What is personal power?

Personal power means making  a habit of taking responsibility for the situations that you find yourself in, and for the direction that your life is taking.  You may not be able to control everything that happens in your life, but you can take control of your RESPONSE to all of the things that happen to you.

In this sense you could say that owning personal power gives you a type of liberation. It is a form of liberation because it liberates you from all the sufferings, anxieties and problems that you experience when you:

• Forfeit your ability to choose your response to what is happening to you in any given situation
• Allow your emotional reactions to slide out of control and cause your thoughts to get locked in a negative spiral
• Blame things that you are experiencing inwardly on something that someone else has done externally
• Give up on a goal too early saying “If only this had not happened then I might have made it”
• Cannot appreciate all the good that is going on in your life because all you see is the bad. This  deprives us of an abundance of both happiness and pleasure that would otherwise be readily available
• Feel like a victim of circumstance  

On being a victim in life

The opposite of owning our personal power is being a victim in life. Nothing saps our energy in life more than having a victim mentality. Many people allow themselves to feel like a victim in life because it is an obvious and manifest truth that we cannot control everything that happens to us. However, as I mention above, this is to miss the point. Being a master in our life and owning our personal power means taking control of our inner response to what happens in our life and thinking, acting and speaking in a way that reflects that.

Two, two minute methods for beginning find liberation in your life through personal power:

 1)      Spend a couple of minutes reflecting on the last time you gave up control of your response to life and became a victim. For those two minutes re-live all the pain, suffering and anxiety that you experienced. End the exercise with a firm mental determination “No more will I give away my personal power and become a victim!”

The point is to use past experiences to make you totally determined to mould a new positive future, free from victim consciousness.

2)      The next time you can feel your personal power being challenged by an inner or outer event say to yourself “I may do many things in response to this situation, but the one thing that I will not do is relinquish my personal power and become a victim”. Focus on this determination mentally for a minute or two.  As you then progress to deal with the issue, stay mindful of your determination and act accordingly.

© Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first! Contact info@mentalfitnessnow.com