Empowerment is more often a topic for discussion lately, I believe because we are undergoing a shift in paradigms. Most people are looking at the changes going on in the world as a “bad” thing. I see the metaphor of the butterfly when I look around.
What it feels like to me is that society is like the caterpillar that is undergoing change and in that transition of going from the less than gracefully caterpillar to the butterfly there is a struggle. With change comes turmoil often because most people resist it and react instead of responding from a place of power.
We all want a better health care system, yet just look at all of the resistance going on in Washington. We want prosperity, yet our system breed debt and Wall Street and the markets are a mess. Then there’s the issue of relationships. Depression and dysfunction is at an all time high, yet, most people resist personal change until they hit the proverbial brick wall.
Why wait?
Change is going to come either way. We can resist kicking and screaming or adapt and learn how to get into the flow. We can proactively release our old baggage and wounded emotional patterns by learning new ways of shifting using our awareness and working with the energy of life, or we can stuff our feelings and continue to experience more chronic disease and lack of peace within ourselves and with others.
Emotion is something that is in your best interest to get acquainted with and stop fearing. Considering that emotions carries 5,000 times more magnetic energy than thought alone (visit HeartMath.org for more info), it is nothing to play around with and ignore if you want to optimize your health – mentally as well as physically.
Emotions play a major role in the state of your health. For example, hypertension is “life under pressure” or high tension. Stress, which is attributed to be the underlying reason for 75-90% of all primary care visits, is an emotional disease. When you feel stress, you are triggering the fear response in your body and it is typically psychological, as we don’t often have physical threat on a daily basis.
Today it snowed again in Chicago, and I could either whine and complain about it, and feel helpless to change it, or I could intend to find the beauty in it, which is what I consciously choose to do. This is always a choice. The challenge is slowing down enough to become aware of your thought pattern and then reset your default dial.
If you have a habit of focusing on what you do not like, you will raise your risk of all sorts of chronic disease. This is also why I choose not to believe in a “cold and flu season”. What is that? Last I checked there were only four seasons, winter spring, summer and fall. Every since I stopped believing in and expecting a season to catch cold, I very rarely even have one.
Confidence and self-esteem boils down to this: you are making it all up. Think about it. Where do you get the ideas to judge yourself by? Why do you think you are born unworthy?
Is that the absolute “Truth”? How do you know? Who told you this? Why do you accept it as true? These are some of the questions I eventually asked myself, as I broke free from the fear of “thinking outside of the box”.
Granted, at one time in our social history we were highly likely to die if the “tribe” kicked us out of the group, but nowadays, with so many options available, you can always find a new “tribe”.
I know that there are feelings involved, however, I’ve come to the conclusion that if someone does not care enough about my well-being to support what is dear and near to my heart (they don’t have to agree, but they don’t have to reject me over it), then it’s just time for me to get over it and move on.
The more comfortable I am in my own skin, the easier it is to move on. After all, I have to live with me; I have no choice (I don’t a have desire to check out of my body). I just say, “there’s only you and me so let’s just disagree” and move on if we cannot work it out – no harm done. Anyway, as far as forming our self-esteem, what we believe about our selves come from a variety of sources when we are not aware of what belief is and how it rules our world.
Is your Mindset dialed to wealth or debt? Success, or fear of failure? It matters to your money where you keep your focus as it will determine what actions you will take unconsciously. For example, most people want to have plenty of money even if the say otherwise. How do I know? As Emerson said (paraphrased),
“I can’t hear what you say because what you do speaks so loudly”
If someone is playing the lottery or working multiple jobs, they have a value placed on obtaining more money for whatever the reason. Considering the level of consumerism and debt in this country, for many people, it is not just to survive that they are working and getting in debt.
Now here is the conflict. Whatever the dominant belief or “vibe” that you put out to the universe will be reflected back to you. The stronger vibration wins. What I mean is, once you realize that your situation and circumstances are reflecting what you feel or believe instead of what you “think” you want, you can begin to see what is really going on. It all boils down again to learning how to manage your own thoughts and feelings, which like anything else, becomes easier once you take the time to learn how to do it.
Now take for example, this issue of focus. You may be an entrepreneur or professional and you want financial success. If you keep talking about how bad things are, or regretting previous decisions, or focusing on your debt, you are giving your energy and attention to this and this will stick like glue to you until you stop it.
Or, if you think that money is bad, or rich people are evil, or that money and spirituality don’t mix and you consider yourself “spiritual”, then you will have inner turmoil over having money. Then there are beliefs such as what could have been passed down through religion or those around you.
What is mindset? Think of it as a radio station that has a frequency that you must dial into. Your mind set tends to be set to a certain way of thinking and keeps bringing the results in your life. It has to do with perception.
If you want to expand the vision for your life, your have to be willing to turn the station from where you are to where you want to find yourself. You have to be willing to open your mind and consider new possibilities.
Or else how are you going to even begin to see a new vision, you keep looking at the old stuff around you, which is yesterday’s vision. So what are the ingredients to mindset? Thought, emotions and feelings. This trio forms the basis of your beliefs, and beliefs are just thoughts and feelings that you keep reinforcing through your perception, HOW you perceive the world.
It is your nervous system’s job, which includes your brain, to make you right and keep looking for and finding what you program yourself to believe by the thoughts, feelings and emotions you experience.
Most of this is done unconsciously, so if you want to change your dial, you have to learn how to consciously switch the dial. Now while this is not necessarily a quick fix, it just depends on your willingness to grow.
If you are looking for the magic pill, you will not find it here, yet, change does not have to take a long time or be a long, drawn out process. That is, if you are willing to be open-minded and develop some discipline along the way.
One of the first steps would be a willingness to change.
1. Set Intention to change
2. Start to see responsibility as the “ability to respond” instead of a dirty word
3. Realize that much of what we are conditioned to think about the world is what is keeping us from living empowered lives. Your life is a reflection of your beliefs. So you have to open your mind to think new thoughts for new results.
Empowerment is what most people would say that they want. In fact, I’ve noticed an increase in the use of the word in the general public. I think we are in a time of evolution. Evolution did not stop with the dinosaurs.
However, when we try to hold onto ideas that do not progress us, don’t we surprise if we join those dinosaurs either individual or collectively. Mother Nature does not play when the interest of Life is on the table. What I mean by this is, all of life is connected whether you are walking around in a physical body or not.
Your physical body is a an expression of the role you are playing now, however, when you live against life giving principles, don’t be surprised if the consequences start to catch up with you. I am referring to our emotions and feelings.
Empowerment is about seeing clearly, embracing the totality of who you are with love and acceptance, then being able to have the personal power to update those things within you that need to evolve. It may have worked for you at one point in your journey, but the environment has changed, so you will evolve or make life really tough for yourself.
The earth and civilization changed and the dinosaurs, with their destructive dispositions and oversized bodies, could not adapt, so they are no longer in the game. We are at a time of change on our planet, this is obvious. Yet, many people want to ignore this change and pretend like its business as usual.
You can feel it in the air. The energy has shifted. This is one reason why things seem to move so fast and furious – unless you have learned to live in the present moment and make friends with change and your emotions. For me, it is getting easier, not more difficult. And I am happier now than I have ever been in my life. Why?
Because I finally stopped pretending that I did not see the “elephant in the room”, I stopped repressing old emotional baggage and saw them for what they were. Emotion is the perception, either based in fear or love. It is energy at its most basic definition. I, like most people were conditioned to live in fear – focusing on what we don’t want, like or prefer to avoid.
And this is dangerous to your mental, emotional, physical and spiritual health.
Relationships are one area that most people, especially most women, give a high priority to. Our concern regarding how others perceive us can run our lives if we are not aware of common social conditioning.
It is a fact that the need to love and be loved is a fundamental human characteristic. In fact, when we come into the world, we are a shining, bundle of love and we are expecting to continue feeling the unconditional love and acceptance that enlivens us, and is the Source from which we come.
Babies in general are such magnetic radiators of this love that we become mesmerized with their eyes and their smiles. Adults generally smile and feel good around a happy baby and unconsciously; we too sense this unconditional love coming at us.
In fact, babies so expect to have their needs met that if you don’t respond pronto, they will let you know how upset they are loud and clear without holding back. Now between birth and age seven a lot happens to potentially incite within us the sense of fear of separation from this unconditional love. As young children, we are emotional beings, with very little logic.
In fact, early in life, children are so close to source awareness, and their left logical/mental faculties so immature, that they have not even developed a sense of separate self. They still experience literal oneness with others, particularly their primary caregiver. It is not until we start language and are aware of our name, that we start forming our sense of self/identity.
Fast forward: commonly, we attach negative stories about ourselves early in life as children tend to think that everything is their fault, and they do not understand logically how to deal with “negative” (I like to call them inharmonious) emotions that are opposite to love. They just know they don’t feel good, and the fear center, survival center of the brain is kicking out “flight or fight” neuropeptides.
Mindset can make you or break you in business and in life in general. In general, I think it is safe to say that mindset rules your life. When I say mindset, I am referring to your belief (thoughts and feelings) and whether or not you are open-minded or stuck on robotic behavior.
Of course, if you keep doing things the same way, you will keep getting the same outcomes. I’m not finished reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, so I want to reserved my full opinion, but so far, I’m not clear if he is saying the we are just victims of circumstances or if the Universe plays dice with the lives of people – what?
I don’t see it this way at all, and I fully believe that there are no coincidences. While being given extra advantages and being born during a certain era affords unique opportunities, whether or not we take advantages of these opportunities is a choice we make based on our mindset.
Our way of looking at life will determine what we see. In the book, Gladwell references a sociologist by the name of Robert Merton who coined a term called the “Matthew Effect” which references the book of Matthew in the Bible chapter 25 and verse 29 which is as follows:
“For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him”.
When I was a kid I use to take this literally and think that somehow it was not fair or that it was saying, “the rich get richer and the poor gets poorer”. This is what I was taught. I don’t see it this way now at all.
My understanding of Merton’s take on it was that those who are already prominent in their status are more likely to get more attention than those who may be just as capable, but less recognized. These different interpretations are all examples of HOW we look at something determines our interpretation and application to our lives.
MY take on it these days is this: If you have an abundant mindset and you are not fear driven, but feel that you have plenty and expect to multiply instead of contract, you will put out to the universe a “vibe” to attract more.
If on the other hand you are afraid and worry about losing what you have all the time, you build a lack consciousness and lack begets more lack. When you read the parable to this conclusion in the Bible, you will see that the servant you had less and “was afraid” of losing his little, not only lost it, but experience torment as well (I would say anxiety and worry are forms of torment alright).
Here’s my overall point – focus on what you want, not on what you don’t want. I use to talk about what I didn’t like, didn’t have or repeat the problem on the table over and over in conversation. Then I finally realized one day that the more I talked about it, the worse I felt.
Empowerment for me is about being able to do, be or have what I consciously choose to experience in my life, including positively impacting my world. It’s about being able to create what I want instead of floundering or feeling like a hapless victim, waiting for the next wave of situations and circumstances to “make” me unhappy.
I figured out a long time ago that if I have to wait for someone else or some circumstance to make me happy, I would probably live and die first. So, I decided, to turn my focus, a long time ago, to finding the path that could take me to my destiny. I think that there is fate, and then there is destiny.
Our destiny is paved with love, joy and peace – regardless of outer circumstances. Our fate is what gets played out based on genetics, karma, childhood experiences and the hand-me-down knowledge that we use in our life without questioning it. My fate was not getting me what I wanted, in fact I did not feel very empowered to go in the directions of my dreams and certainly I did not see then how to make it a reality.
One thing I have discovered is that when there are blind spots in the way, even if someone hands you the treasure map, you still will fall into a ditch and not find the goods. This is what a WHOLE lot of people (I know from my own past personal experience as well), do every single day. Instead of using wisdom and courage to eliminate these blind spots, we somehow think that we can live on a whole new higher level and still keep our bad habits and low self-images running rampant through our minds.
I saw again a movie called “The Kid” with Bruce Willis. I first saw this movie ten years ago and I rented it to watch with my husband last week. This is a great movie to give you an example of how our wounded “inner child” can run our lives in so many ways.
Fear and its various forms are such a ubiquitous emotions in the human drama. I come from a place of living the fear driven life. I can therefore speak with authority based on my life experience.
Now of course, this is my perspective and this is not a matter of “right or wrong”, it’s just a perspective. However, since the “proof is in the pudding”, for me, as long as I get results, it does not matter if the experience is shared by others or not, but what I do know is, if the actions are based in principles, the results are reproducible.
What’s cool about brain science is that it also helps to substantiate these principles. For example, other than the fear that is used to protect us from physical harm, experiencing chronic psychological fear is not only a threat to your health, relationships and finances, it can keep you playing small and limited your whole life.
I refer to this kind of fear as Fictitious Evidence Affecting Reality. In other words, we are the authors of our own fear-based stories and when we learn how to separate our True Self from the Mental Me, the story of who we think we are, we can once again begin to see life as an exciting adventure instead of another day of struggle, stress and “survival of the fittest”.
It’s all about perception. It was Albert Einstein who said:
“Reality is an illusion; albeit a very persistent one”
Reality is relative. Science shows that your outer world and experience is truly a reflection of how you think and feel.
Empowerment is more often a topic for discussion lately, I believe because we are undergoing a shift in paradigms. Most people are looking at the changes going on in the world as a “bad” thing. I see the metaphor of the butterfly when I look around.
