Personal Empowerment
Personal Empowerment – starting young!
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Personal Empowerment.
You are responsible for your life. So why expect something to happen for motivation. Self motivation is biggest drive for self empowerment. Anil Sinha
I recently sat with a man who had asked me to write his biography, his journey from weighing 350 pounds (160 kilograms) back to 200 pounds (90 kg). After he told me his story, I had a question for him. First, here is his story, briefly.
He had told me that as he grew fatter, just from being a glutton and careless, he grew too big to do his ceiling insulation batt business – he couldn’t fit through the manholes into the ceiling cavity, so he sold that business and bought a security patrol business. Then he couldn’t get in and out of the patrol cars because of his rapidly expanding girth, so he sold that business too. Eventually he began selling real estate in a city office because all he had to do was stand (or sit) near the front door where people would walk by, and he could talk to them.
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However, the life changing chain of events for him began with the bicycle shop next door. Sometimes he’d stand at his front door and chat to the owner of the bicycle shop, a former triathlete champion, and one day he asked him if he could try riding a bike, as he thought he might like to lose some weight. Just making conversation. The reply was that he didn’t stock a bike that would hold his weight!
Then he needed to run to the back of his shop again to the toilet, for the fifth time that hour, and the bicycle shop owner told him he needed to get ‘that’ checked out. He already knew what his problem was. The doctor told him after a few short minutes “You have chronic diabetes caused by your eating habits. If you don’t lose 100 pounds this year, you won’t see next year!” It scared him; he said those words felt like machine gun fire into his chest!
My question to him was: “If that doctor had not threatened you with your own death, at what point would you have decided you were overweight and needed to do something about it?”
His answer? “I don’t know. I never considered it! I don’t know what it would have taken to have that amount of personal empowerment, to recognise my problem and deal with it!”
Personal empowerment is not a big deal.
A whale of a time!
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My definition for #personal empowerment is the willingness to honestly see yourself as you are, and to commit to making any changes you feel are necessary for your wellbeing, on any level, physical, mental, emotional or spiritual.
That just means that if you know you are not fit, you decide to change that and you do what you need to do, to become more fit. If you have bad breath, you brush your teeth. If someone tells you that your breath is bad, you don’t abuse them for being rude to you; you thank them for being honest with you and then you brush your teeth.
Being less than you can be, less than your human potential is a crime against yourself. That doesn’t mean that you need to be training to be fit enough to run the next marathon. It doesn’t mean you need to immediately begin to diet, or take any other radical steps. It has nothing to do with vanity, and everything to do with your personal pride. Look honestly at yourself. Ask yourself if you are the person you always wanted to be. If you can see how you can become closer to that ideal, then you need the strength to commit to making the changes that will get you there.
OK, I hear some howls of protest! Personal empowerment? I’m suffering from a chronic illness, I can’t do that! I was in a car accident and my injuries won’t allow that! I am overweight because I have a medical condition and the drugs affect me!
Relax. The question is; are you being all you can be? If you are ill, then you are ill and that will place limitations on you physically. But how is your heart? How is your spirit? How is your mind?
Personal empowerment will take you from where you are in your life, to where you could be. It’s not about being fitter, faster, smarter or better than anyone else, just being the best YOU that you could be. Sometimes, personal empowerment is just being the best parent you can be, so that you can be an empowered parent for your children. What this world needs probably most of all, is empowered people, who can be empowered parents, so that the next generation who are our children now can take over this world and continue to make it better and fix the mistakes we have made in getting it to them.
Personal empowerment is worth it.
But how do you get personal empowerment?
It’s the little things that count!
Image from mylifeismymessage.org
It’s easy. Baby steps each day. It’s not a massive shift, it’s just a few little success habits to get into each day, and then continue to do them every day! Not hard at all. You already have a number of habits right now, perhaps some that don’t serve you that you could replace, others that you definitely want to maintain. Like brushing your teeth. But add some affirmations and goalsetting to that. Perhaps doing a few minutes reading of something positive each morning and evening – just a few minutes. Perhaps setting priorities for your day, specific things that will actually advance you a little closer to your goals. Perhaps at the end of the day, doing a review and seeing what you achieved, what you learned, what you felt, and checking off what you actually did. If you started a new habit, check off that you did it, or didn’t – make yourself accountable.
Get into success habits. Start feeling a sense of achievement for the little things, so that when the big things come up and real personal empowerment is needed to face those challenges, you have already been practising, you have the success habits in place, all you are doing is changing the goal……! See? Simple.
If you feel this article has empowered and benefited you and you feel it could benefit the personal empowerment of other folks you know, please reblog it, share it with your friends and associates. It might be the day you changed someone’s life for the better!
Til next time, fair winds and full sails,
Ray Jamieson
Be ambitious towards your own personal enhancement. Steve Mariboli
Please also refer to other posts on Empowerment:
Excellent post, & I was interested in that man’s story as I have wondered how do people get that big? Why do they let themselves grow and grow to such proportions? YET I am the heaviest I have ever been in my life. I do want to lose weight. I don’t feel as energetic & sprightly as I used to. So, same: why have I let myself grow this way?
A really good read. I appreciated this in many ways. Am going to look at that program, too, just curious….