The word ‘empowered’ gets thrown around a lot lately, including through Theravada Mental Health’s many mantras and mission (our whole schtick is to help our clients ‘Be Empowered’, after all). When a word is overused, it tends to have the impact of its meaning or definition blurred or diminished. That’s why I want to dedicate our December blogs to gaining a sense of self-empowerment by identifying what exactly that means and how to accomplish it.
Feeling self-empowered in a variety of aspects of life significantly increases fulfillment and contentedness. Everyone has their own reasons for looking to feel more self-empowered. They range anywhere from improving their relationships, gaining control over physical or mental health problems, improving work and financial satisfaction, overcoming major life changes, gaining more direction in life, and meeting life goals. However, you don’t have to be struggling with an area of life in order to gain self-empowerment. Some might seek self-empowerment because they’re on a personal journey to accomplish being the best version of themselves. Regardless of the reason, self-empowerment can benefit anyone.
There’s also a belief that if you’re not empowering aspects of your life, then someone or something else will overpower them. This latter threat can come in the form of being pressured, manipulated, and taken advantage of by bosses, peers, family members, or society, causing a sense of overwhelm, distress, depressed mood, or anxiety. If you don’t gain a sense of empowerment in your own life, you may also lose sight of what direction you wish to go and what life goals ultimately make you happy.
Some benefits to Self-Empowerment:
- Improve relationships (with yourself and others)
- Gain confidence in yourself
- Feel more in control
- Improve self-image
- Improve mental and physical health
- Inspire others
- Accomplish life goals
- Improve your mood
- Feel contentedness with yourself and your life
The place to start is to take some time to self-reflect (like, REALLY self-reflect by taking more than a few minutes while you’re brushing your teeth in the morning), and identify what you do well, what you could be better at, and how to be better at those things in order to make life easier and gain a greater sense of empowerment in life. Some introspective questions to explore and elaborate the answers to these questions may be:
- What is possible for me right now that I wasn’t able to do last year?
- How do I want to feel?
- What can I enjoy more of?
- What stresses me out?
- What kind of experiences do I want to have?
- How can I do things differently?
- What is my definition of success?
- How do I see myself?
- What am I afraid of?
- How do I make use of my time?
- What are my goals?
Start with answering these questions and being as honest with yourself as possible. There’s no shame in identifying that we aren’t at a place in life where we want to be. Life is about continuous evolution toward gaining positivity and personal growth, and through self-empowerment, we can keep on this trajectory. But beware of some barriers that may stand in the way of your continued personal growth and development, despite having done the hard work of identifying what it is in life that you are lacking or have not yet fulfilled.
These barriers can be overcome with yet more focus and work on whether or not they apply to you as well as your attempts at mitigating them – usually done through self-determination, motivation, and oftentimes with the guidance and support of a therapist. These barriers include:
Negative Self-Talk/Inner Critic
Negative self-talk is the manifestation of the inner critic that most of us possess, at least to some degree, and which not only deters us from accomplishing our goals but from attempting them in the first place. This critical voice comes from somewhere, and it’s helpful if you can go through your history and identify whose words these are because they are often not originally from you. It takes cognitive behavioral skills, self-awareness, and self-compassion to fight negative self-talk and your inner critic, and gaining these skills and directives most often comes from engagement in therapy and learning therapeutic approaches.
Lacking Self-Care/Self-Love
Negative self-talk is indicative of a lack of self-love, and if you don’t put yourself or your needs as a priority, you are lacking in self-care. If you don’t focus on getting your basic and emotional needs met, it will greatly inhibit your ability to achieve self-empowerment, if you can at all. Start your journey toward self-empowerment by taking inventory of your needs and how to take better care of them. You may want to start by asking yourself how well you take care of others you love vs. how well you take care of yourself.
Not Having Life Goals
Do you know what your life goals are and, if you have identified your life goals, have you kept them in mind as life gets in the way of achieving them? Identify the main goals, no matter how large or small they seem, by using the SMART model for goal setting (find a guide to using this model HERE). Next, break them down step-by-step, notating incremental accomplishments as you work toward achieving the larger goal. This will help keep you motivated by triggering a persistent release of dopamine (the chemical your brain produces that makes you feel good), which is very helpful in keeping you motivated and focused on accomplishing the goal.
Comparing Yourself to Others
There’s nothing that takes the wind out of your sails like opening up that social media account and seeing photos of ONLY THE BEST moments in a person’s life and comparing them to your life. Maybe your friend is seen on a luxurious vacation, or that chick you used to work with posted about her recent engagement, or someone you went to high school with is now a successful artist and traveling the world while doing what they love. We have to protect ourselves from these unrealistic and quite ridiculous comparisons that we contrive through exposure to social media by avoiding exposure to these outlets as much as possible. All of the success you may feel you’ve achieved can be wiped away in one instance with the sight of a former colleague who achieved her long-standing goal of heading the company where you two used to work together. Remember, these are THEIR life and goals, not yours. Instead of wasting your time on social media, maybe set your sights on listening to empowering podcasts or reading an empowering article related to one of your goals.
Lack of Motivation
Remember Isaac Newton’s first law of inertia, “An object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion…”. While one of your life goals may not be to run a marathon, this law figuratively applies to other aspects of our lives. If we don’t develop a healthy routine and stick by that routine every day, we tend to become more stagnant and less motivated, because we’ve stopped the routine from putting us into motion. Likewise, if we take time off from our steps toward achieving our goals, the likelihood that we’ll accomplish them, especially in a timely manner, is greatly diminished. The key is to keep your motivation in motion by continuously making small strides toward achieving the overall goal every day.
Remember that you are ultimately in control of your destiny and life. Start by identifying and answering the questions you have toward gaining a sense of self-empowerment, then ensure there are no barriers present to prevent you from achieving the goals you set toward self-empowerment. Next week’s blog will outline the areas of life we can focus our sense of self-empowerment and examples of what that may look like for you.