Empowering Yourself

What you love you empower-what you fear you empower-and what you empower you attract.--Author Unknown

Empowering Yourself

Empower means: the power to make choices relevant to one's situation, acting with confidence. It’s about realizing that you have the power to take control of your own destiny and make the choice to live the life you desire.

Your thoughts and feelings go hand in hand. If you spend much of your time self-identifying with negativity, and self-loathing then this becomes your self-image. Your self-image determines how others see and treat you.

Empowering yourself is possibly the most important thing you can in terms of realizing your desires. The more you empower yourself, the more you act with confidence. The more you’re able to see the real potential of who you are, and change your self-image. As the circle continues, this more confident self-image now determines how others see and treat you.

Empowering yourself is also to some a scary proposition. If you truly want to be empowered you must first take responsibility for your life, period. You must accept without a doubt that you created or co-created every situation in your life. That doesn’t mean placing blame or feeling shame.

It simply means that you have to accept that the choices you’ve made up to this point have led to where you are in life right now. Most mental health professionals will say that this leads to a blame the victim mentality. However, if you are empowered and making decisions based purely on your core values, then you will not be a victim.

If something unpleasant or even horrible happens in your life, you’ll have the tools to deal with it. You will not see yourself as a victim of circumstance. You’ll see yourself as someone who currently has a situation that needs to be dealt with and you’ll find the best resources available to deal with it. No matter the situation.

Taking the Steps

1. Acknowledge and accept where you are right now. Once you do this, you can then say to yourself, “this is where I AM and that’s okay for now.” Knowing and accepting where you are will give you a clear understanding of what you need to do to move forward.

2. Figure out what you do want. You have to be specific. Just simply knowing what you don’t want isn’t good enough. Pose the question, the answer is there you just have to know how to listen for it. Meditation can help you. It will allow you to quiet your mind so you can hear the answer.

3. Deal with any resistance you feel to the answers you’ve been given. This may require you to change your beliefs. Remember if you believe you can’t then you can’t. You have to start to believe it’s possible. Learning to monitor your feelings will help you. When you think of your newly set direction in life, pay close attention to the feelings you get.

If you feel doubt, fear, anxiety, or any other negative emotion, then stop for a moment and determine what you were just thinking that caused those feelings. Take each thought one at a time. For instance, you find that fear or anxiety kicks in when you’re thinking of your new direction. And you determine you were thinking, I’m not smart enough to do this.”

Then ask yourself, “Why do I feel this way?” And start thinking about and listing all the things that you’ve done in your life that says otherwise. Always turn the negative into a positive. If the fear or anxiety is deeply rooted, and you can’t use these techniques to move past it, you may need to seek the aid of a counselor to discover why you can’t let it go. But generally, just turning the negative thought on itself is enough to move past it.

4. The last step is to have faith and allow. Once you’ve dealt with the negativity concerning the change, have faith that you’re taking a positive step in the right direction. Allow it to happen. Relax and pay attention to how events unfold.

You’re on the path to becoming who you really are. Your past holds only memories of what was and your future holds the promise of what you create. This is empowerment. You now have the power to take control and make the choices that allow you to live the life you desire and deserve.