What really matters when empowering yourself? It seems that lately in the media, the empowerment of women, minorities and many other classes of people is being celebrated. This is absolutely wonderful. However, by itself it’s absolutely not enough. Empowerment really works in the final analysis by how the individuals being empowered respond to it. You can put someone in a great position through gifting them that alone, but if they haven’t earned that position then they will find it tough to make it through. While it’s important to understand historical context and societal difficulty, sometimes nothing is more important than feeling your best self through your individual value alone. After all, we live life as individuals, so it pays to work on ourselves in that regard.
Why do you need empowerment? Well, there are many reasons. Feeling like you are limited is a terrible thing to conceive, and can often lead to forms of depression. A lack of empowerment also leads you to live like a person you don’t respect, and this can be a crying shame. We all know we have the potential for wonderous things inside us. This might not look like running an ultra marathon, but it might look like being the best mother you can, or turning up for your nurse night shift ten minutes prior without fail every single day. It could be using your organizational skills to moonlight in charitable work. We all have an amazing amount of potential inside us, and uncovering it in a way that makes sense to you is a phenomenal method for reaching it.
But where do you begin? This is where empowerment comes in. To empower yourself, you have to know what reasons you have for personally doing so. The following tips can help you uncover those reasons, and we’ll show you why:
Responsibility
Life’s better when you have more responsibility, not less. We all know that a break from the stressors of life are desirable – but are they really? Sometimes working hard towards sustaining your family unit, being the best sales representative and gaining that promotion or taking the first tentative steps towards opening your business require a donning of responsibility. These are the things that structure our life and give us purpose. With that purpose, we find a wonderful sense of meaning. People often read articles spouting ‘the importance of purpose’ and expect a soppy passage about being great and never backing down, but responsibility is more mature than that. It means willfully taking on a task to improve your life and the life of people around you.
This is often emphasized in the little things. It might mean cutting back on your Yoga attendance to help your child with their math homework. It might mean willfully getting more exercise in the morning so you don’t live most starts to your day lethargic and tired. There are a million methods of adding responsibility to your life, and if they’re sustainable, realistic and desirable, why not go for it?
Appearance
Being truly empowered is to understand your own worth. Some people might think that this means being comfortable in whatever you wear, no matter how tattered. This is true to an extent. You should never base the quality of your identity on what brands you wear, how color coordinated you are and how stylish you look. It should be the amount of Instagram likes you get or the amount of people following you on Facebook. However, it can pay large dividends to work on your appearance. Whatever makes you feel more comfortable in yourself and your skin is probably a good place to start. Wearing well-fitted clothes that reflect your personality will require some shopping around, but that feeling when wearing beautiful new garments is undeniably a fantastic feeling.
If trying to fix your life in ways that mean something to you, it might even pay to change up your whole look. This is a great way of feeling like a fresh person, someone more in sync with how you’d like your ideal self to seem. For example, choosing the right ladies hairstyles as per today’s fashion could be a great place to tie your entire outfit together. It could be finding a foundation that more appropriately matches your skin. It could be wearing that power jewellery you love and that means something to you more often.
This might sound like ‘you’ll feel better if only you looked better!’ but this is not the intention behind this advice. If you look at the people you truly admire, the most self-actualized people you know globally or from your friendship group – it’s unlikely they pay little attention to their appearance. Self-grooming is the first validation of self-worth, and so taking a little time to ensure this is well taken care of could be the fuel for you to feel the confidence you deserve to. It certainly can’t hurt you to try.
Knowledge
There’s an old adage – ‘work smarter, not harder.’ This is true. A person could work a field all day, turning up the soil by hand in order to try and make it suitable for a crop yield – or they could use a tractor for the same purpose. There is absolutely no shame in taking shortcuts provided they do not rob you of knowledge.
Not all of us have the most gifted physical capabilities, but we all have the capacity to inform ourselves to a certain degree. This can come through almost infinite different means, and for infinite different reasons. However, if you’re content with knowing what you know now, you’ll always be relatively hostile to new information. This might not be a conscious effort, but it does affect you.
Let’s use an example. Let’s say you are hoping to lose some weight. Now, you could try and eat completely healthily from now on, cutting many of your carbohydrates and sugars as well as eating at a caloric deficit of five hundred each day. This will help you lose weight, no doubt about that. However, going from the mentally indulgent sense of eating to the discipline it takes to follow this new diet is not always so easy. People simply do not adapt to new habits this quickly, as so sometimes this can mean setting yourself up to fail. You might have a refrigerator full of excellent leafy greens and proteins, but before you know it you’re on the phone to your pizza delivery service.
We’re not suggesting you have zero discipline – just that you might be better suited trying to understand the mechanisms behind habits. Take two people. One undertakes this new diet hoping they make it through, motivated and sincere but without much else. The second person undertakes the same diet, but researches online into the power of habit, and how to make sustainable changes to overcome the hunger pangs. This might be through drinking more water, supplementation and getting more exercise. Who do you think has more of a chance of making it through? While they both might, the second person is much more likely to have an easier time of doing it. This means they can direct more mental effort to other tasks in their lives, as their untrained self is not overcome by the difficulty of a change.
With this in mind, working smart also means trying not to accomplish too many things at once. Sometimes it pays to focus your entire being on something worthwhile in front of you, making sure that it’s done perfectly and you’d proudly allow it to bear your name.
With this advice, empowering yourself becomes less of something you take pride in on a macro or group scale, and something you know internally to be true. If there’s anything the world needs more of it’s actualized individuals, and so making this effort could be the most powerful thing you do.
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