The words, personal power, always make me think of Tony Robbins (I obviously have watched way too much late-night infomercial TV!). Don’t worry, this is not a hype-fest, exhorting you to (punching fist in the air) take control of your life.
It is, though, a gentle call to action. More about that in a minute.
As a business owner, you have lots of opportunities to use your power. You are the one who gets to decide not just the WHAT of your business: your offerings, systems, and so on, but also the HOW.
And it’s the HOW that sets you apart, distinguishes you from everyone else.
So, having access to your personal power is so important. That access lets you know what your Inner wisdom tells you is right for you and your business. And it’s the doorway to making the authentic decisions you need to make, and taking action from them.
Your work is important. You have meaningful things to offer your clients, and the world.
And HOW you do it is a reflection of how empowered you allow yourself to be!
So how do you access your personal power in those everyday situations that, together, to create our business lives?
Let me first say that by power, I’m not talking about dictatorship (however benevolent) or manipulation or any other kind of power that means coercion. And I especially don’t mean having that kind of coercive control over your own Self.
Nope, what I mean here is the recognition of your own ability to decide how you’re going to respond to a situation.
We tend to think of response as some visible action. And that is certainly an important part of it. But I also mean, and this is just as important, our response on the inside, right down to what we decide to think and feel.
For those of you new to this idea, I want to be clear. You can and do have the ability to decide what you think and feel.
We’ve been taught otherwise in our culture, to a large extent. Even if you’re lucky enough to come from a family where the thinking and feeling was mostly positive, we’ve all got some deliberate work to do in getting our thinking and feeling in alignment with where we want to be.
This kind of clarity about where we want to be is an important part of having a successful business. Notice the patterns you slip into in the day-to-day of your business. You might notice, as I have, that the more I step outside my comfort zone, the easier it seems to slip into old patterns.
Here’s one that might pop up for you. It sure has for me! When undecided and a little scared, or even just thinking of stepping outside of your comfort zone, **poof**, you can manifest someone to hand your power over to in an instant.
This person judges, criticizes, or gently admonishes that what you think you could do is, sadly, not possible. Even a neutral response like, “Who knows?” undergoes an awesome alchemy into, no, sorry, no can do. And it becomes no-can-do because this other person said so, or thought so, or turned her head in a certain way, clearly (remember, this is alchemy we are talking about here!) indicating the impossibility of it all.
As long as you believe that real or imagined conversation, you don’t have to stand in yourself and your decision. You don’t have to bear the discomfort and continue to move forward.
Whew! Kind of breathtaking, the efficiency and unconscious briskness with which we turn possibility into uncertainty.
This is powerful stuff.
And disempowering stuff.
Now all of this is also very good news, because if you can manifest this kind of power-sucking perspective, you can also manifest all kinds of awesome support to keep your power!
This is an opportunity to expand. To expand in the knowing that when these power decision moments arise, we get to decide what to do.
Here’s a cool tool to remember what to do when your personal power decisions come up:
A – AWARENESS: oops! (or, crap! for those of us with more colorful vocabularies) There I go again!
B – BRAKE: stop right there.
C – CLARITY about my options, including handing off or keeping my power in that moment.
D – DECISION: who’s gonna get the power here?
Fortunately, that last one is pretty easy – Awareness, Braking, and Clarity make it a snap to decide who gets to own the power.
A, B, C, D. That’s it.
Do you see any situations where you hand off your power to someone else? Are you aware? Do you stop yourself, brake? Are you clear about what you really want to do? What’s your decision?
You get to decide!
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I’d love to hear from you about situations where you’re tempted to hand off your personal power. What helps you stay aware?
Leave a comment below!