loved, and so on. So we have different levels of dependency: on one hand, hierarchical, tied to securing one’s livelihood, financial means and so on; on the other, purely emotional, tied to that social dependency of wanting to belong or be loved. And looking at how we grow up — they’d had plenty of rooms on beliefs and similar — we learn quite early and quickly that certain configurations, say, that certain achievements are expected in exchange for a reward, like good grades earning some kind of reward. And once these configurations get stored as beliefs, we act accordingly, and it’s entirely possible that, without any power games actually being in play at all, these beliefs quietly running in the background make us fall into a kind of automatic behavior, doing certain things because we assume they’re expected of us, even though the other person may not have addressed that at all, neither subtly nor openly. Did Vera see it the same way, or did she have further thoughts?
Vera said she personally sees values as something she’s earned or built for herself, and she has a bit of an issue when adults still let values, absorbed as sentences repeatedly heard from parents and similar, hold such a strong influence, or remain so determinative, in their adult thinking, feeling, and acting. She always tells herself, at some point I became independent and can set that aside. She admitted she might be different from many people in that regard, and didn’t want to judge it either way, just speaking from her own perspective. But was the host referring to a kind of pre-emptive obedience — doing something because you think the other person expects it of you, in order to get some reward, even if it’s just a friendly smile?
Quite possibly a form of pre-emptive obedience, the host agreed. It could also simply be cultural aspects that shaped us — something like punctuality, say. We’ve internalized and stored certain things about how we evaluate that, in the sense of respectful or disrespectful behavior toward each other. And various things can genuinely kick in here without ever being explicitly addressed. She often sees this with people who genuinely want to say no more often but find it hard to. When they actually try it, they’re often quite surprised, because suddenly there’s a reaction, or rather a lack of reaction — an unexpected non-reaction they hadn’t anticipated at all. They might have expected outrage, some tension or conflict, but it simply doesn’t materialize. Which shows very clearly that, in that context at least, it isn’t actually a power game happening at all, but rather something on my own end, in the interaction — assuming certain things are expected of me and acting accordingly, without realizing that it’s actually about me, not about the other person, in terms of the behavior I end up displaying.
Perhaps they could open up the power-and-control angle a bit more too, the host continued — thinking about what other everyday situations come to mind. Something like a manager delegating to a team, or a project lead handing out tasks, then following up on results — that can put us fairly quickly into a control-type situation, depending on how tightly or loosely leadership is exercised. Or moderating meetings and presentations — there are plenty of situations where any of us might end up steering a meeting with colleagues, say when presenting something ourselves, stepping into that moderator role and having to navigate it. And in that moderating or delegating role, we gather a range of experiences — not just what we do to steer things sensibly, but also the different reactions we can face, from resistance to open displeasure, and how we handle those situations. Those were a few more fresh impulses she wanted to add. Vera, anything to pick up on there?
Vera wondered whether what the host had just described was actually power, or simply a distribution of roles handed down from somewhere.
Handed down by whom, the host asked — did she mean someone decided who leads a given meeting or conference or project discussion? Because ultimately everyone ends up in some kind of role in that constellation — is power necessarily being exercised there? That’s what Vera was wondering.
Power doesn’t necessarily have to be exercised at all, the host clarified. Her point was that we frequently find ourselves in situations, regardless of whether the setup comes from above or arises organically, in conversations, in meetings and similar, where power games genuinely can emerge, triggered by certain reactions from the audience or participants, whatever the setting — meeting, training, or otherwise. And this is especially observable in constellations that aren’t hierarchical by structure — in project leadership, for instance, you often deal with people who normally hold senior positions elsewhere, and suddenly the project lead takes on a lateral leadership role over them. In that constellation, it’s quite common to witness a kind of power game unfold, where things are ostensibly discussed on the factual level, but you can very clearly sense something else entirely is actually at play, beyond whatever surface issue seems to be the problem. With that, maybe they could bring Jürgen in and see what impulses he had, and draw connections from there. Jürgen, good morning — though they couldn’t hear him quite yet.
After a brief audio hiccup, Jürgen came through: good morning to everyone in the room. He said the word he’d been waiting for, in connection with today’s subtitle, had finally arrived — “steering” or “control.” Looking very closely at the subtitle, as he likes to do, the host had asked how power and control determine our relationships and interactions. His initial answer: power, as they’d discussed often, is influence, capable of both good and bad, both a positive and a negative way of exercising it. Control, though, is where a distinction comes in that’s actually central to his own profession — he’s often mistakenly seen as a “controller” in the sense of a checker or inspector. But that’s not what a controller is; if it were, the job would be called “checker,” not “controller.” A controller, properly, is about steering — which is exactly why he’d been waiting for this term to come up. Because he’d distinguish two facets in answering how control influences a relationship or interaction, something you see especially clearly in project work, where, aiming at a very clear target, strong technical competencies as well as personal competencies get thrown together ad hoc, each person carrying their own notions of power and self-control. To position these two facets clearly for discussion: control alone lets me establish that a control exists at all. Vera’s example, that phrase “but you love me,” was a perfect illustration — it implicitly means the other person is constantly checking a certain behavior of yours against their own internal “love schema” and arriving at a conclusion: yes, she loves me, or she doesn’t anymore. That is, in its purest form, control — comparing a factual state against a norm and noting a deviation. That’s really all control is, nothing more. What layers on top of that is steering — the actual decision, say as a project lead facing someone else’s power games, of whether to even engage with it at all, and in what manner to use that instrument. Summing it all up, he thinks this whole context, building a control system within a relationship, becomes genuinely difficult to explain and rather opaque, because the mere existence, the choice of how I want to steer a relationship, a certain power dynamic, is already a hugely influential factor in whether people within an organization feel merely controlled, or merely steered, in quotes. That was really what he wanted to express — how important this terminological distinction is for him. Thanks for listening.
Wonderful, thank you so much, the host said. Vera, thoughts?
Vera found the distinction between steering and control genuinely excellent — exactly right, and Jürgen, as always, had put it perfectly. She’d have loved to send him a little heart the moment he came up. Because if I only steer, I’m simply holding the reins and letting things run, or giving input, but the moment I control, I’m exercising a certain power. She found the way Jürgen put it genuinely fantastic.
Where does steering end and control begin, the host asked. Jürgen, go ahead.
Thanks, Jürgen said. His view is that, just like the distinction between power and violence, there can’t be steering without control. But you can control without steering — I simply establish that there’s a discrepancy between a desired behavior and an observed or verifiable one. Fine, there’s a deviation. The person isn’t behaving in this project the way I’d like. I take note of that, I’ve controlled it, established it, and file it away, for whatever reason. That decision, and this is what he wanted to express, the deciding criterion for steering, for exercising power, whether in a positive or negative direction, is rooted causally in wanting — I want to steer this in the direction I want. And it’s precisely from that moment of wanting, “I want to steer,” that power, for him, actually begins. Because control is, for him, the foundation that even prompts or motivates me to exert influence in some form in the first place. With one exception, which he might bring up later. But generally, he’d say, or rather he does say, steering requires control — otherwise I simply cannot steer at all.
The host was fully on board, and wanted to add that people perceive things differently too — they’d already touched on values, and people hold different values to different degrees. So it’s entirely possible that perception itself differs — take a team constellation, whether a project or classic hierarchical structure — one employee might feel controlled, while another in the exact same situation finds it entirely fine, exactly as it should be. What does that mean, in reverse, for us? What can we take from it?
That, as with everything in life, there’s no ideal recipe, Jürgen said, echoing something the host had raised repeatedly before, including the day before. It really comes back to making a decision — especially in a project or business context — a decision to follow a certain value framework. And fundamentally, power games, a phrase he genuinely dislikes, are really just corridors, corridors within very specific norms and rules that I, or an institution, a company, establish, within which a person, barring some dependency relationship, can choose to fit in or not. And that’s where the circle closes for him: any relationship or web of relationships, whether a company, a state, or a private community, is defined precisely by establishing boundaries that, from that community’s perspective, shouldn’t be crossed by the individual. And what that requires is steering, and potentially power, to keep whoever matters for that collaboration within those boundaries, those guardrails. Back to the project example: if he has a difficult, contrarian team member who’s nonetheless technically outstanding and whom he needs as project lead, otherwise the project might even run against the company’s values — then all he’s really doing is controlling, checking the values that matter for this project or company, and determining whether he can still steer that person within those boundaries, or whether the boundaries themselves need to soften. That’s a topic that might come up too — that as a result of steering, the feedback loop tells me I need to change my own boundaries, my own instruments, my own attitude toward power. That applies especially in the private sphere too. Thanks.
Wonderful, the host said — several angles worth picking up here. First, on perception: there’s no one-size-fits-all recipe, absolutely, which also means, conversely, I can’t make everyone happy in every situation. Worth being clear about that with yourself too. It’s entirely possible that someone simply doesn’t fit into a team within a company because the company’s value framework just isn’t compatible with that employee’s. And then there need to be consequences of some kind, whoever draws them — whether the employee recognizes it and decides to leave, or conversations happen first. And on the other side, this directly brings in the aspect of culture too — company culture plays a genuinely major role here. We have culture and subculture in various places, something they’d touched on in other rooms too. Which means these guardrails Jürgen mentioned are often not even written down anywhere — they’re unwritten rules of how people interact. And if I’m at a company for some time, or part of a team, I absorb those rules by observing how people interact, seeing what happens, and having these unwritten rules passed on to me.
And this brings in the aspect of sanctions too, also often unwritten — and these sanctions, in quotes, don’t necessarily have to come from someone in a leadership role, hierarchical or otherwise; they can happen socially, between colleagues. A genuinely fascinating example from the Deep Talk Club itself, observed on a meta level: when certain things happen in the chat, reactions often follow from longtime Deep Talk Club members, meaning some people no longer feel the need to address something themselves, because it’s already been “handled” by others in the chat. Anyone want to pick up on that? Vera, thoughts, and then they could bounce back to Jürgen.
Vera said that’s absolutely true, and there’s also that sense of belonging that comes with sharing the same values as a group. Another thought that occurred to her: control genuinely has a positive side too, since on one hand it encourages performance, and on the other, if I’ve delivered something and it goes entirely unnoticed, uncontrolled in a sense, that can feel negative too. Whereas if it’s controlled, noticed, and perhaps positively evaluated, that’s positive — but that only works if control has actually taken place at all.
So can control be positive, or is it inherently positive, the host asked?
Absolutely, Vera said. And we recognize this from various settings too, where employees complain because, well, there’s never any consequence anyway — nothing gets checked, and there’s no consequence if rules aren’t followed, which often breeds resentment and demotivation among colleagues.
Jürgen, anything to add there?
On Vera’s last point, Jürgen said, he thinks consequence is an absolutely essential precondition, really the whole justification, for control in the first place. And something he wanted to mention, actually meant to bring up the day before but it slipped his mind: he’d come into that room a bit later, and as he interpreted it, someone used their “power” — strike the quotation marks, their power — to appear anonymously and insult, or humiliate, he assumed, someone, since he’d joined late. What he noticed, addressing the host directly, were two distinct spheres. He’d observed, if she’d allow the assessment, that she was personally affected — affected as a person, based on how she articulated herself and how the topic kept getting framed. An alternative way of being affected would be to detach that entirely from the personal level and say, I’m affected because this violated the room’s rules — the norm, meaning what control actually consists of. This room has rules, and someone comes in and breaks them — control kicks in, you remove them from the stage or the room. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re personally affected. Those were the two spheres that surfaced for him yesterday around that incident, and he thinks it’s also a good example of the exact point where pure control shifts into deliberate steering and its effects — specifically, using certain means to act on the person rather than the actual issue. He wanted to bring that in, hoping it fit today’s topic too. Thanks for listening.
Wonderful, thank you so much, the host said, and she wanted to shed a bit more light on this for anyone who might have joined later and found it harder to follow. To clarify: it wasn’t a situation where someone came on stage and broke room rules. It was actually connected to the day before’s topic on power, power games, and violence through language — she’d covered various self-presentation techniques and given examples. And during that, without her even having looked at the chat yet, someone wrote in: she’d read it out loud — “hi, now what you’re claiming is getting scientifically thin. No, nonsense. Convince and convey. Okay, you clearly lack basic linguistic and pragmatic knowledge, qualitative methods, documentary method in brackets etc. aren’t enough for this. If you don’t know or understand this, why do you even do this job? You’re surely not a psychologist, otherwise you wouldn’t be this out of your depth. This just shows again how inferior coaching is.” Then some more nonsense followed, something about the “within seven seconds” stylistic device, along the lines of, aren’t you ashamed, as someone with a doctorate, to be teaching at bachelor-student level? And then that person had simply vanished, didn’t stick around. They’d picked this up from the chat not because of any personal grievance, but because it was such a perfect illustration of exactly what they’d been discussing, letting them place it on a meta level and examine what was actually happening there. Jürgen, did that help place it better for him?
Thanks, absolutely, Jürgen said — you really have to see the full context, exactly as she’d emphasized later in that same session too, you always need the full picture. He’d spare his own judgment of those comments, but thanked her for making it transparent.
Very happy to, the host said. Sabine, good morning — she wanted to pick up on something too.
After a connection hiccup, Sabine came through: she also wanted to thank the host for repeating that, since she found it genuinely wild. It just shows something, though — people behaving that way, and it keeps happening in politics too these days, and end up becoming the center of endless discussion, which she thinks is part of the problem — we often put them at the center of attention and might actually be making these people stronger by doing so. She just wanted to put that up for discussion, since she had to leave shortly for a 9am appointment, but had a few minutes and would love their take on it.
Wonderful, the host said — they certainly wouldn’t have made a big deal out of it the day before on their own; they’ve had various chat comments before too. If anything, when something turns personal like that, she’ll remove someone from the room and maybe add a comment, but generally they don’t dwell on it, at least not here on Deep Talk. The day before, it simply fit perfectly — Erik had come into the room and opened up that exchange with her right after her monologue, in quotes, and she was thinking it might even make a good example to demonstrate through a kind of role-play. And then, naturally, they had a textbook example right there in the chat, which is why they picked it up and followed it through, since it fit the room’s topic so perfectly, letting them demonstrate what actually lies behind that kind of thing. Vera, Jürgen, did they want to weigh in on Sabine’s broader point, about discussing such things too much or putting them too much at the center of attention, generally speaking, not specifically about the day before?
Vera agreed completely with Sabine — it happens often, both politically or socially, and privately too, that people talk about others or situations perceived negatively, just as in politics or social topics; whether it’s simply more interesting to talk about, or whatever the reason, she notices this too.
Jürgen, anything to add there?
Not on that specific point, Jürgen said, since regarding what he could observe of the day before’s incident, he’d already spoken his piece and wanted to hold back now, because something the host had just said at the end genuinely affected him.
She couldn’t quite place that right now, the host admitted, but fine, let’s just leave it there. Ultimately she’s with Sabine — she can confirm this observation happens in many places. It’s a bit like our tendency to focus on negative news over positive ones, preferring to get worked up about certain things rather than highlight the good. We see that everywhere — whether that’s casual gossip or otherwise, people love talking about a coworker, and it’s usually not on the factual level at all, but everything happening on that relationship level, in quotes. And that seems to just be genuinely captivating and interesting to us. Whether it’s talk shows, TV channels, whatever — when there are aspects like this to pick up on, you can see from the click numbers and viewership that it genuinely works. And certainly some shows, thinking of things like Heidi Klum’s “Germany’s Next Topmodel” or “Big Brother” and whatever else has existed, actually “create,” meaning stage, certain situations, precisely because they know it triggers a kind of sensationalism that keeps people glued to their screens, following along, because you’ve got different roles, drama, all that. And that loops right back to the topic from the day before too — fundamentally, this is the theme of self-presentation. They’d discussed this in the context of, say, underscoring expertise or similar — that it’s used quite deliberately, and they’d touched on talk shows in that context too, where certain things get deliberately staged, not really about genuine power games at all, but staging a scene because it’s known to boost ratings or viewership. With that, let’s move into today’s closing round, and then she’d gladly announce tomorrow’s room too. What are some aspects worth highlighting, Vera, then Jürgen?
For her, Vera said, it’s steering and control — something that will probably keep turning over in her head today, and she’ll keep thinking it through and placing it for herself. Thanks.
Thank you. Jürgen?
He owed two clarifications, Jürgen said. First, why he’d chosen the word “affected” earlier: what he’d witnessed, and the choice of words used, wasn’t, in his view, a power game or dominance behavior anymore, but deliberate destructiveness aimed at a person — bullying, essentially, as he perceived it, which is why he’d labeled it as personally affecting. Second, regarding the subtitle: he felt reinforced, or rather, he’d learned something new — he’d always associated control with a dominance toward steering, purely from his own professional title, but he now realized, and thanked Vera for this, that control doesn’t become a power factor simply by broadcasting that you’re controlling, along the lines of “Big Brother is watching you.” It’s genuinely essential, in the next step, to distinguish the specific means chosen to actually exercise that dominance — but again, coming back to a theme that keeps resurfacing: the essential instrument is consequence, actually following through. That had become clear to him today. Heartfelt thanks for that, and a good day to everyone.
Wonderful, thank you so much, the host said — and briefly, to close the loop on how they’d classified the day before’s incident: among the various self-presentation techniques she’d covered, one is called “threaten and intimidate,” which includes things like testing someone’s knowledge, voicing criticism, exposing, refusing, lecturing, pushing the other party into a defensive, justifying position, and correcting. So they’d classified it under that technique — not as a power game, but as a kind of self-presentation. The person involved had a fairly freshly created account, and they couldn’t even pull up the profile — once they left the room, the whole matter was essentially already resolved and impossible to look into further. And she’d just noticed, though it’s probably already been deleted by now, that “Germany’s Next Topmodel” had gotten garbled into something reading almost like “chubby” instead of “top” in German — probably just a typo when sending, but she found it genuinely adorable and had to bring it up, since it made her smile. So, apologies if it’s already gone from the chat by now, she’d already seen it. Which shows, once again, that they can always find moments of humor even in dealing with certain things. She was genuinely looking forward to tomorrow’s room too. Thanks again for today — she thought it was genuinely useful being able to tie back to the day before on one hand, bringing some transparency for anyone who’d joined partway through, and on the other, they’d managed to spin some fresh threads in various directions today too. Tomorrow they’d continue with the invisible violence — how can we recognize and fight psychological violence? On the word “fight,” she’d genuinely debated whether to say fight, leave it be, or handle it — so please don’t hold her to that exact wording; as she’d mentioned, they were essentially piloting a new approach, trying things out. ChatGPT had phrased it as “fight,” and they’d just left it as is, genuinely curious to see how tomorrow’s room would unfold from there. Everyone was warmly invited to join again tomorrow morning at 8am. Until then, take care.
