How to Empower Yourself

Feeling confident, powerful, and capable are all essential pieces to growing and learning as a person. You are much more likely to be successful at something if you believe you can do it. The opposite is true as well. Doubt and insecurity can be detrimental to your ability to learn new things and grow if you allow them to overshadow everything else.

While it may often feel like everything is out of your control that is not the case. Stepping into the power you have over your own life is possible and it is called empowerment. Keep reading to learn what empowerment is, how you can use it to fuel your motivation, and how to build it within yourself.

What Is Empowerment?

Do you ever feel like you are on top of the world and can take on any challenge? These feelings of self-confidence, assuredness, and self-determination mean you are feeling empowered. Empowerment can be described as a “process that fosters power in people for use in their own lives, their communities, and their society, by acting on issues they define as important” (Page & Czuba, 1999). When you feel empowered, you feel “in power”. Empowerment allows you to feel confident that you possess the power necessary to create the life you want and develop the belief that you are capable of accomplishing anything you set your mind to.

Feeling empowered allows you to pursue your goals and dreams with enthusiasm. If you feel you lack motivation or confidence, working on empowering yourself may help your self-esteem and quality of life. One study used an online psycho-educational program to help treat people with depression and measured changes in empowerment. Immediately following the program, participants noted an increase in self-esteem and empowerment. Improvements in their quality of life were noted even six months after the completion of the program (Crisp et al., 2014). This means that improving your self-esteem and feeling more empowered can have a positive effect on your overall quality of life.

The opposite of this feeling is powerlessness or defeat. This mindset may cause you to feel like a victim and believe that your life is out of your control. While it isn’t possible to feel fully empowered one hundred percent of the time, having a defeated attitude may have negative consequences for your health.

A lack of empowerment (high powerlessness scores) is associated with the following

• More limits on physical activity with age
• More negative psychosocial symptoms with age
• More health problems five and ten years post-survey
• Deterioration of health in general (Seeman & Lewis, 1995)
• Try not to worry if you often feel powerless. Empowerment is a trait that we can cultivate within ourselves with time and practice.

How To Empower Yourself

Now that you have a better understanding of empowerment, how can you start to build it within yourself? For some people, feeling empowered and confident may already be a part of their personality. Building a sense of empowerment may take a bit more work for others. The following are suggestions of behaviors you can develop within yourself and actions you can take to increase your feelings of empowerment.

• Develop positive self-talk​. Negative self-talk can be detrimental to your state of mind. To develop more positive self-talk, you may need to replace negative thoughts with positive ones. For example, instead of thinking “I can’t do that”, think “I can do hard things”. This simple switch can make a world of difference.
• Create an action list for your goals. Ideas and goals are great but they are essentially useless without taking action. Empowered people recognize the need to put in the work to reach their goals. Start by identifying your large goals and then break them down until there are actions you can complete today, this week, this month, this year, and so on.
• Practice confidence and assertiveness. Feeling confident and powerful in your abilities is a key component of feeling empowered. It’s okay if this isn’t naturally a part of your personality. With practice, you can learn to speak up and make your voice heard. As Robin Sharma said, “Speak your truth even if your voice shakes.” Try practicing what you are going to say in your head before you say it out loud if you feel extra nervous.

In Sum

Empowerment is a wonderful tool to drive you toward your goals and dreams. This feeling happens when you feel confident, assured, and powerful in your capabilities. Feeling empowered is important for personal development as well as other areas of life, such as school and work. People who are empowered engage in positive self-talk, take action to reach their goals, and act assertively and confidently. Feeling empowered can be difficult for people who struggle with self-worth and confidence. Use positive affirmations and practice being self-assured to build a feeling of empowerment within yourself. Once you start believing in yourself, you will find you are capable of much more than you realize.

References

• Crisp, D., Griffiths, K., Mackinnon, A., Bennett, K., & Christensen, H. (2014). An online intervention for reducing depressive symptoms: Secondary benefits for self-esteem, empowerment and quality of life. Psychiatry Research, 216(1), 60–66.
• Page, N., & Czuba, C. E. (1999). Empowerment: What is it? Journal of extension, 37(5), 1-5.
• Seeman, M., & Lewis, S. (1995). Powerlessness, health and mortality: A longitudinal study of older men and mature women. Social Science & Medicine, 41(4), 517–525.