How to Become Self Empowered
Takeaways: Becoming self-empowered is the path to feeling happier, more secure, and reaching your full potential. Learn how to become self-empowered and build the life you envision for yourself.
- What is self-empowerment?
- Finding balance
- Self-empowerment is always evolving
- Attaining self-empowerment in your life
Becoming Self Empowered: Living Like You Are Important, Too.
Are you ready to become self empowered? In our hectic, demanding lives, it’s easy to lose sight of ourselves: who we are, how we feel, and what we need. I see this all the time with therapy, life coaching, and personal growth coaching clients, even more challenging can be figuring out how to assert all-of-the-above in our relationships with others. This is particularly true if you’ve been existing in a toxic relationship, codependent relationship, or navigating the aftermath of a bad breakup. In the midst of stressful circumstances, attaining empowerment can seem out of reach — especially when you’ve been focused outwards rather than within.
What Is Self Empowerment?
Self empowerment can be thought of as one of the goals of self-actualization and personal growth. To be “self empowered” is to feel confident, to trust yourself, to believe that your feelings are important, to consider yourself worthy of love and respect, and able to assert yourself appropriately in relationships. However, it’s difficult to be truly self empowered when you are out of touch with yourself and feel disconnected from the type of life and relationships that feel energizing and nourishing to you.
Finding Balance Between Me and You
Self empowerment can feel challenging for people who care about others feelings and who prioritize their connections with others. Why? Because for sensitive, caring people it can be easy to disown yourself and your feelings — making the way others feel and what they need more of a priority than your own needs and feelings. Many people, especially women, can feel guilty when they ask for what they want. Furthermore, if you are in an unhealthy relationship that does not support your empowerment, you may also feel like you’re risking having other people judge you or be angry with you if you start asking for what you need for a change.
The last thing you want is to feel hollow, helpless, or increasingly bitter.
However, at the same time, being dependent on other people to meet your needs or for the way you feel about yourself is inherently disempowering. If you wait for other people to take care of you instead of caring for yourself, you risk becoming resentful. And when you allow the way other people feel about you to define the way you feel about yourself, you become disconnected from yourself; transformed into a people pleaser, chasing the dragon of approval and validation from others.
The last thing you want is to feel hollow, helpless, or increasingly bitter. While attaining empowerment can feel bold, or even scary, it’s really the only choice for a happy, healthy life and relationships. Believing that you are worthy of love and respect — and then behaving accordingly — helps you take care of yourself and teaches others how to treat you.
Self-Empowerment Is Always Evolving
Empowerment is not something that you achieve and then have forever. For most people, living in a position of empowerment requires balance and constant realignment. To stay empowered means staying connected to your feelings, and the evolving landscape of your life. In this way, we can say that authentic, healthy “empowerment” is more of a life-skill than a destination.
Because developing self empowerment is such a complex, yet vitally important part of the growth process for many people, I’m devoting an entire episode of the Love, Happiness and Success Podcast to the topic. I’m also enlisting the support of a real-life “Empowerment Expert” to share her wisdom with you, a fellow therapist and life coach on the Growing Self team. We’re talking about how people create empowered lives and authentic relationships, starting by focusing on how to build a strong foundation within themselves.
Attaining Self Empowerment
We are talking about many of the “pieces” involved with cultivating personal empowerment, including:
- Mindful self-awareness
- Building self-love and self-compassion
- Why building a sustainable self-care routine is key to maintaining your solid foundation
- How stress can impact your empowerment
- The need to create balance by staying aware of your feelings
- How to be assertive and set boundaries in relationships… while also being flexible
- Trusting yourself
- How to ask for what you need… while also having compassion and empathy for people you love
- Developing a sense of self worth that is independent of external validation
- How to not give your power away, blame others, or lose yourself in relationships
- How to not fear your own power
How to Become Self Empowered in Your Life
Becoming a fully self empowered person is a process, not an event. For most people, achieving this type of confidence and growth is acquired over months, even years of dedicated personal growth work. However, Teena shares many different strategies you can start using right now, to build your self awareness mindfully, treat yourself with compassion and respect, trust yourself, and start strengthening your feelings of empowerment. I hope her wisdom gives you insight into how to begin cultivating empowerment in your life.
If you’d like to do this transformative work with a life coach or therapist on my team, I invite you to schedule a free consultation.
Additionally, we discussed a number of resources on today’s show. Here are links to learn more:
Enneagrams – The self awareness / personality quiz we often use with our individual and couples here at Growing Self.
Cultivating Mindfulness Skills – Check out the “Happy Mind” unit of The Happiness Class.
With love and respect,
Sources
- Nießen D, Schmidt I, Groskurth K, Rammstedt B, Lechner CM. The Internal-External Locus of Control Short Scale-4 (IE-4): A comprehensive validation of the English-language adaptation. PLoS One. 2022 Jul 11;17(7):e0271289. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0271289. PMID: 35816496; PMCID: PMC9273068. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9273068/
- Nowicki S, Iles-Caven Y, Kalechstein A, Golding J. Editorial: Locus of Control: Antecedents, Consequences and Interventions Using Rotter’s Definition. Front Psychol. 2021 Jun 29;12:698917. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.698917. PMID: 34267714; PMCID: PMC8275955. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8275955/
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