EMPOWERMENT

You now know how to create with thought. This is a huge step forward in creating your life as you want it. To breathe life into this knowledge, however, you need personal power. Many who want to grow and create more fulfilling lives fall short at this point. They read books and take workshops, but they haven’t developed the personal power to profit from what they have learned. Their learning is primarily intellectual, and nothing really changes.

Personal power is the ability to find your own individual truth and then create your life around it. And an empowered person is one who can do this consistently over time. How do you acquire the personal power to bring this about? We’ll start by looking at the qualities that make up personal power. Then we will lead you through several exercises that will help you cultivate or further develop these sources of power within yourself.

Before we begin, however, it is important to develop a healthy relationship with the whole notion of personal power. To discover how you currently view personal power, take a few minutes to answer these two questions in your journal or in the space provided.

In answering the first question, you may have discovered that the primary way you feel powerful is by doing things in the world: exercising, making things happen in your work, taking charge of projects around the house, making money, getting ahead in your career. For you, power is about asserting yourself in life, actively engaging in the process of creating.

Alternatively, you may have discovered that the primary way you feel powerful is by being in a certain way: being calm under pressure, demonstrating a sense of humor when things get difficult, being patient and understanding with another person, being in touch with and expressing your feelings, having an inner knowledge of the right thing to do. You experience power as your ability to receive the energy of a person or situation and respond appropriately to it.

Or you may have discovered that the primary way you feel powerful is in relationship to another person. You may feel powerful in exerting power over another—managing another person, controlling the behavior of your child, telling your spouse what to do, asserting your point of view and making sure it’s the dominant one—or to empower another—helping another person to grow, learn, and become more powerful.

These are the three primary ways we experience power: by doing, by being, and in relationship to others. The first two comprise personal power, and when balanced, allow us to have access to the full range of our power—our active, doing, masculine power along with our receptive, being, or feminine power. Standing alone, neither of these modes gives us sufficient power to sustain our growth. We need both. We need the active mode to get started, and we need the receptive mode to sustain us through the growing process.

If the primary way you felt powerful was either over another or by empowering another, this is important feedback. In these instances, you are deriving your power from interacting with another person rather than having your power come from within yourself. When you are not interacting with another, this form of power dissipates. And while it is obviously better to empower others than to control them, you’re still not in touch with sources of power that spring from within you.

You probably had no problem thinking of ways in which you do not feel powerful. This question helps many people pinpoint areas in their lives where they need to make a change, where they need to empower themselves. Many people feel powerless in some of the following areas: emotions, sex, caring for their bodies, money, work, relationships . . . as a matter of fact, all the vital areas of life come up when we think about powerlessness.

There are seven sources of power that we have found to be essential to creating and sustaining growth in our lives. You will likely feel adept at working with some of them, while others may be foreign to you.

Imagine that you have just made a breakthrough in the empowerment process. You have gained a wonderful insight into yourself and the changes you want to bring about, cleared away your limiting beliefs, and created an affirmation and visualization that’s right on your growing edge. And you have a good understanding of how to nourish this affirmation and visualization on a daily basis.

What’s needed now is the willingness to stay with your affirmation and visualization until it’s manifested. The quality of personal power that enables this to happen is commitment. It is the active engagement of your full will and whole heart to carry your original intention through to fruition. This includes the willingness to keep peeling back layers of unconscious beliefs that form your resistances.

Commitment requires much and gives back even more. It gives us pride—the pride that comes from making good on our inner promises to ourselves. It gives us confidence—the confidence that comes from seeing that we have what it takes to embody a vision. It gives us satisfaction—the satisfaction that comes from stretching beyond ourselves and becoming more than we were before.

What is the key to developing commitment? It is having a compelling vision. You need a vision strong enough to attract you and sustain your energy when your spirit flags. There is where the empowerment methodology comes in. It enables you to create a compelling vision and an affirmation and visualization on your growing edge so you are motivated to stick with it through all the bumps along the way.

What happens after we commit to affirming and visualizing the vision we want to bring into our life? What can we do on a daily basis? We develop the practice of discipline. We set up a time and a place to do our mental practice each morning or evening. In between these times, during the day, we stay aware. When old self-negating thoughts come into our mind, we do not allow them to hang around. We deliberately replace them with self-affirming thoughts.

Discipline is the hands-on aspect of commitment; it’s the daily dedication to our vision. It is rhythm with a purpose.

Discipline is a struggle when we attempt to apply it without a compelling vision. And discipline for discipline’s sake is pure drudgery. Athletic coaches, teachers, parents, and others often misunderstand this very important source of power. Discipline employed to build character, toughen, or punish is negative motivation, which will often, in the long run, produce the opposite of what we intend. Negating what you don’t want energizes and manifests it. What we think about we create.

A compelling vision naturally brings about commitment. Commitment naturally brings about discipline. If our discipline starts to waver, we need to recommit to our vision. This is the secret of true discipline.

We may have an excellent sense of commitment and discipline, yet still find ourselves slacking off. To keep up our motivation, we need something else. That something else is a personal growth support system.

A support system is composed of friendships and relationships dedicated to helping us grow. It can include professionals (like a therapist or mentor), close friends, and various types of support groups.

The critical factor in a support system is that the stated objective of the interactions is personal growth. There are many friendships or groups that are not explicitly intended to help us grow. These are fine. But we should not misunderstand their nature.

You also need to recognize that some relationships actually hold back your growth. These people may be afraid of self-discovery and this may prevent them from supporting your growth. Their approach to growing may be dogmatic and they attempt to force their path on you. They may be self-destructive and their negativity may shut you down. If you have these kinds of influences in your life, it’s all the more important that you seek out a personal growth support system. It’s also important for you to directly address nonsupportive people, especially if they are close to you, letting them know that their negativity is having a deleterious impact on your personal growth, and change the situation.

It requires effort and a clear intention to seek out and build a support system. It often takes several attempts before you put in place the kind of support system you want. Once you have a support system in place, it requires commitment to keep it alive and vital. It’s easy to get caught up in the endless busyness of life and neglect your support system. Of course, there may be a time when it’s appropriate to let go of some aspect of your support system if it’s no longer serving you and you’ve grown beyond it. You know whether or not you’ve outgrown it by asking yourself one simple question: Am I growing as a result of being in this group?

Another important kind of support is our physical environment. Our environments at home and at work are constantly affecting us. The sense of order, aesthetics or lack thereof, noises, and so forth all influence our internal state. We can create an environment that offers us calm, joy, inspiration, or any other quality we feel will enhance our growth, but this requires a clear intention.

How do we get answers to questions like these: Is this group helping me grow? What’s my growing edge? What fears or limiting beliefs are blocking me? We get these answers from our inner guidance, which has many names, including intuition, hunches, and gut feelings.

To become more self-aware, it is essential to be able to draw answers from within. Inner guidance is like the fine-focus setting on a pair of binoculars. A small correction is often the difference between seeing and not seeing or between a vision manifesting or languishing. Inner guidance provides the fine focus in our lives. The more adept we are at this process, the easier our growth becomes. And it is simple— it’s just a matter of doing it.

There are four steps that we have found helpful in accessing our inner guidance:

1. Get still. First we need to turn off the chatter in our mind. This mental chatter is like the static on a radio—it interferes with our ability to hear anything significant. A few deep breaths can usually quiet the mind. If the issue you are attempting to receive inner guidance on is of a deeper nature, several minutes of meditation on a calming image, such as a peaceful lake, will help.

2. Ask. If we want information, we need to ask for it; it doesn’t just come. We need to turn on the radio if we want to hear music. The more precisely we ask the question, the clearer the answer we will receive.

3. Trust. Many times people get very clear inner guidance, but they discount it. They don’t believe in their intuition or trust their own internal knowing. To prove its validity, we must trust the inner guidance we get.

4. Act. To demonstrate trust in our inner guidance, we must act on it. It doesn’t do us any good to know something and not act on it. After you’ve followed your inner guidance, make a mental note of what happened. How did it turn out? As you experience positive results from acting on your inner guidance, you will begin to use it more. And the more you use it, the more refined it gets and the better the results you achieve.

Although we need to be serious about our growth, if we want to sustain it over time, we can’t take ourselves too seriously or we will get weighted down. We need to complement the intensity that can occur on a path of personal growth with some form of lightness. Some people do this by dancing, others like to sing, and some get together with friends in a playful way. Keeping our spirit light as we grow makes the process much easier, not to mention more enjoyable. When was the last time you had a good belly laugh?

There are two ways to take a personal growth journey. The first is to view ourselves negatively each time we learn about parts of ourselves we need to change. The other is to view every limiting belief and growing edge we discover with gratitude for the ability it provides us to learn and grow. The former approach involves taking this journey as an act of self-negation, the later as an act of self-love.

Going on this journey as an act of self-negation, and lamenting all the parts of ourselves that are not the way we want them, is the surest way to bring our growth process to a standstill. Most of us just don’t have the stamina to subject ourselves to this kind of negative self-criticism and abuse over the long haul. We would rather just not look. And as our enthusiasm wanes, we move forward in fits and starts and eventually we simply stop.

When we pursue our journey of personal growth as an act of self-love, on the other hand, we are best able to sustain it over time. We gain energy from each self-discovery. We grow in enthusiasm each time we recognize our power to shape our future. We are animated by the opportunity to take on new growing edges that can improve our lives.

This source of personal power is the most central to our definition of empowerment. Every one of us is a unique being with particular gifts, strengths, needs, lessons to learn, challenges to overcome, and contributions to make to the world. Our primary aspiration should be the discovery and creation of a life based on this composite of our uniqueness.

Yet it isn’t easy to break out of the strong enculturation of expecting someone out there—the expert—to tell us the truth. We expect the doctor, the attorney, the pundit, the politician, the priest, the guru, or the therapist to give us the answer. In our fast-food culture, we aren’t encouraged to take the time to know who we are and discover what’s important to us. We have become estranged from ourselves and one of our greatest sources of personal power—our unique inner truth.

Finding our own truth allows us to have a strong foundation on which to build. It gives us insight into our values, which helps us make wise decisions for our life. It gives us a solid identity from which we can develop a well-founded opinion. It gives us criteria for how we want to grow . . . and much more.

Your own truth must be the guiding force for creating your life as you want it. And no one but you can know that truth. Almost every exercise in this book will help you discover and create your truth.

There you have it—seven precious sources of power that can promote your growth, if you use them. It’s now time to come into deeper rapport with each of these sources of personal power. To do this, we will guide you on an inner journey. All you need to do is relax and notice the images and ideas that come to you. It is an effortless way to allow your beliefs to emerge. After the exercise, we’ll help you better understand what came to you and make changes as needed.

EXERCISE | PERSONAL POWER GUIDED VISUALIZATION

Allow thirty minutes to do this exercise. You will need your journal and, if convenient, some colored markers or pastels for drawing images. Space has been left below in case you don’t have your journal handy.

Find a quiet place where you will be undisturbed, sit in a comfortable chair, and, if handy, put on some relaxing music. The guided visualization is divided into seven sections, one for each source of power. At certain points you will be guided to pause and close your eyes so you can more easily visualize and then draw or record in your journal what comes to you.

As you are writing or drawing in your journal, it is helpful to keep your eyes half-closed. We call this soft eyes; it allows you to move more easily back and forth between the imaginative and ordinary states of mind.

1. Imagine yourself walking through a sunlit forest. You walk farther and farther into this forest until you come to a clearing where you see a magical palace. You walk up to the palace and enter through the main gateway, where you see many doors, each of a different color and shape. Pause for a moment to visualize this.

The first door you come to has Commitment written on it. Open this door and enter the room of Commitment. In your imagination begin exploring the room of Commitment. What do you see—what images, colors, shapes, or people? What do you hear—what sounds, words, or music? And what do you feel—what emotions and sensations?

Pause to explore this room, then record in your journal the images, sounds, or feelings you discover. As you record your experiences in your journal, keep your eyes soft as you move in and out of your imagination.

2. Now see yourself leaving the room of Commitment and closing the door behind you. You are back to the place in the palace with all the doors of different colors and shapes. This time you come to the door marked Discipline. Open this door and enter the room of Discipline. In your imagination, begin to explore the room of Discipline. What do you see—what images, colors, shapes, or people? What do you hear—what sounds, words, or music? And what do you feel—emotions and sensations?
Close your eyes and explore this room. Then, with soft eyes, record in your journal the images, words, or feelings you discover.

3. Visualize yourself leaving the room of Discipline and closing the door behind you. Again you come back to the place in the palace where there are many doors of different colors and shapes. This time you come to the door marked Support System. Open this door and enter the Support System room. In your imagination begin to explore the room. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you feel?
Close your eyes and explore this room, then, with soft eyes, record in your journal the images, words, or feelings you discover.

4. See yourself leaving the Support System room and closing the door behind you. Return to the place in the palace where there are many doors of different colors and shapes. This time you come to the door called Inner Guidance. Open this door and enter the Inner Guidance room. What do you see, hear, and feel?
Close your eyes and explore this room; then, with soft eyes, record in your journal any images, words, or feelings you discover.

5. Leave the Inner Guidance room and close the door behind you. Again come back to the place in the palace where there are many doors. This time you come to the door of Lightness. Open this door and enter the room of Lightness. What do you see, hear, and feel?
Close your eyes and explore this room; then, with soft eyes, record in your journal images, words, or feelings you discover.

6. See yourself leaving the room of Lightness and closing the door behind you. Find yourself back at the place in the palace where there are many doors of different colors and shapes. This time, you choose the door called Love. You open this door and enter the room of Love. What do you see, hear, and feel?
Close your eyes and explore this room, and then, with soft eyes, record in your journal images, words, or feelings you discover.

7. Leave the room of Love and close the door behind you. You are back at the place in the palace where there are many doors of different colors and shapes. This time you approach the final door, the door marked Finding Your Own Truth. Open this door and enter the room of Your Own Truth. What do you see—images, colors, shapes, or people? What do you hear—words, sounds, or music? And what do you feel—emotions or sensations?
Close your eyes and explore this room, and then, with soft eyes, record in your journal images, words, or feelings you discover.

See yourself leaving the room of Finding Your Own Truth and closing the door behind you. It’s now time to come back. Imagine yourself passing by all the different doors and pondering your discoveries: Your Own Truth, Love, Lightness, Inner Guidance, Support System, Discipline, and Commitment. Pause.

Go back through the main gateway by which you entered the palace. Enter the forest and begin walking out. Finally, leave the forest and come back, fully present here and now.

You now may be asking yourself, “What do I make of what I discovered in the different rooms?” Some people do lots of drawing and others lots of writing. Some get information in a symbolic way, others in a more literal way. Some don’t see or hear anything; they just get feelings. What’s important to know about a guided visualization is that there is no one way it’s supposed to be. We each access our subconscious mind in our own way.

As you look over what you wrote or drew in your journal, for each source of power ask yourself, “Does this suggest that I have a healthy relationship or an unhealthy relationship with this quality?” Wherever you find a healthy relationship to a source of personal power, acknowledge and affirm this strength. Draw on this quality as an asset in your growing process. Where you find an unhealthy relationship, appreciate yourself for becoming aware of it. That’s the first step in any growing you do. Once we’re aware of something, we can begin to make changes.

Let’s now look at how some people from our Empowerment Workshop experienced this exercise.

When Judith went into her Support System room, she had a feeling of fullness and aliveness. The room was filled with people who cared for her. Her boss was smiling, and her family rushed to hug her. Other close friends in the background were waving and releasing balloons with personal messages of how wonderful they thought she was.

She wrote in her journal, “I realize that I am deeply supported in my life. People value me and are there for me when I need them. I feel very fortunate in this part of my life.” Judith’s support system was a source of strength she could draw upon.

Jean had this to say: “In the room of Support System, I found myself suspended on pipes, as if I were being held up by a lot of different poles. They were sticking me up quite high, so my feet didn’t touch the ground. I was supported but I couldn’t go anywhere. This helped me recognize the fact that, in my life, the people around me aren’t really helpful in understanding who I am and what my personal work has to be. I realized that I have to get out on my own. I must redo this room.”

Marcia had great difficulty even opening the door to the Support System room. When she finally got in the room, it was very blurry and she had only a vague sense of shadowy figures in the corners. Marcia felt uneasy and empty in this room. Marcia wrote in her journal, “I feel the images reflect the way I isolate myself from other people. I’m afraid of getting close to people; it’s too scary for me. I don’t have support because I’m afraid of intimacy.”

Understanding the importance of nonjudgmental feedback, Marcia did not judge or blame herself. She saw the information as valuable input. How did she work with this input? To begin with, she was compassionate with herself. She acknowledged that this was a growing edge for her. She did not put herself down because she didn’t have a support system. Instead, she began using an empowerment tool that was created specifically for this exercise—becoming an interior designer and redecorating her room.

In all likelihood, you found some rooms that pleased or excited you, and some rooms you didn’t care for at all. You may even have had a room in which you saw nothing. These experiences were feedback about your current relationship with each aspect of your personal power. This self-awareness is the first step. The next exercise will help you redecorate each room the way you want it. As you change your mental images of how that room looks, you set the stage for those changes to occur in your life.

The redecorating process is an easy and fun way to enhance your relationship to a source of personal power. Marcia began visualizing her Support System room with distinct, clear images of specific people who were on a path of growth. She saw herself interacting with these people and enjoying those interactions. She visualized herself putting up pink wallpaper with hearts. She added lots of flowers and plenty of windows with the sun shining in. She arranged the furniture so that she could talk with others more intimately. As her own interior decorator, she designed her room exactly as she needed it to help with this growing edge.

Charlie’s Lightness room had no floor! He gulped and acknowledged that his life, inwardly and outwardly, was indeed much too serious. So he completely redecorated this room. First, he put in a rainbow-colored floor. He put every fun person he had ever known in his room. He took his favorite comedians and had them offering private joke sessions just for him. He played zany games with his kids. Everybody in his room was laughing.

Each day Charlie went to his Lightness room as part of his meditation, and after about two weeks of doing this a shift took place: Charlie noticed himself lightening up. He no longer felt he needed to work until eight each night. He found that he could make time to play with his kids and that it was actually fun. He discovered a new treat—taking his wife out dancing. He even started looking forward to his meditation each day, since he was now meditating on lightness. Meditation started becoming fun, as opposed to another obligation he went through to become spiritual. Charlie began enjoying his life in a way he never thought possible.

EXERCISE | REDECORATING YOUR ROOMS

1. Think back over your rooms of personal power and see which ones need to be redecorated. You may determine that some rooms are perfect just as they are, some rooms may require only new paint or wallpaper, while others may need a major overhaul. Check off on this list those rooms that need redecorating.

Commitment

Discipline

Support System

Inner Guidance

Lightness

Love

Finding Your Own Truth

2. Use your creativity and imagination to design the interior of each room, one at a time, exactly as you wish it to be. Describe each newly redecorated room here.

3. Spend a few minutes enjoying the changes you have made in each room. Soak up the experience of how it feels to spend time there.

4. Spend a few minutes each day visiting your personal power rooms. You’ll be amazed by the positive changes that begin to occur. Who said growing couldn’t be fun?