But what is self-empowerment?
It’s about giving you the power to take control of your own destiny and live your life how you want to live your life. And Self empowerment is a sort-after quality by employers, so it is a great asset to your career too.
Self-empowerment is the net effect of the way you conduct yourself, the image you project to others and the way you improve yourself – and it’s all inter-related. How you feel about yourself determines the image that you project onto others, and the image you project to others determines how they react to you. Remember the law of attraction?
And until you understand how you and your actions appear to other people, you cannot understand why they think and respond to you the way that they do. Sounds complicated I know, but here are some tips to help you empower yourself.
Have confidence in yourself – a confident (but not arrogant) image of your self will naturally project a more powerful image than if you are uncertain and anxious about your image you’re your actions. And more importantly, self-confidence feels so good! If your self-confidence has taken a battering for whatever reason, ask yourself “why” – is it a physical image issue? Or an ability issue? The important thing is to identify what is affecting your confidence and take steps to improving it.
Take care of your health – eat well, exercise regularly and take the time to manage stress in a positive manner. If you feel good, you will feel more self-confident and you will project a glowing energy to others.
Make a positive impression - People react more positively to people who obviously take good care of themselves, so dress well, keep neat and tidy and hold your posture. It’s also important to focus on what you say – avoid excessive apologizing, and speak with a thinking mind, don’t think with a talking tongue!
Be constructive – so many people are too critical, gossip or just complain too much. And humans being the way we tend to slip into negative thought processes more easily than positive ones. So avoid the temptation to join the whinging mob – be positive and optimistic, provide constructive feedback on issues and participate in finding solutions to problems rather than just finding all the problems.
Don’t expect others to change – if you are unhappy with something or someone, don’t expect them to change to suit you. You can explain your feelings and perhaps suggest a way where both parties can compromise – but don’t just expect everything to change to suit you. Be prepared to make a positive change yourself!
Thrive on feedback – to empower yourself also means to develop yourself technically, behaviourally and emotionally. Seek feedback and respond to it by identifying how you can change to better empower yourself. Don’t take criticism personally – but rather as an opportunity to improve. Don’t fear failure – learn from it. And don’t just observe life – participate.
Focus on results and outcomes – in other words, focus on your goals, ambitions, and desires. It’s easy to get tied up in how you ‘feel’ – and it’s important, but to achieve, sometimes we need to put feelings and emotions to the side.
Focus on getting the job done, and once achieved you can look back on the experience and contemplate the emotional aspect of the journey.
If you take the above advice on how to empower yourself, I can assure you that you will feel more confident in yourself and your abilities, and your peers will see you this way too – after all, how you feel about yourself determines the image that you project onto others, and the image you project to others determines how they react to you.
