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How to identify abilities that empower change
My experience with empowerment focused on using it as an instrument of control. I like the term because it lends weight to serious attempts to wrestle your demons.
Empowerment is about whatever allows you to gain control over your life. Once I decided that personal development was a dominant theme of my life, searching for what might give me the power to change became paramount.
I arrived at this conclusion because of patterns of reluctance that continued to bedevil me: I wanted but was reluctant to lose weight, stop smoking, make cold sales calls, improve my posture, and become less shy with others.
But with every attempt, I often felt like I was moving a ten-ton boulder.
Tools for Fighting Reluctance
All these wants repeatedly got beat back by reluctance of one kind or another. Have you had this experience where your wants and desires were blocked by innumerable internal obstacles? Did they stop you in your tracks, accompanied by incredible frustration?
If you managed to avoid admitting defeat, and you persisted, as I did, you came to realize that the issue was personal power: how to harness it to help you achieve what you wanted.
So, what are the sources of personal empowerment? Money, time, information, a trained skill, references, contacts, faith in personal discipline, willpower, and ability to withstand disapproval, rejection, and failure.
Identifying Your Strengths by Self-Understanding
I should add self-understanding to this list, allowing you to locate your strengths and capacities. What you are good at gives you a leg up in the empowerment game.
I came to believe from life experience that my capacity for self-discipline was my chief skill; I could use this discipline to gain positive outcomes: weight loss, smoking cessation, and sobriety come to mind as the most prized results I sought.
Mastering these as I did, after a prolonged period of struggle, difficulties, and unwavering persistence, I arrived at a more powerful place.
If you are in a position where you are faced with an ardent desire to achieve a goal but also are enduring a powerful resistance, take heart!!
My experience provided the following lessons.
- Identify your main strengths and find ways to improve them.
- Locate achievable goals that are symbolic of fundamental values and ideals.
- If you have inner conflicts holding you back, seek help from a coach or therapist to learn ways to gain mastery over those conflicts.
Employ self-study to find your main drives and what energizes your best efforts so that your goal has an excellent chance of fulfillment.
It may be in your case that you suffered a misfortune, traumatic or otherwise, from which you want to cope in a healthy way by creating a new narrative of overcoming.
I leveraged an early misfortune of being disrespected and repressed by a parent in my early years into positive accomplishments. These accomplishments mostly took place in the fields of health and fitness.
These successes provided the foundation for later projects that added to my recovery; my confidence was restored, which opened new doors.
You, too, may find this an appropriate route for the way forward. As Shakespeare said:
They say best men are molded out of faults. And, for the most, become much more the better for being a little bad.” Measure for Measure
Of all forms of empowerment, the one I rate the highest is the one that allows you to ‘act in accord’ with your ideals.
In the end, empowerment is taking responsibility for setting goals and achieving results. It means implementing decisions yourself rather than implementing the decisions of others.
Embodying your ideals is the route to more productivity, more satisfaction, and more maturity.
As one of my favorite authors Terry Cole Whittaker claims:
Diminishing yourself is an expression of powerlessness. Stop being controlled by your fears and belief system.
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