The Strength of Softness: How Smoothness Creates Power and Momentum
We grow up believing that strength means pushing harder, going faster, trying more. But what if I told you that the real secret to power has nothing to do with force? What if the path to true strength lies in something far more elegant—softness itself?
Through my years of kickboxing, swimming, and horse riding, I discovered a truth that contradicts everything we're taught about strength, masculinity, and power. Softness isn't the opposite of strength; it's strength refined. It's precision distilled down to its very core. It's the kind of sustainable power that doesn't just get you there—it carries you further than brute force ever could.
Kickboxing: The Fast Track to Black Belt Through Softness
When I first stepped into kickboxing as a red belt, I carried all the misconceptions about power that most of us do. Believing that my strength meant throwing everything I had behind every movement, and that intensity was measured by how much force I could generate. In my early days, I naively pushed myself really hard, fast, and relentlessly, until my body gave me a harsh lesson. It was the day I tore the cruciate ligament in my leg that my understanding of power began shifting entirely.
Recovery forced me to rebuild everything slowly from the ground up, and in that rebuilding, I discovered that the greatest fighters weren't the ones who were always hitting the hardest. They were the ones who moved their energy with precision and who truly understood that power flows from softness.
When I returned to training, I learned to channel my energy more effectively. Instead of powering through techniques or throwing blind punches, I began to move with more tactical awareness, finding the sweet spot where minimal effort created maximum impact. For me, being a small-sized woman, it meant discovering that my strength lay in tiring out my opposition by avoiding the kicks and punches. This shift in my thinking not only healed my body, it accelerated my progress.
With this newfound softness over force, I found myself advancing faster than I ever had before, reaching my black belt sooner than I'd believed possible. That's when I realised that my softness hadn't weakened my strength, it had become the very thing that propelled me further.
Swimming: The Paradox of Going Slower to Go Faster
Twenty-five years of swimming also taught me one of life's great paradoxes: sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. In my early days, I approached swimming like an exhausting battle against the water; some days felt as though I was swimming through treacle and gasping for air. The result was predictable—quick exhaustion, shortened sessions, and the feeling that I was fighting for breath rather than flowing.
Water, I learned, doesn't respond to force either. It responds to moving with it. When I finally stopped trying to overpower the pool and started working with it, everything changed again. Smooth strokes replaced fast ones. What surprised me most was that softness didn't just give me endurance, it often made me faster too. The water began to carry me, rather than resist me, and I discovered that sustainability and speed aren't opposites. They're dance partners, and softness brings them together.
Horse Riding: The Language of Softness
If you've ever tried to force a horse to do your bidding, you’ll know how quickly that approach falls apart. A horse doesn't respond to aggression or domination—it responds to your communication, and the most powerful communication happens through the softest touch.
True horsemanship is about being connected. When you learn to make contact without force, when your energy aligns with theirs instead of opposing it, something interesting happens. The horse begins to move in synergy with you. Softness creates trust, trust creates willingness, and willingness creates those seamless transitions from walk to trot to canter that make it look effortless from the outside. What appears to be control is a partnership, and what feels like softness is actually the deepest form of strength.
Softness in Human Connection: The Art of Invitation Over Demand
However, perhaps nowhere is the power of softness more transformative than in our relationships with others. Think about the last time someone commanded you to do something you didn't want to do, or threatened consequences if you didn't comply. How did that feel? The natural response is resistance, defensiveness, maybe even rebellion. Our bodies tense, our minds close, and cooperation becomes the last thing we want to offer.
Now contrast that with someone who approaches you with genuine curiosity about your perspective, who invites your views rather than demands you comply. A person who seeks to understand before seeking to be understood. When we soften our approach in our interactions with others, something else wonderful happens. We create space for authentic dialogue. We discover not just whether someone will do what we're asking, but why they might be hesitant, what concerns they have, and what support they might need.
In the workplace, this might look like investigating how a colleague feels about taking on a project rather than simply assigning it. In relationships, it means approaching conflicts as puzzles to be solved together, rather than battles to be won and sides to be taken. In disagreements, it means staying curious about different perspectives rather than becoming dominant voices that silence dissent or dismiss opposing views as nonsense.. If it makes no sense to you, then do your best to try to listen to someone else's view, instead of shutting it down.
Demands rarely work—at least not in the way that creates lasting cooperation and trust. Softness, on the other hand, opens up dialogue. It invites multiple viewpoints into the conversation. It recognises that what we might initially perceive as resistance or stubbornness is often just information we haven't yet understood. When we approach others with the same gentle power we've learned to use with horses, in the pool, or in martial arts, we discover that people, like water, respond better to softness than to force.
But I want to be clear about what softness really means. It isn't weakness or passivity, it's the highest form of strength. Like a skilled martial artist who knows the best way to fight is not to fight, softness is power with precision. It's knowing exactly when to apply the brakes and how much pressure to use. It's the confidence that comes from true mastery—the kind that rarely needs to shout or display itself because it's already so complete.
In a world where dissenting voices to systems of power are marginalised and framed as the enemy to our societal structure, this skilled softness is needed more than ever before. We don't need to target groups and silence voices—we need the precision of softness to open up discussion and dialogue before conflicts escalate beyond repair. If we ever want to create a future of unity as a human family, where we are all for one and one for all, then softness will be the new power. Because imagine this: if we all engaged with this level of skilled softness, there would be no need for war. Conflicts would be resolved through understanding and connection long before they reached the point where force becomes the only option left. Force has become so outdated that it's actually counterproductive to the connections we desperately need to build the world we want to live in.
Redefining Softness: Power in Its Purest Form
If we continue to equate "soft" with weakness, or worse, if we dismiss it as something feminine to be avoided, then we rob ourselves of one of the most potent forms of power available to us.
Softness is not weak, giving up or giving in. Softness is a power that has learned precision, strength that has discovered efficiency, force that has evolved into flow.
Think of your foot hovering gently over the brake pedal while driving, you're alert, ready, responsive, but never tense. Readiness and poised awareness are what true softness looks like in every arena of life.
Written by Lisa Precious
