Some days are not easy! Nor are “user-friendly“! Such days can bring you many more challenges while you still have to cope with the “ordinary” things! You still have to go to your work, to pay one or more bills, to get the kids from school (or to take them there!), to find time for some reading, to go in the gym, to visit a friend, to see a movie, to meet with your parents, etc. The list never seems to get shorter! How would you find the extra energy, feelings and inspiration you need to cope adequately with whatever a day tosses at you? You simply, need to tap into YOUR keys of empowerment!
Why Do You Need The Extra Energy?
Every new day, passing by, brings you new activities, errands, chores, to-dos, and tasks to cope with! Every new day, new tasks are added and piled up in a cloud of constant obligations and to-dos without a room for doing what, seem to you, important! Do you know the feeling? To be marooned within a sea of endless obligations, without an apparent salvation raft?
The sense sometimes is overwhelming! And frustrating as well!
For this reason, there are times when you need, something more energy, focus, inspiration or “fuel” to just get on doing what have to be done!
There is a time you need an extra portion of empowerment, specially delivered to YOU!
What’s That Empowerment Thing?
Empowerment is not something you can do, from authority, status or friend position towards other people! It is not only exerted from you as a leader or head of a team or a department towards your subordinates. Nor it is something that it is strictly associated with closed hierarchies!
Empowerment is an ongoing process influencing and impacting you and all the people around you! It is nor a momentary goal or a task you promptly erase after you have completed! It is an ongoing process can be utilized for yourself as well as for other people!
Generally speaking, Empowerment can be viewed as:
the process of obtaining basic opportunities for marginalized people, either directly by those people, or through the help of non-marginalized others who share their own access to these opportunities. It also includes actively thwarting attempts to deny those opportunities. Empowerment also includes encouraging, and developing the skills for, self-sufficiency, with a focus on eliminating the future need for charity or welfare in the individuals of the group. This process can be difficult to start and to implement effectively. (Wikipedia: Empowerment)
But the definition does not state anything about how to summon it, when you need it, or how to use it in favor of your objectives! For this reason, you need to know some ways, you can use in order to empower yourself in moments of work or personal overload or in any situation, potentially, creates you a lot of stress!
10 Keys of Empowerment
There are many ways you can find and use in order to empower yourself and the other. The real (and excellent) empowerment is an ongoing process needs commitment, discipline, and refinement in order to yield the results it’s been expected to!
Empowerment is an art involving coaching, mentoring, leadership, management, mediating, challenging, inspiring and interacting of yourself and your beliefs with those of the other people. And that why it is sometimes very difficult to apply it to our self!
Below there are some ways can be proved useful to you when you need to use your empowerment muscles towards a situation you are facing. These ways can provide a framework of reference for using your empowerment abilities for alleviate the stress and set clear goals and expectations to yourself and to the people you work and associate with!
Such ways may prove of use, are the following:
- Review your goals, beliefs, and principles. These going to give you the direction you need to take in the implementation and provide you with inspiration for complete what’s needed to be completed!
- Have a system in place that can support effortlessly your workflow and provide you clear guiding rules for the moments you are feeling stressful and out of sync with your goals and the important things you have to do!
- Make it personal. Involve yourself in the design and the to-do process. Be the owner of the decision and of its implementation and be accountable of the result. For better results, make this information “public” (share it with a close circle of people who can hold you accountable about the doing or not of a particular task, beyond a formal hierarchy). You can also use many apps (in your phone, computer, tablet, etc) that can provide motivation, inspiration and sense of accomplishment to you via prompt notifications (as the IDoneThis (not an affiliate link), is)!
- Set clear boundaries of the things you do and the things you don’t and communicate them clearly to yourself (that’s might by a little tricky and to the other people you work with). Clear boundaries, as Ken Blanchard, John P. Carlos and Alan Randolph have written in their book: The 3 Keys to Empowerment: Release the Power Within People for Astonishing Results
are one of the three components of empowerment!
- Start practicing the art of saying No, when you feel overwhelmed or when you think it is needed! Remember that everything dependent on choices and the how strong you are, directly depends on the weak links you cultivate with your attitude(s) of being the work super-hero, the one who can handle everything, the worker who can be available all the time and the guy (or girl) everyone loves!
- Always make time for calming your mind, even within stressful situations. This going provide you the advantage to take control of the situation and handle it towards your favor!
- Make a break, go for a walk, read something you know it makes you high on emotion, listen to some inspiring music, etc. The objective is to find some time to regroup yourself and pivot to a new more favorable position!
- Challenge yourself with new things and acknowledge your success even for the smallest, minute, achievements or the small forward steps you have managed to achieve, during the process. If necessary bribe yourself with a treat, or prize after the objectives have been reached!
- Talk or communicate with friends, associates, or generally people close to you and know your objectives, asking them for some good opinion about you, or a praise, or something that make you inspired! This, usually, works!
- Evolve via continuing training and practices that would provide you more energy, morale, inspiration, focus and the necessary momentum to move forward!
Question: Which ways you use to empower and inspire yourself? How do you empower other people? Do you have any other ways of empowerment would you consider to share with us? What do you thing about the “10 Keys of Empowerment”?
