Secrets of Self-Empowerment: Acquiring Personal Power is Healthy and Wise
The accumulation of personal power should be at the core of everyone’s life journey. It’s a choice that everyone has to make. We can choose to remain in self-limiting paradigms, or we can embrace attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that are self-empowering and that lead us to personal greatness.
We can use a variety of terms to describe personal power, such as confidence, courage and competence. People acquire these constructive and other qualities in the course of their personal development by leaving behind behaviors and attitudes that they evolved as children and by acquiring healthier, more fulfilling life strategies.
There is nothing negative about personal power; the deliberate accumulation of personal power aims to enhance one’s mastery of self and not of others. Personal power is more an attitude or state of mind, rather than an attempt to maneuver or control others. Indeed, when persons exhibit manipulative and controlling behavior, that is a surefire sign that they are stuck in behavioral paradigms developed as a child when they were dependent on others and learned to manipulate others in order to get their way or to feel loved.
Personal power is quite the opposite; it equates to emotional self-reliance and taking responsibility for one’s physical needs through productive activity. Life requires that we function as adult human beings able to cooperate with other adults in our useful and productive activities. The end game is to be a help and not a burden in life. Self-empowerment makes this possible.
Personal power is based on strength, confidence, and competence that individuals gradually acquire in the course of their development. It is also self-assertion, and a natural, healthy striving for love, and satisfaction and meaning in one’s interpersonal world. This type of power represents a movement toward self-realization and transcendent goals in life; its primary aim is mastery of self, not others.
| Hallmarks of an Empowered Person Empowering Behaviors, Attitudes and Beliefs | Hallmarks of a Disempowered Person Self-limiting Behaviors, Attitudes and Beliefs |
| Assumes responsibility | Blames others |
| Creates opportunity in challenging situations | Engages in self-pity |
| Industrious, productive | Procrastinator, slothful, competitive |
| Emotionally Self Reliant (attains emotional detachment because happiness comes from within) | Emotionally dependent on another or others for happiness or for rescue |
| Loves without expecting payoff | Loves expecting something in return |
| Receives love openly | Closed to the goodwill of others, self-isolating |
| Accepts reality for what it is | Engages in wishful thinking; denies facts |
| Discerning (ability to judge well; wise) | Feigns confusion to gain sympathetic responses |
| Exercises loving kindness to self and others | Selfish, malicious |
| Confident | Arrogant |
| Looks inward for peace and joy | Looks to external sources for happiness and approval |
| Creator, inventor | Conformist, imitator |
| Cooperative | Subordinated, dominating |
| Courageous | Anxious, fearful |
| Inner directed; Doing and action are their own reward | Pursues externally defined success |
| Disciplined | Disorganized |
| Self-reflective | Self-absorbed |
| Humble | Self-important |
| Helpful to others | Burdensome |
| Determined | Grudging |
| Problem solver | Wishful thinker |
| Forgiving | Holds grudges, vindictive |
| Aloneness | Loneliness |
| Feels adequate, senses self-worth | Sense of impoverishment |
| Gratefulness | Pessimism |
| Assertive | Passive |