NEW YEAR POWER

As we are beginning a new year, now is a great moment to refresh your awareness of your innate powers. Why? Because your innate powers is your key to your self-management and mastery of your engagements. After all, while you do have these innate powers and you can’t lose them, still ... in order to make full use of them, you need to be fully cognizant of them. Otherwise you could forget them or overlook them or even minimize them. People who do that then make the mistake of thinking that they are victims without any power to effect change. When you refresh your mindfulness about your powers and utilize them, you become a victor over life’s circumstances and can no longer be a victim. How’s that for a goal for 2023?

The truth is that you have the power to do all kinds of wild and wonderful things! But that is true only if you’re willing to tap into your innate powers, activate them, develop them, and then put them to good use. That’s up to you; you have to do that. Default on doing that, then any competency that you have will actually atrophy.

I recently came across the following a quotation from Ralph Martson who first, vividly expressed the powers that we all have and then provided a challenge about using them for your highest meanings and values. It might be a good idea to print it off and put it on your bathroom mirror and read it every morning as a way to awaken the spirit of possibilities in yourself.

“Right here and now, this very day, you have the power to think, the power to dream, the power to make decisions, the power to act, the power to create, to learn, to influence others, to change things, to experience and enjoy. On top of all that, you have the power to invent, to innovate, to change your mind, to understand, and to move into a new direction. You have the power to persevere, to work with discipline and focus, to manage your time, to recognize your opportunities, to take responsibility and to act responsibly, to solve problems, to effectively utilize your resources, and to make a positive difference in your world. Some people take these very same powers and achieve great things. How will you make use of your power today? It is an incredible opportunity and an awesome responsibility. It is real and it is yours. Challenge yourself to transform that power, with your thoughts and actions, into your own special greatness.”

Talk about power! That is a powerful description of a person who is in touch with his or her powers and knows out to put them to good use. When you refresh your awareness of your innate powers, then when there is an opportunity, you are able to take advantage of it. Your powers give you the capacity to make good use of opportunities. It’s important that you know that an opportunity is not a “right.” You can’t claim that as a right or demand it. Instead, think of it as a chance. It’s your chance to seize the possibilities in an opportunity and see what happens. And that requires an active mind and body.

The most obvious aspects of your innate powers are those by which you express yourself

externally, namely your linguistic powers of speech and your behavioral powers of action. When you develop these inner capacities, you increase your ability to make a difference in the world and to be effectively productive. The internal powers are much more subtle. These are in your meta place and here you have to activate your thinking and emoting, your brain and body. Then you can create a lively and rich inner world. In Neuro-Semantics, our new focus on thinking and the thinking series in the Brain Camps are designed to richly enhance these internal powers. In NLP, when Richard Bandler spoke about this as running your own brains, he identified a common problem that people have in taking charge.

"Most people don't actively and deliberately use their own brains. Your brain is like a machine without an ‘off’ switch. If you don't give it something to do, it just runs on and on until it gets bored. If you put someone in a sensory deprivation tank where there's no external experience, he'll start generating internal experience. If your brain is sitting around without anything to do, it's going to start doing something, and it doesn't seem to care what it is. You may care, but it doesn't.” (1985, p. 7)

That’s the problem. Apparently, your brain needs direction. It needs to be told what to do. That’s where meta-thinking comes in. Above and beyond thinking, is the instructional thinking. That’s where you tell your brain (or focus your mind) so that you think about things that make your life better and more resourceful. In both NLP and Neuro-Semantics, we enable people to learn to take control of their lives and change their experiences, by showing how to control what happens in the brain. Speaking about control, Bandler uses the metaphor of driving.

“Most people are prisoners of their own brains. It's as if they are chained to the last seat of the bus and someone else is driving. I want you to learn how to drive your own bus. If you don't give your brain a little direction, either it will just run randomly on its own, or other people will find ways to run it for you—and they may not always have your best interests in mind. Even if they do, they may get it wrong!" (1985, pp. 7-8)

So, just as you go to a gym to develop your body, if you want your innate powers to be well developed, to be sharp and ready to put you into action, you need to develop those innate powers. Then your zone of power will be at your ready access as opportunities arise. Then, your experiences in life will be under your control and not the environment, the culture, or someone else’s.