personal power

MY JOURNEY AND WHAT I OFFER OTHERS FROM THERE

Image of peacock with tail feathers fully fanned from Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

I don’t even know what first got me thinking about issues of personal power. I’m pretty sure it was after I started developing some. It would have been too painful to look at the topic head-on when I had so very little power to stand in. In my first early-adult efforts to establish anything remotely resembling power, I puffed myself up, attacked others I feared were bigger than me, or withdrew from humanity bolstered by disdain for others. Counterfeit power, to be sure.

I certainly wasn’t taught that it was okay to actually have or want power. Were you? No one ever laid out for me the possibility of feeling big and strong and capable without dominating or plowing over or disregarding other human beings. No one modeled or discussed cultivating an actual inner sense of well-being and strength and outer behaviors to bolster that and express it outward.

Because my mother modeled self-diminishment, I became interested in supreme self-honoring. She tiptoed and dodged around with a wobbly voice and crooked stance, apologizing constantly and for everything. (She literally once apologized to me after I dropped a fork—unrelated to anything she’d done.) Then she got big to express rage at her powerlessness, only to shrink again in remorse. Argh. As a child and teen, I did not have awareness of or compassion for her suffering in all of this.

At some point, perhaps gradually, I started experimenting with carrying myself with dignity, living in integrity, behaving as if my presence and thoughts and contribution mattered. Plenty of fake-it-till-you-make-it in there, but I learned quickly that posturing never worked—that stumbling and righting myself without melting in shame was infinitely better than pretending I never stumbled. Like everything else in my life, the personal power project grew at warp speed and took on a new level of substance after I discovered The Work of Byron Katie in 2005.

That’s why my book, Scooch!: Edging into a Friendly Universe, contains an entire section on scooching into your personal power—the good kind—born of my observations of self and others and my painful process of developing what was weak or sorely lacking. It covers topics such as these:

• Being in good standing with yourself—as opposed to the flimsy pursuit of seeking to get everyone to like you and think well of you.
• Self-referral—in which you tune inward toward an inner gauge to measure what matters—to know your worth, or what has worth to you, or what feels aligned or off to you—rather than navigate by external markers and the opinions of others.
• Issues of integrity—like renegotiating clearly and quickly when you know you need to change something; or telling the truth instead of telling yourself and others what they want to hear (including saying NO when that’s the right answer!).
• Clearing victim mentality—I found I could trade that in for a consciousness of choice, because when you find what choice you have (however small a sliver in some cases), you can’t be the victim who’s forced to do things, or not allowed, or thwarted by this condition and that person.
• Watching your language—I just had a cool moment with a client who mentioned responding with “I’m flattered” when someone wanted to hire her. I invited her never to say that again—and she instantly noted it had felt off to her as she said it! Note that a lot of the habits that undermine our power or keep us from standing in power are just that: habits. In the case of speech, our words come from ideas of politeness, or cultural norms in conversation, or old ways we’ve seen ourselves or spoken unconsciously, and so on. If you consider what you’re actually saying with “I’m flattered,” you’ll see you’re not standing in the truth and beauty and skill of what you do; you’re treating someone’s confidence in you and recognition of your worth as random flattery!
• Making no one the villain—because when we focus on how someone has wronged us (even when they ACTUALLY have), we don’t get to the gifts of a painful situation. When we see them as a face of God, bringing something good for our healing and evolution, we find the invitation: perhaps a muscle we need to build, a call to boundaries, a reminder to speak up (could be any number of things).
  

There’s more. But perhaps my top favorite is the chapter on Power Zappers, which identifies typical ways we sabotage our own power. I want you to have access to the power zappers because I love them. They’re clear and simple and offer easy forward movement into your power. Whether you’ve grown your power a lot (or naturally always had it!—I hear that’s a thing), or you’ve barely begun the journey of allowing and expanding it, you’ll find something here that applies. The chapter’s laid out so that each power zapper has its own subheading (you can skim and read the ones that call to you), with brief bullet points to illustrate how/why we do this, and an affirmation or new mindset to support building power in that realm.

Read the POWER ZAPPERS chapter to gauge where you routinely lose power, right on my website, now or later.
Love and blessings, Jaya