HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN YOU ARE EMPOWERED?

What are the telltail signs when you are empowered? When you have accessed all of the powers that I’ve been describing in this series, how will you know? What will be different? How will others recognize your innate powers?

You will first and foremost move through the world with a sense of confidence that you are in charge of you and your life. You do not talk or think or whine like a helpless victim. When there’s something to do, you take action. When you make a mistake, you simply say so and make the needed corrections. There’s no blame, no accusations about others, no pointing the finger to the universe or to God and accusing that you’ve not been given a fair shake. When you are empowered, you access your core powers of thinking, emoting, speaking, and behaving and put them together to generate the skill-set that you need to cope and to master the situation.

This feeling of confidence of being in charge means that if someone were to ask you, “Who’s responsible for your financial well-being? For your health and fitness? For your character and personality? For your love relationship and friends? You would take your index finger and point to your chest, to your heart and proudly say, “I am of course!”

This feeling gives you the sense of being “at cause.” You are the cause of your experience and the quality of those experiences and knowing that, you make choices that will enhance the quality of your life just as you set frames of meaning that makes every experience richer. This includes experiences that are under the control of others like perhaps a job in a large organization. That’s because no matter where you are, who you report to, how many bosses or authority figures you answer to, you know and feel that you have choice. “I am the architect of my experiences! I am a meaning-maker!”

Being empowered you glory in the fact that you are a meaning-maker. You know that for you there is no “meaning” that exists out there independent of your thinking–emoting powers. You create the meanings that you experience and even the “meanings” that you receive from others, accept from others, for those meanings to be meanings in you, you create, invent, and construct them through the process of receiving communications from others. And knowing this, you know that all the meanings that you experience are yours. You are therefore empowered to change those that do not enhance the quality of your life.

You know you are empowered when you live with passion. Empowered people live on purpose. They

listen to their inner voice of what excites them, what brings out their very best, what makes them feel fully alive and then set an intention to develop those inner capacities clamoring to be expressed. This is the self-actualization drive that is within everyone but that is dampened and reduced in so many people. You know you’re empowered when you set out an intentional course of action, which may take ten or twenty or fifty years to complete, a course that makes your life an adventure. It becomes a discovery of what you have to develop and express and the difference it makes in the world.

Setting out on the course doesn’t mean that you know all the steps, or that you’re confident you can make it work, it only means that you don’t sit around waiting— you take action. You do what you can with what you’ve got now. You face your fears and courageously go for the vision and the dream in spite of periods of confusion, insecurity, doubts, and all of the other emotions that often plague us humans. You live above and beyond that— you live for a dream that you care passionately about. So you step out, maybe not knowing precisely where you are going, but you step out inventing it as you go.

You know you are empowered when you empower others. The power that I’m speaking about isn’t just for you, it is for sharing with others— as many others as you can. So you are not wanting to have power over others, but power with others. A truly empowered person takes no pleasure in trying to control others or force others to do it their way. There is far too much to do, to experience, to learn, to enjoy, to contribute to be focusing on what belongs within the power zone of other people.

Trying to control other people actually is a sign of insecurity. The person who tries to control others is insecure and low in personal empowerment. This is an indicator that the person has little power him or herself! They may be trying to experience “power” in a toxic way by trying to control others. They may have become addicted to a pseudo-power and so try to control their world by getting all of the externals under control. Whatever they are trying to do, they are not demonstrating an empowered life. Empowered people love to see others become empowered and enjoy the process of turning over control of others to those others.

You know you are empowered when you have self-control. Ah yes, self-control. The ability to control yourself. This is the power to discipline yourself, to be a “disciple” to whatever passion that you want to live and express. This speaks about the ability to follow-through— consistently, regularly, methodically, congruently. An empowered person sets an intention high enough so that it becomes easy and natural to follow-through and carry out the plans in order to make them real.

Empowerment begins here. Self-control is the beginning place. After all, if you cannot lead yourself and manage yourself, you won’t be able to control yourself. And without self-control, the likelihood is that you can get out-of-control and do things that undermine your highest and best. Solution: Learn the Meta-States Model so that as you learn to effectively reflect on yourself, then you can meta-state yourself with the understanding, acceptance, appreciation, discipline, etc. that puts you in charge of you!