The philosophy of power and manifestation can sometimes feel like a dream, as most people don’t comprehend how powerful they actually are, they have no idea the hidden power and potential they possess, but as soon as we acknowledge how powerful we truly are and apply these simple principles in our life, then get ready to see life-changing results to how you live, work, and thrive in every area of your life. Imagine waking up every morning feeling powerful, knowing you’re are an unlimited being, what would you do? imagine that life right now! think of the things you would do, places you would go, the people you’ll encounter, as a limitless being because recognizing your power gives you that control over your life and the confidence to do anything.
1. What is power?
Let’s first start to think about what the word power means, it can be defined as many things but in the simplest form, it could mean the possession of control, authority, or influence over others. A force or energy that is or can be applied to work and the ability of acting and producing an effect. The authority, or right usually conferred by one person upon another to do something that affects change.
These are all very strong definitions to identify what the word “power” means. Some common synonyms of power are authority, command, control, dominion and jurisdiction. While all these words mean “the right to govern or rule or determine,” power implies possession of ability to wield force, authority, or influence. The power to mold public opinion, these are all examples of what power is and how people use it in today’s world.
2. What is personal power? Why is it important? And how do we use it?
There are people in the world who believe that life just happens to them and that they don’t have any power to alter their destiny but i disagree with this to an extent. The truth is you are powerful, you are important, you’re valuable, you are brilliant and you have purpose! so it’s time to embrace your power, it’s time to see yourself as the powerful beautiful being that you are.
Power does mean to be strong, yes but not just physically but also mentally as well. Being mentally strong will put you in a position of power knowing you have control over your mind, your thoughts, your life and your emotions which is definitely powerful. It’s when we don’t acknowledge that we have any authority over our lives and believe that we are just victims of circumstance that we truly become powerless.
I always loved the poem and quote by “Marianne Williamson” who is a spiritual activist, author and lecturer. And she said “our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure, it is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us,” and i couldn’t agree more with this! because the truth is, many people are often afraid of their own potential.
3. What Characterizes a powerful personality?
The truth is that many highly accomplished people can embody many traits, whether it’s for business or pleasure and I find that these people are able to travel alone, dine alone, while doing it all gracefully. They know how to enjoy their lives because they’re not reliant on someone else’s presence, they’re content within themselves. They are independent, self-sustaining individuals who are capable of enjoying their own company. Real powerful people don’t need to rely on the constant presence of others to feel powerful because they’re secure on the inside. But that does not mean that they always have to be alone, it just means that they’re not reliant on the presence of someone else to feel powerful. Along with being self-sufficient, highly powerful put-together people applaud other people’s accomplishments, empathize with their struggles, and understand that how they respond to someone else’s life says almost everything about who they’re as a person.
And another powerful character trait is listening because listening is more than speaking! and that is a greater tool for connection and learning, learn to listen to people.
Some examples of powerful Character traits.
- You’re not easily swayed
- You’re a good listener
- You’re comfortable with confrontation
- You practice empathy
- You have clear boundaries and respect yourself
- You inspire others
- You’re resilient
- You respect others
- You know your worth
- You’re authentic
4. Power is contagious
We’ve stated that power can also be defined as energy and energy is contiguous so keep it positive! and your positivity is infectious and key to living your best life so do whatever you need to do daily to maintain that positive frequency in order to reap the benefits later on.
5. What gives people power over you? and how do you keep your power?
Sometimes people try to assert power over others and control situations in order to assert dominance! which in some cases can be a form of abuse. Money, violence, management and being in a position of power has been the quickest route to establishing dominance that people have used to gain influence by advancing themselves.
Most people try to control what happens in their life to a certain extent. However, when a person tries to control elements of someone else’s life, this can be damaging. But how do we know when it’s abuse? because even abuse can sometimes feel like love coming from someone close to us. Controlling behaviors may occur in several forms of abuse, including.
- Physical abuse: Any unwanted contact from someone who has the intention of causing another person injury is physical abuse.
- Emotional and verbal abuse: This comes in the form of nonphysical behavior, such as insulting or threatening someone, constantly monitoring them, or trying to humiliate them.
- Financial abuse: This occurs when someone attempts to control a person’s financial situation.
- Digital abuse: This form of abuse uses technology, such as texting and social media, to harass or intimidate someone.
How do we keep our power?
Giving away your personal power robs you of mental strength, but maintaining control in your life requires that you make a conscious choice to take back your power. Before you can create positive change, you need to recognize the ways in which you give your power away.
Here are a couple of examples on how to keep your personal power:
1. Don’t waste energy complaining.
There’s a big difference between complaining and problem-solving. Venting constantly to your friends, family, and co-workers keeps you focused on the problem and prevents you from creating a solution and implies that you have no power over your situation, and also shows that you can lack power over your attitude. So watch out for this! because sometimes we don’t realize that constant complaining opens the door for a lot of negative things.
2.. Emotions and establishing healthy boundaries
Don’t let other people’s behavior dictate your emotions. Saying your mother-in-law makes you feel bad about yourself and claiming that your boss makes you mad suggests that they have power over how you feel, and it’s ok to be honest and express how people have hurt you! but It’s also important to accept that it’s up to you to manage your emotions, regardless of how others behave. Giving into people’s guilt trips or refusing to speak up for yourself, gives other people power over you, so recognize that you’re in charge of yourself! and establish healthy, physical and emotional boundaries that doesn’t give others control over you and your life.
3. Practice forgiveness.
Holding a grudge against someone who has hurt you doesn’t punish the other person—it only punishes you. When you waste valuable time thinking about a person who has wronged you, it takes away your ability to enjoy your life.
Forgiving someone is the best way to take back your power. But to be clear, forgiveness isn’t about the other person or saying what the person did to you was ok and acceptable. It’s about choosing to let go of the hurt and anger that interferes with your ability to enjoy your life because that has to be more important as life is too precious to be wasting it on people who are happily living theirs.
4. Know your value.
When you’re not clear about what your values are, or how valuable you are! you’re at risk of becoming a helpless passenger rather than a confident driver of your own life. You’ll be at risk of jumping on board with other people’s ideas and maybe even being easily led astray. Take back your power! by acknowledging your value in yourself and living true to what’s important to you.
5. Don’t waste time on unproductive thoughts.
Have you ever come home from work and spent the entire evening wishing you didn’t have to go back again tomorrow? Suddenly, you’re giving your eight-hour workday 12 hours of your time. Take control over the thoughts that occupy your mind, so you don’t give more brainpower to areas of your life that doesn’t deserve it.
6. Faith and spirituality
How to Understand faith as a source of strength and personal power
Living in faith is a personal experience as everyone experiences their faith differently. However, what most believers have in common is that their faith is a source of strength, regardless of what religious beliefs you have, every religion will teach you that you’re a powerful being. For Christians, strength and power comes from a belief in God’s omnipresence and Jesus’s love. This belief can make the burdens of life easier to bear. Faith is power, and where there is power, there is faith; and where there is no power, there is no faith.
We all have situations that just looks too big for us to overcome, the opposition too strong, the dream too big and it becomes easy to have a weak mentality! and we get intimidated and back down, seeing ourselves as limited. But as a believer you are taught that you’re very powerful! you’re not ordinary, you’re not common, you’re a child of God! destined for greatness and through the power of God there is nothing that you cannot achieve.
What you could be up against may be big but it’s no match for your God and you have access to a power that is so strong, the same power that raised Christ from the grave! but here’s the thing, how you see yourself will determine whether you see this great power in your life. If you continue to doubt and have weak undeserving thoughts constantly feeling insecure, intimidated, unworthy telling yourself it’s not possible, “I can’t accomplish my dreams, i can’t break this addiction!” then you’re cancelling out that power because we have free will remember. But the point i’m trying to make is that you have to get in agreement with God and see yourself how God sees you, because God isn’t looking at weak people, he’s not looking at average people, he’s looking at son’s and daughters of God! and you came from him and there is absolutely nothing weak about him.
7. Power thoughts
It’s all in your mind, whatever you hold in your mind will occur in your life. You can’t win in life if you’re losing in your mind so prioritize your mindset in order to get different results. Work on your thoughts and attitude, in Psychology Cognitive Behavioural Therapy model is one of the most important models and it states that events lead to thoughts, thoughts lead to feelings, feelings lead to behaviour and behaviour always has a consequence. It’s not the events themselves that determine how you feel and behave. It is your thoughts about these events that trigger the sequence of feelings, behaviours and consequences. As with every model, this model is a simplification of a complex and dynamic reality. However, it is very useful in understanding how the mind works. Here’s a little visual example of how Cognitive Behavioural Therapy looks like.
COGNITIVE BEHAVIOURAL THERAPY MODEL
CONTROL YOUR THOUGHTS – CONTROL YOUR LIFE
There will always be events and circumstances in your life that you cannot control. But if you learn to control your thoughts and your mood then your behaviour no longer depends on circumstances but on you. When you regain control over your thoughts, you regain control over your feelings and actions. Your thoughts shape your reality more than anything else. Therefore, not having control over your thoughts equals not having control over your life.
Through practicing Mindfulness, you will become more aware of your thoughts and regain control over them. By practicing kind and non-judgmental thinking, you are preventing the activation of unsafe thinking in your mind and you are regaining control over your feelings and behaviour. This will put you back in control of your life and allow you to reshape your life in any way that you want.
8. Self-discipline
I have yet to meet a highly successful, powerful person that did not incorporate self-discipline in their lives! Self-discipline is the foundation of any successful human being and is one of the strongest forms of self-love. If you love yourself! you will discipline yourself it’s as simple as that.
9. Maintain self-control
What is self-control?
Self-control is the ability to control our feelings, emotions, and reactions. Many people struggle with self-control. For example, we need self-control when it comes to eating healthy, exercising, sticking to a budget, and even regulating our sugar intake and for many achieving our daily and long-term goals. People continue to study the importance of self-control as a force we can tap into for a more successful, satisfying life. Luckily, there’s a lot we can do to enhance these abilities.
The ability to keep disruptive emotions and impulses in check is the mark of a leader.
Here are some tips to increase self-control:
1. Find more motivation.
Motivation is important in honing self-control skills. Figuring out what motivates you the most is key to accomplishing your goals. When you look at the bigger picture instead of every small detail needed to cross the finish line, you’ll find yourself more motivated to get things done so stick to the bigger picture and don’t focus on the doing part! sometimes it makes it easier to look at the end result to help get things done and accomplishing goals.
2. Set SMART realistic goals.
You can find yourself losing self-control if the task at hand seems unbearable. Setting actionable SMART realistic goals for your day can help you avoid being overwhelmed. “SMART” goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Bounding. And setting achievable and realistic goals can help you build discipline to complete everyday tasks in both your personal and professional life.
It’s also important to remember to not be so hard on yourself as we can sometimes be our own worst critics! so be kind to yourself when trying to achieving your goals, even small daily tasks, understanding that what we perceive to be our “best” differs from day to day. Meaning what could have been your ‘best’ workout on a weekend knowing that you usually go all out, could be different on what you did on a Monday. And remember that was your best for that Monday! so don’t compare it to anything else and beat yourself up saying “oh I didn’t do my best today! I feel terrible I can usually do much better” failing to realize that you did do your best for that day.
3. Understanding your emotions
Self-control, or impulse control, starts with understanding emotional intelligence Knowing yourself can help you manage your emotions and impulses.
For example, do you react impulsively to issues? Do you pause to listen to others’ feedback? Are you able to stay composed and positive in stressful circumstances? Can you exercise patience in annoying situations? The ability to keep disruptive emotions and impulses in check is the mark of a great leader.
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Emotional Quotient Inventory and the Emotional Competence Inventory are two emotional intelligence assessments to help you increase your awareness.
4. Get digital self-control support.
Accountability is key. There are many ways to outsource self-control support, including apps that you can download to your phone which can be helpful when meeting a work deadline, ensuring that you never miss a workout, and keeping track of your meals, budgeting and spending, these apps can become very useful.
10. Have an attitude of gratitude
Gratitude is an emotion similar to appreciation and can give us a phenomenal sense of happiness and thankfulness in response to being on a positive frequency. I personally believe it to be tangible gift to feel this incredible emotion.
Gratitude is both a state and a trait (Jans-Beken) better explained this as one can experience gratitude for someone or something at a certain moment in time, and someone else can experience gratitude more long-term as a positive character trait.
According to Dr. Robert Emmons, the feeling of gratitude involves two stages:
First comes the acknowledgment of goodness in one’s life. In a state of gratitude, we say yes to life. We affirm that, all in all, life is good and has elements that make it worth living. And the acknowledgment that we have received something gratifies us, both by its presence and by the effort the giver puts into choosing it.
Second, gratitude is recognizing that all sources of this goodness lie’s outside of one’s self. Meaning one can be grateful to our creator, the universe, other people, animals, and the world, but not to oneself. At this stage, we recognize the goodness in our lives and who to thank for it.
11. Build resilience
Life doesn’t come with a map, and everyone experiences daily challenges to traumatic events with more lasting impact, like perhaps experiencing bereavement, or a life-altering accident, or a serious illness. People go through so much in their lives, bringing a unique flood of thoughts, strong emotions, and uncertainty. Yet people generally adapt well over time to life-changing stressful situations thanks to resilience.
Psychologists define resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress—such as family problems, relationship problems, serious health problems, or your workplace which can mean financial stressors as well. So as much as resilience involves “bouncing back” from these difficult experiences, it can also involve profound personal growth.
“Growth mindset”
Cultivating a “growth mindset” can be an important part of building resilience. It is the opposite of a “fixed mindset,” when you believe that your intelligence and abilities are fixed, it innates traits that you can’t change. When we’re realistic instead, a “growth mindset” acknowledges that you can learn from challenges, and through these experiences allowing you to increase your intellect and abilities. And one of the beautiful things in having a “growth mindset” is knowing that you can never finish educating your mind. Here are some simple tips to incorporate a growth mindset.
- Leave the “genius” myth behind – the truth is achievement requires hard work, not just natural talent and when people say “it’s just talent!” in my opinion it overlooks all the hard work people put in.
- Focus on “brain training” – your brain is like a muscle that needs to work to get stronger.
- Prioritize learning over approval, and try to enjoy the process, the journey not just the end result.
- View challenges and setbacks as opportunities to grow, to learn something new.
- Acknowledge and embrace your imperfections, and try different learning tactics.
- Applaud your effort, and not just your inherent skills.
- Avoid comparing yourself to others – we all have different strengths and we learn differently but I truly believe it’s so we can enjoy these gifs in one another, not so we should compete.
Seeking help
Getting help when you need it is crucial in building your resilience so get the support you need during difficult times and take care of your mental health by giving it what it needs and you will reap the benefits of this later on.
Final Thoughts
You’re powerful and here at Personal Excellence, you’ll discover the secrets to self-empowerment, learn how to banish self-sabotage! rise to your full potential and make your dreams a reality. Finally giving you the ability to live the life you deserve so feel free to leave us your comments and subscribe to our Newsletter! so we can send you more great content directly to your inbox.