As an empowered person, you have full control and the ability to manifest positive opportunities and experiences, healthy relationships, and all good things into your life.
When you’re in your power, you’re comfortable going with the flow, confident about taking risks and find it easy to make decisions. When your self-empowerment quota is low, you’re forever chasing your tail, every challenge seems insurmountable, and it feels like everyone is out to take advantage of you.
Personal power is an attitude and state of mind that is the driving force behind your actions. It’s also your competence, mental and emotional strength, and resilience. While your power can’t be taken from you, it is straightforward to relinquish it unconsciously.
How You Give Power Away
When you give your power away, you sabotage any chance of success in many areas of your life. As a result, financial, emotional, health, and relationship problems manifest easily.
People Pleasing
Putting others’ needs before your own – whether in the family or romantic relationships, friendships, or work situations – is detrimental to your happiness. If you’re a people pleaser, you devalue yourself with every action you take to make someone else feel more important. You also allow other people to determine the kind of day that you’ll have.
Keeping Yourself Small
Convincing yourself that your needs don’t matter is an excellent way to keep yourself small and give up on your dreams. If you have trouble setting boundaries and allowing people around you to put you down, bully, or ridicule you, you’re inviting them to come and take your power away.
Feeding Your Addictions
Confusing your personal needs with having more ‘stuff’ makes you a slave to your addictions. You don’t have to be hooked on hardcore drugs, tobacco, or alcohol to become a powerless addict. Comfort eating, shopping, watching TV, social media, and sex can have the same detrimental effect on your power. By feeding your addiction, you’re confirming that the subconscious belief that you can’t be happy without your ‘fix’ owns your power.
Repeating Relationship Patterns
If you’re caught in the trap of chasing love and having your heart broken time and time again, you’re simply repeating the relationship patterns that are meant to teach you something about yourself. Whenever you become co-dependent on a lover, you willingly hand over your power and permit them to treat you the same as the last person who hurt you.
Until you learn to love, respect, and value yourself enough to take back your power, you’ll keep on repeating the same negative behavioral pattern.
How to Reclaim Your Power
The opinion, beliefs, behavior, or actions of others doesn’t define you or your self-worth. You have more power than you could imagine, right at your fingertips. If you want to reclaim your power, all you to do is commit to taking full control of your life.
Step into The Leading Role
You are the star of your life story. So Instead of sitting on the sidelines, you need to exercise your personal power by stepping into the leading role. Explore your life purpose and determine your direction. Establish healthy boundaries and take actions that support your purpose. It’s perfectly OK to ask others for help and advice, provided that you don’t disempower yourself by buying into their opinions.
Get Clear on Your Limiting Beliefs
The reason you gave your power away is down to your limiting beliefs. Before you can fully reclaim your power, you need to examine how you see yourself and your beliefs about the world. Unfortunately, you’re likely to be following a sabotaging script that was written by someone else and passed down through generations in your family.
Take a timeout and meditate to understand the difference between hard-wired beliefs and beliefs that belong to your authentic self.
Learn to Say “No”
People pleasers often find it difficult to say “no” to requests for time, knowledge, or energy. However, to take your power back, you must learn how to value yourself. Unless you have a genuine interest in doing something, you must turn down all requests without feeling guilty or selfish. The same applies to unfulfilling activities.
Once people realize that they can no longer take advantage of you, your power is returned.
Big Yourself Up
If you’ve been exposed to naysayers, complainers, nit-pickers, and overly critical people, you’ve probably developed a negative self-talk habit. Unfortunately, what you say to yourself can be hugely empowering or equally disempowering.
Get into the habit of bigging yourself up daily. Develop a vocabulary of positive words that encourage and motivate you to own your power. If a negative thought pops into your head, nip it in the bud before you utter it as a negative statement of self-sabotage. The more you practice, the easier this new habit will become, and the quicker you’ll have your personal power back.