“How do I feel empowered every day?” might be a question you have asked yourself at some point. It is certainly something many people ponder. I know that’s true because when I asked Google that exact question, I was met with 96 million results. That’s quite a lot to sift through if feeling empowered is something you would genuinely like to experience.
But what if it does not have to be so complicated? What if you don’t need ten top tips or eight daily rituals to make you feel empowered? What if there is a clearer, simpler way?
A helpful place to begin is by considering what we actually mean when we use the word empowered. For each of us, it will carry a slightly different nuance. So let us start with a simple definition. Merriam-Webster defines empowered as having the knowledge, confidence, means, or ability to do things or make decisions for oneself.
The Empowered Child
The pivotal part of that definition is the ability to do things or make decisions for oneself. When we feel empowered, we tend to get on with life and trust the actions and decisions we make.
When I was a primary school teacher, there was one group of humans who seemed to have this completely mastered: children aged three and four. I only taught that age group briefly during my training, but I spent a great deal of time observing in those classrooms. These children trust themselves implicitly. They move between activities at their own pace. They choose what they want to do. They will confidently tell you that the sweep of colour across their paper is exactly what they say it is.
This is where the dictionary definition begins to feel slightly incomplete for me. Those little children do not possess extensive knowledge. They have not yet learnt very much about paint, sand or building blocks. Yet you cannot deny that they are empowered. They are doing things and making decisions all day, every day, and they have no concept of the word empowered.
What Happens to Empowerment?
So, what is going on here? Why do those small children behave in a way which shows they are deeply empowered while adults can often struggle with this?
This might initially seem like something very complicated. It might appear to require a deep dive into the past and an exploration of what happened to have us lose that feeling of empowerment and that ability to act and make decisions for ourselves.
But I don’t want to go there because, to coin a phrase, “I have been there and done that”, and I can categorically say that it didn’t help. I poked in the past, I did inner child work, and I tried to find the answers in my experiences as a child. All that did was make my mind busier and left me focused on the people and circumstances in the past I could do nothing about.
Absolutely, what you experienced, heard and had said to you as a child, shaped the way you began to think about yourself and your place in the world. But how empowered you feel right now depends on the thoughts you are believing right now, not on those past experiences.
What Gets in the Way of Feeling Empowered
So, how you feel about your actions and decisions today is created by the thinking you have about them. But not just the thinking itself, but whether you believe it. This is what has you move forward or stay still in any aspect of life.
Here’s something I see in my clients (and myself) all the time.
- There’s a great idea for business or life which comes with a good feeling.
- A whole load of critical thinking about themselves and/or the idea arises, bringing with it an uncomfortable feeling.
- A fear-based response occurs which might look like avoidance, procrastination or freezing.
What if we called that good feeling at the beginning of this journey empowerment? We could call it intuition, wisdom or inner knowing too. For me, these things are all the same. When we feel the pull of universal intelligence, something arises within us. Fresh new thought with a feeling of aliveness. In that moment, we feel totally empowered. We feel ready to leap forward with the idea. There is a passion and drive.
The trouble is that the inner critic is so often waiting in the wings. The voice that says your idea is silly or you are silly. The voice that says you are not ready or good enough. It seems like that voice hears the new idea and steps in to stop us moving forward. Please don’t blame the inner critic for this. It is trying to keep you safe. At some point, you began to believe it wasn’t safe to step beyond your comfort zone. You learnt to perceive a thought-created comfort zone and the inner critic set itself up as the guard of that zone.
But what is even more significant than the sound of the inner critic is the way it makes us feel. As the inner critic speaks those untruths about your idea or how capable you are to move ahead with it, we feel that thinking. It may feel like overwhelm, resistance or fear. Perhaps you have noticed how it feels to you. That can be so helpful because rather than being a problem, that feeling is a gift. Or rather, understanding that feeling is the gift which allows empowerment to return naturally.
A Rise in Conscious Awareness
When you see that feeling as an indication that you are believing unhelpful thinking, it becomes easier to return to the path of empowerment and take those actions and make those decisions which will move your life in a direction you will truly love.
Here’s what that looks like for my clients as they begin to understand this more clearly.
- There’s a great idea for business or life which comes with a good feeling.
- A whole load of critical thinking about themselves and/or the idea arises which comes with an uncomfortable feeling.
- In that moment, there is an understanding that the uncomfortable feeling is an indication of their state of mind.
- There is a noticing of the thoughts which are now seen as untrue.
- Often there is a pause, a breath taken, a grounding back into the present moment. Please note that how this occurs is different for everyone.
- Once the person has settled again, there is a feeling of empowerment, action taken and decisions made.
Of course, there are still occasions when that gets missed. There are still times when you might not realise that the feeling is coming from thoughts, not from what you are about to do. But the more you see it, the more clearly you see it, and over time this creates a natural movement towards feeling increasingly empowered and taking the actions which feel truly aligned.
All that has to happen for you to feel empowered every day is a rise in conscious awareness. This is not about what you do but about what you see. Understanding the truth that feeling empowered is not something you have to work hard to create but something which reveals itself when you stop believing that habitual critical thinking.
All day, every day we are navigating life with a constant noise of thoughts and feelings, yet beneath that noise there is something steady. The true you is empowered, and that is not something to build or earn, but something to notice.
To connect with Clare Downham and find out more about the work she does, please visit the link below.
If you would like to spend time with speakers like this in person and hear them share their wisdom and experience in a beautiful setting in Albir, Spain in November each year, you can find tickets here www.thevivaevent.com/registration