What is Personal Power | Simply Woman Magazine

• Tweet
• Pin It

Written by Chantal Hewko

Today I would love to share with you about what I feel Personal Power is to me and why I feel it is so important.

So what is Personal Power? This is something that I learned while I was in school for coaching at The S.W.A.T Institute. I loved this concept so much that I knew becoming an empowerment coach was the path I needed to be on. Personal power means to become empowered from within.

When I first joined The S.W.A.T. Institute I had no clue what being empowered even meant. I had never fully experienced it or felt it from my core. Once you begin living from a place of empowerment it will become your new “default” and it will get easier and easier to get back to this place when you fall off track.

I have come up with what I feel are the 6 most important steps to Enhancing Your Personal Power so you can begin to get an understanding of what this all means. These 6 steps continue to challenge me daily so don’t put pressure on yourself to master these by tomorrow.

Just start with some gentle awareness around them.

1. Understand Your Priorities: Do you find yourself saying “YES” when you really want to say “NO”? Try and search for the reason why you are saying yes in the first place. Is it because you would feel guilty if you said “NO”? Maybe if you said “No” you would not get accepted or loved by those you are saying “No” to? Try and see if you can understand the fear behind saying “No”.Next is determining what is really important to you in your life. In my coaching calls we will work on a values list and we get really clear on what is most important to you and what you place the most value on. Many of us have no clue what we really value and therefore we have no clear direction of what we want from life. Once you know what the most important things are to you, decision-making will become much easier for you and your life will become more streamlined. Your goals and vision for your life will become clear to you.
2. Don’t React but Act Instead: Once you have determined your goals for your life and you know what is most important to you, begin acting rather than reacting when a situation arises and challenges you or threatens your best intentions. What does reacting look like? When we react to a situation it looks like blaming, criticizing, drama, and using excuses why things are the way they are. You are giving your power away. It derails you even further from your path in life and it drains your energy.When we choose to act instead, we are becoming solution oriented. If you don’t like something, change it. There needs to be no drama, no arguing, but simply channeling your energy towards something that makes you happy and starts moving your life forward in the direction you want it to go in.
3. Never Take Things Personally: I got news for you!! Nothing other people do has anything to do with you. The way people treat you is because of their life experiences that have molded their perception of the world and it has nothing to do with you. Your actions will also uncover a strong or weak response in someone and this has to do with their own insecurities and the way they perceived it based on their experiences. You have no control over the way someone will respond to you. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that the person knows our world. You will no longer be stressed, hurt or disappointed when you can master this one thing. You will live from a very empowered place if you practice this every day.
4. Let Go Of Expectations: This has been one of my biggest lessons to date in my life. Along with mastering to “never taking things personally” comes with letting go of expectations of others. What an unbelievably freeing place to live from wouldn’t you think?Begin by simply accepting others for who they are. Because when you don’t, you are living from a place of wanting others to live their life within your own wishes and what you think their life should be. It is not up to you to decide what others should be doing. You must take full responsibility for your own life and nothing happens to you unless you give rise to it. The same goes for day-to-day situations. We have a plan for how our day needs to go and when it doesn’t go this way we become upset. How would you feel if you could simply let go of how it “should have went”? When you learn to let go of the way things ought to be rather than the way things are, and make new adjustments to your reality, your life becomes smoother.
5. Non-Judgmental: We all live within our own bubbles with our own values and perceptions on life and it is easy to judge others when they don’t act, do or say the same things we would. We are all after the same two things in life: to be loved and validated. We just go about getting it differently. We are at different stages of life and are at different levels emotionally and spiritually on our journey, however we are all right where we are supposed to be. Avoid passing judgment and instead look at them with curiosity, love and acceptance.This was one of the biggest “aha’s” for me in school when we were told to look at our clients simply with curiosity without any kind of judgment. This holds true for you as well. If you feel you are coming down hard on yourself, see if you can step back and look at your actions with only curiosity.
6. Learn to Forgive: Forgiveness is possibly the most misunderstood word in the English language in my eyes. I think many of us think we need to deny it when someone hurts us or justify his or her actions, however, this is simply not true. To begin with, forgiveness is about you and not the other person. You can forgive the person without excusing the act. Forgiveness brings a kind of peace that helps you go on with life. You hurt for as long as you attach meaning and significance to other peoples’ actions on you. When you do not forgive you stay stuck in a “story” that you keep replaying over and over again. You destroy your body each time you stay stuck in anger because you release the stress hormones that go along with it. You give your power away to the one who “hurt” you when you desire revenge on them. The person who hurt you was most likely coming from a place of wounds and pain and not equipped emotionally to deal with the event that took place. When you can forgive others, you start living with compassion and this is one heaven of a place to live from. 
    

Chantal Hewko is a Certified Empowerment Coach with The S.W.A.T. Institute! Call today at 250-260-1919 for your Free Discovery Session with her. You can also check out her website at http://strongselflove.com/