Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
No one can fix your world for you, but everything you need to find peace, power and love is within you already; you simply need tools to access it
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We live in a world where becoming powerful is defined by individuals and social standards which tend to lie outside of our own minds. We have become a society that has surrendered our connection with our own internal power base and redefined it in terms of our ability to connect with, and be part of a social system that pressures us into believing that belonging to it, and surrendering who we are to it, gives us definition, and subsequently power. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Though we are, in fact, social animals, we are first, and foremost, individuals. We are unique and specific to ourselves, and we must begin to understand that true power was born inside of us, and it is we who must understand how to connect to that power, define it, and learn to champion it.
Self-empowerment has little, if anything to do with the outside world, and those who live there.
It has everything to do with the power that is already inside you, and your willingness to do what it takes to access that power and to learn how to use it to become a loving, powerful person.
The Ten Secrets to Self-Empowerment
True inner power is standalone power. This means that its existence and its ability to evolve and continue to strengthen who you are must have a limited connection to external sources. Attempts to derive power from external sources can have a debilitating effect on inner power, because it redefines the individual based on external sources. External sources of power tend to be defined more ambiguously, so definition and subsequently, usability can suffer. Indeed, self-empowerment is an internal mechanism. Let’s take a look at the practical and actionable ways to access, define, and employ your own internal power.
1. Social Housecleaning
The first step is a social purge. This does not mean that you must cast your social life aside. It does mean that no person or mechanism outside of you should play the dominant role in pressuring you to be anyone else but yourself. You, and you alone make the decisions that will help you define your life, and your internal power. Be willing to limit your time with social media, political pressure sources, family and friends who attempt to set the course of your life for you, and any person, place, or thing, that has you focusing more on those external sources than you do on accessing the internal attributes that will help you define who you are, and how to use your own personal power base. Only you decide who and what becomes part of your life.
2. Take your life off autopilot
There are specific processes involved in establishing and maintaining your internal power base. Conscious thought and decision-making are essential. This does not happen when you are blindly following the crowd, and engaging in mindless routines which do little more than remove you from the awareness that is necessary to focus on accessing your inner strength and creating the person you want to be. Put conscious thought in everything you think about and do. Be your own personal tone-setter.
3. Slow Down
Learning to access your internal power is a deliberate process. The pace of today’s world has accelerated to the point that it robs us of our ability to efficiently gather information, make decisions based on that information, and execute those decisions. Everything you do to become a powerful person will depend on how well your plan to get there is formulated. Moving at an accelerated pace reduces your ability to think about what you are doing. Make no mistake about it, internal power is always a function of your ability to process information efficiently. Nothing good happens fast, and accessing and developing your internal power demands a slower life-pace.
4. Intellect Over Emotion
Unhealthy emotions are like an internal virus that robs us of our stability and our power. While emotions do play a vital role in human life, it’s important that those emotions are healthy, and assist you as you connect with the deeper parts of yourself. Establishing a solid internal power base is always about using your intellect before your emotions. You want to give yourself enough time to apply intelligent conscious thought to the circumstances that may become part of your life. In any situation that arises in your life, try to take a step back, and allow your emotions to engage only after your intellect has done the necessary work to guide you through what is occurring, rationally, and with your eyes set forward on the establishment of a plan to address those circumstances.
5. Fact Finding
It’s important to become a good fact finder to provide the foundation for internal power. Internal power cannot develop, and it will not continue to live inside you without the facts. Inaccurate and incomplete information is a pathway to internal weakness. Gathering the facts, and learning to apply them in your daily pursuits sets the stage for thought and action that is accurate and efficient. Get your facts from reliable sources. Be wary of word-of-mouth information, and the ‘short version’ of a story that doesn’t seem to have any connection to the facts needed to substantiate it. Always ask questions. Make sure your information is sound, and can assist you in your plans to move forward in your life. Give yourself enough time to acquire accurate information.
6. Honesty
Make honesty your best friend. The truth of the matter is that most of us really don’t want any part of real honesty. Honesty has evolved into a concept that has less to do with factual information, and more to do with emotional survival. We will do whatever it takes to protect our fragile and spurious feelings, even if it means altering the facts to meet our needs. Powerful people are honest people. They work with the facts, do not rely on defenses such as denial, rationalization, and intellectualization of faulty information. Honesty may hurt just a little bit as it challenges us to move past the weaker parts of our personalities, but if we stick with it, it becomes one of the most important weapons in our power base arsenal.
7. Embrace Change
Inner power understands that we live in a dynamic world that does not stay the same. You cannot fear change. Change is essential to growth, and growth fuels inner power. Life without change exists in self-induced safe places, that do not challenge your intellect. Inner power evolves along with an ever-changing and always dynamic world. As the external world continues to develop, change remains constant. Internal power does not fear change, takes risks, steps out of comfort zones, and seeks new avenues of learning and adaptation. Mastering the dynamics of change continues to feed internal power. Never fear change; rather, embrace the opportunity that lies within it. Take small steps, but always be willing to step out of those comfort zones. Internal power demands change, and the learning that it instigates.
8. Positive Language
We spend more time in our own heads than anywhere else in our lives. Almost everything we do is either accompanied by, or initiated by our use of language. Inner power has everything to do with the way you speak to yourself. You can energize your whole human experience by using linguistic statements that provide you with the impetus for growth, confidence, and self-esteem. Internal power has a reciprocal connection to positive energy. As you speak to yourself using positive energy, you become more powerful, and as you become more powerful, you continue to speak using positive language. Positive language helps create positive internal energy, and dramatically increases your ability to become a powerful person.
9. Wisdom/Humility/Gratitude
Wisdom sets the stage for all the learning, efficient decision-making, internal growth and fulfillment needed to establish and maintain internal power. Having wisdom means that you are connecting with life’s information physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. With wisdom, you will become a human being who never stops learning, and never assumes to have reached the point where learning is not essential. Learning fuels self-empowerment, but in order to continue learning, humility must become a part of your life.
Humility is the teacher who never relinquishes studenthood, who understands we are constantly expanding into the unknown, and embraces this journey with grace and curiosity. Wisdom requires continued learning, and humility provides the environment for that to occur.
Gratitude is a state of being which opens the gates for power and joy to flourish. It is always available, and attaches itself to everything you think, feel, and do. It lives inside you and wraps itself around your entire world, supporting and energizing you as you move forward, even if on wobbly legs.
Your ability to incorporate wisdom, humility, and gratitude in your life removes you from the tendency to slip back into weaker and more dependent ways of living. You will continue to learn, your wisdom will increase, and you will be grateful for every moment of your existence.
10. Faith
Faith is that ghost of a virtue — undefined and misaligned. When, however, it becomes part of you, your world becomes defined and aligned forever. All too often, people have a difficult time with faith because it becomes attached to God, and they don’t understand how to address that concept in their lives. Whereas faith and God are inseparable, they do not exist together until you make a conscious decision to connect them. Faith, as I am defining it, is nothing more than the ability to understand that something greater than you exists, and that by acknowledging that power, acquiescing to it and embracing it, you become part of that power source. All three of those components must occur for faith to develop in you.
It’s important to look at yourself as a limitless creation, who possesses the ability to define and understand higher-order life enterprises. This is a two-step process: First, make a decision to accept the possibility of a higher power. Second, without judgment or pretense, make an attempt to define and include that higher power into your life. If you can, you will begin to understand faith, and you will have more faith in yourself. Faith can create peaceful, indestructible inner power that will be available to you in everything you do and everything you experience for the rest of your life. Your decision to attach it to God or not, is yours and yours alone. Try not to make your difficulty with God a reason not to explore faith. The power it creates will change your life forever.
Everything you need to become more powerful is already inside you. If that were not the case, we could not have survived as a species.
Try to reduce your involvement with the external world enough to access, define, and connect to the sources inside you that will begin to create the powerful person you were meant to be. And don’t confuse power with strength. The kind of power I am referring to exists within, and in the end, will connect to the love that has been inside you all your life. This love will help you ascend to the new and wonderful higher order levels of living that have been waiting for you. When you reach the point that your love becomes spiritual and unconditional, you will have achieved the most powerful point in human existence.
Reduce the impact of the external world. Focus your attention on the power that has laid dormant inside you. Let your internal power exist inside a framework of spiritual love, and you will understand who you are and why you are here. You will have arrived. Here’s to the power inside you!
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Faust Ruggiero is the award-winning author of The Fix Yourself Empowerment Series.
You may also enjoy reading Power Play: Redefining Your Relationship to Power, by Iman Oubou.
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