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Your Personal Power: Cultivating and Sustaining It
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Author: Administrator Account
Added: 10/31/2005
Type: Summary
Viewed: 201 time(s)
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 Your Personal Power: Cultivating and Sustaining It
Your Personal Power: Cultivating and Sustaining It
by Idara E. Bassey
"Power is learning from what is inside you."
Harriet Rubin
K eeping up with the Joneses. A seemingly "harmless" remark from a
loved one. The workday that makes us wonder if we are still
gainfully employed- all aspects of our daily lives that can send
our personal power haywire- assuming it has already been
sufficiently developed and nurtured. A solid "inner armor" is an
important tool to have in our life arsenal so the challenges we
face on a day-to-day basis do not do us in. Harriet Rubin's
quote suggests an approach that make the cultivation of personal
power within everyone's grasp- let look more closely here at
what steps we can take to realize this goal:
Look within yourself- Becoming self-referencing is one of the
most important skills we can ever develop in life and it is a
key aspect of developing personal power. It is perfectly fine
to have friends, spouses, partners and the like, but at the end
of the day we have to look within ourselves and become the
authority of our own experience. As the saying goes, "we came
into this world alone and we will leave alone." Only we can
determine our values and priorities; and this task is too
important to be delayed or delegated. This "baseline" foundation
of inner knowledge moves us along in the process of developing
our personal power and serves as the springboard for the next
step in this process.
Learn from yourself- Thinking about what we have learned about
ourselves per our inner assessment leads us to deeper
realizations. For example, it is not enough to notice that we
get annoyed every time a particular friend is late every time we
plan an outing. At some point it should dawn on us that being
on time is important and perhaps may be, in our view, a
demonstration of respect for others. So taking note of an
experience or an insight that has dawned on us is a good first
step. However, in refusing to dig any deeper, such insights are
little more than interesting ruminations that cannot propel us
forward.
Live the learning- This is often the point where people stumble
in their efforts to cultivate and strengthen their personal
power. It is so tempting to be "wowed" by the intensity of our
insights that we never go beyond this point in our thinking;
thus ensuring our lives do not change in response to the new
insights we discover about ourselves. Back to our perpetually
late friend scenario- let's say she calls to meet for lunch.
Inwardly you are still seething from her less than timely
arrival the last time you got together. However, you say
nothing and agree to meet her as you have before and hope she
will be on time. With an interaction as simple as this you may
not be aware that your personal power has taken a direct hit,
but it actually has. The lesson learned from your past
experience (i.e.- that you get annoyed and feel disrespected
when your friend is perpetually late for social outings) that
flowed from what you have identified as a priority in your
personal value system (being on time communicates respect for
others) has not yet been integrated into your decision-making.
Resolving this situation may simply warrant bringing your
friend's perpetual tardiness to her attention and explaining how
it makes you feel. However, do not wail in frustration if your
friend is still late. The victory here does not lie in changing
your friend's behavior, but in standing up for yourself and your
standards of what you consider to be acceptable behavior. This
is all you have control over anyway. Ultimately, you can decide
whether your friend will remain in the friend "column." But
until then you have just broadened your options beyond pacing
back and forth with smoke coming out of your ears, and this is
an empowering development.
Even if pacing back and forth is the only response we can
muster, join the crowd in heading back to square one. We've all
been there- repeatedly even. Developing personal power takes
time. Reaching for the chocolate cake rather than probing the
source of our upset is not necessarily a failure; neither is
reluctantly culling the lessons learned from past experiences
when we would much rather be swimming in denial. However, each
time we take a step away from our conditioned responses and look
to ourselves as the source of insight about what matters to us,
we have an opportunity to create a new set of results in our
lives and increased inner power to boot. We live more and more
in our personal power when the truth of our being is reflected
in our daily experience. We can then encounter the world from a
position of strength that bodes well for creating a satisfying
life experience can resist the "winds" of what we encounter
everyday. Why not let you be in charge of you?!
2005? One Light Messenger All rights reserved.
Dr. Idara E. Bassey is an Atlanta-based attorney and spiritual
counselor. She is author of Reflections of a Mystical Sistah:
On Traveling Down the Road to Self-Definition (iUniverse, 2004)
and can be reached via her website at www.OneLightMessenger.com |
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