First Steps in Empowerment

Choosing Empowerment

Empowerment often begins the moment you feel out of control. It is the first sign something isn’t aligning with your inner self or values. The process of finding empowerment in a situation ends with a sense of freedom and wholeness that feels like expansion within yourself and beyond.

Finding empowerment in situations takes practice as it doesn’t come naturally and is rarely taught. It also requires energy and effort as you learn and grow from impulsive decisions to calm control. When you are empowered you are centered. You have the capacity to look at more than one perspective, to acknowledge how your feeling, and to ask for what you want. You may not be able to complete every step or it may not look perfect when you complete the process. That is ok because benefits come from the smallest steps and every opportunity to grow makes attempt that much easier the next time. Empowerment is choosing your best life.

Here are the first three steps:

1. What’s the situation that you need to acknowledge?

2. How is the situation making you feel?

3. What do you want?

Step One: What’s the situation that you need to acknowledge?

Empowerment starts with defining the situation you find in yourself in. What is the story and how can you tell it as neutral as possible (emotion-free, blame-free). Why neutral? If you tell the story from a neutral perspective you have the ability to look at your situations from different viewpoints and have more options on how you choose to feel and the actions you want to take.

Here’s an example. Two friends are traveling together. They get into a petty fight about what time to meet up in the morning. Let’s call one friend Joe and the other David.  Joe feels like David is being controlling. A neutral approach looks like this, Joe acknowledges: I am hungry, I am tired, overwhelmed. David is making suggestions and I don’t have the energy to process them or respond. 

The truth is David might be controlling. The truth could also be David is simply excited and unaware of how Joe is feeling. If Joe looks at the situation from a neutral perspective, he can see his own part and remains open to the different perspectives of David. 

Step Two: How is the situation making you feel?

Now that you’ve acknowledged the situation you can ask yourself, “How do I feel about this?” Often there is more than one feeling and they overlap. You can feel overwhelmed and happy. You can feel tired and unsure. Try sitting in a comfortable position, taking a couple of deep breathes, relaxing and observing what comes up. Try doing this without judgment or movement to fix it. Be gentle and patient with yourself. 

When emotions that come up feel “bad” (for lack of better term) we tend to avoid them. But emotions are not inherently “good” or “bad” they simply tell us something (or motivate us). Sometimes what feels “bad” means we are actually “hurting”. Don’t let hurt scare you. Hurt and pain are not indefinite. You can heal from pain. It’s only once you acknowledge that you hurt, you can decide how you want to move forward.

In our example, Joe sees his own situation clearer. He acknowledges he is physically stressed (hungry and tired) and feeling overwhelmed from the travel. He knows David is not controlling and realizes he isn’t angry. In fact,  how he is feeling has nothing to do with his friend at all. This allows him to step back from the situation and determine what he wants.

Step Three: What do you want?

Starting from a neutral perspective and owning how you feel, you can ask yourself, “What do I want?” This may be the hardest part of the process because it requires vulnerability; asking for what you want opens yourself up to the possibility you might not get it. When we get what we ask for from loved ones, our relationships grow deeper and fuller. When we get what we ask for outside of relationships, our journey can feel more at peace.

When we don’t get what we ask for there is work to do: letting go, acceptance, changing expectations, etc. But not getting what we ask for can also mean getting something you never knew you needed. There is magic in trusting our own beyond what we can see for our own journey. No matter the outcome, you move forward.

For our example, what does Joe want? To eat a large meal, take a nap, and then collaborate on traveling adventures. 

Asking for what you want might be small like, I want to eat pizza for dinner or large and more abstract like I want friendships based on respect and reciprocity. Asking for what you want also begins the second stage of the empowerment process; knowing what you have control over and focusing on that. We will save for the later.

Tying it all together with a bow

The example with Joe and David is simplistic and easy to solve. We know that’s not how life is all the time but, we want to illustrate how dramatically the process changes your sense of power. You have control over how you process situations or how you set goals, even if you have no control over the outcome. You have more empowerment than you believe.

The other truth is we can’t always do the steps in real-time or perfectly, but just acknowledging that you have options in how you feel and what you want, frees you. It changes your relationships too, with yourselves and others as you learn to be more vulnerable, more connected, and more complete.

Image by Oriol Angrill Jordà