Tag Archives: success habits

Og Mandino – Lessons from the Master

Og Mandino

Og Mandino Courtesy of Wikipedia

“I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.”
― Og Mandino

When Og Mandino touched my life

There are moments in our lives that are indelibly etched, that live with us forever. One such moment in my life is when Og Mandino first walked out on stage in front of me, sat down and began to speak.

It was a day in early 1987, at the old Boondall Entertainment Centre on the north side of Brisbane. There were half a dozen famous speakers on the schedule; I’d only heard of a couple. A friend and business associate at the time invited me along. He had a mobile mechanic business and credited much of his success to staying motivated by events such as this. That still holds true, we do need a regular injection of inspiration. I was then new to the corporate world and this was my first taste of it.

A couple of high energy, foot stomping, stand on the chair and chant speakers came on, one of whom has since mellowed and gained great popularity. When he spoke, there was a great energy in the hall, 17,000 people were up and chanting too, clapping and cheering.

Then Og Mandino took the stage.

The man had a presence I have rarely experienced. He spoke softly, invited us to sit, then he sat and began to speak. In contrast to the energy of the previous speaker, he hardly moved on his chair. The audience didn’t move, not even sure they breathed for the next hour as this man poured wisdom forth as though there was nothing else happening anywhere in the world. I don’t recall a single person coughing, not a chair creaking, not a sound for that hour, except the voice of Og Mandino reaching into my heart and changing my life around for me. If ever there was an audience with an angel, this was it.

I have no further recollection of any of the speakers of that day, although I still have the promo material and notes I made. Og Mandino had done his work. That was, I think, his last visit to Australia. He passed away in September of 1996, the world was saddened by his passing and his loss to humanity was incredible. However, the man left a legacy that I had begun to devour long before then. He was also an inspired author.

The Og Mandino Legacy

Og Mandino wrote many books, the most famous of all was “The Greatest Salesman in the World”. I read it many times, and followed up a number of times with the ‘workbook’ “The Greatest Secret”. It was while working through the exercises in this book that I gained the personal empowerment and inspiration that has me writing to you now.

Not only did #Og Mandino teach through the wisdom of his writing, he used strategies that if implemented, work brilliantly. Old but powerful concepts that the greatest teachers and philosophers down the ages have used to change the world. He made the suggestion that we record our successes daily, so that we could see at a glance, just how successful we were. He described a simple graph paper chart he used and I followed up on it.

First, I took a sheet of paper, ruled it up as I thought he meant, and went to work with it. Then I got my first computer, and created a spreadsheet in Excel. Each morning I would set my intention and goals for the day, and each night I would tick off my successes. My life turned on this program.

At the time, I was recovering both in health and from a business failure, and my goals for recovery from each went on this sheet. Month after month, I would check back and chart my progress. Some months I would see poor results, so I got out my diary and checked what I did that did not work – and saw how to change it for the better. Other months were a series of daily celebrations. On review, I could see what worked, so I incorporated more of those events and activities into my life. Simple although crude, but incredibly effective, daily doses of empowerment. Daily readings of Og Mandino books were a staple at this time in my life, consolidating my successes and carrying me through the dark times.

Og Mandino

Og Mandino Fundamentals Courtesy of pixpirations.com

After only a couple of years of rebuilding my health and my life, I restarted in a new career direction. I had undertaken the Entrepreneurs Program at University of Queensland, the Business Programs at Kedron Business College and numerous other courses, programs and seminars, when the share market crashed.

The 1987/1988 share market crash was a global catastrophe. Lives and businesses were ruined overnight. But I was ready. I found that people were coming to me in my new vocation of business adviser to get them back out of trouble, out of impending bankruptcy, business closures and persecution by the banks. I had made my own turn-around, and now armed with the tools of my recent experiences, I took on this challenge. The incredible part was that the empowerment strategies I had used on myself, combined with the business education I had obtained, were both the emotional and business support and advice that these ailing and failing business owners needed. We never lost one who came on board with us! We saved millions of dollars for companies that were within days and sometimes hours of closure, hundreds of jobs that would have vanished, ruining lives and families as they went. But we saved them all.

I thank Og Mandino for it. His teachings and wisdom enabled me to be in the right place at the right time, to make this contribution and Mr Og Mandino, I am eternally grateful to you Sir. Thank you.

The programs I created back then were followed by far more advanced programs in later years, seminars, workshops and advanced trainings in many fields, delving into the neuro-sciences and alternative thinking therapies and strategies way before they were popular or fashionable. Life has changed and evolved much for me since then, and the products and services I now deliver are far more advanced than anything I could have dreamed of back in the 1980’s. However, just like you can trace your DNA back hundreds or thousands of years, so you can trace the DNA of my programs and training back to the simple, fundamental philosophies and teachings of Og Mandino, and some of the other great mentors of my early years in business and training.

Whilst some people have said that “unless it’s created with the technology of the current day, it doesn’t work anymore”, I think about the other fundamental laws of nature and physics and the generalised principles that still make the world go round. Gravity is one such law. It’s still working incredibly well. Cause and effect. Very powerful also. Sayings like “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar” and so on, still relevant and absolutely true. The fundamentals will always work. Because they are the fundamentals of life and of very our existence on this planet. They are there for everyone to use, if only they knew about them and would access them to their benefit.

Please look at this link about OG MANDINO. His life story makes for powerful reading. Before becoming a best-selling author, Og Mandino was a bombardier and pilot in the US Air Force during World War 2. He flew with fellow pilot and later movie star, James Stewart. During his early life after the war, he, like so many other returned soldiers, contemplated ending it all, but found inspiration in a book, and his life changed also. His remarkable life story is well worth reading…

Og Mandino

Og Mandino Air Crew Courtesy of www.natickvets.org

If you would like to experience the benefits of the teachings of Og Mandino as they influenced my life, you can. I have packaged much of what I learned from Og Mandino into Life Change 90, the life change program that over a period of just 90 days, can transform the life of the person who truly commits to it. No matter what you do, you are here, on this planet, and you are likely to be here for the next ninety days. Make them count. Get Life Change 90!

If you know someone else whose life could benefit from exposure to the principles espoused and taught by Og Mandino, please send this blog article to them. I’m sure they will thank you.

Til next time, fair winds and full sails.

Ray

Empowerment through emotional intelligence

#Empowerment through emotional intelligence

Tip of the iceberg!
Image from www.soulseeds.com.

“In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels”
― Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ

Empowerment through Emotional Intelligence

Many people have heard of the term “Emotional Intelligence”, made famous in a book by Daniel Goleman and now commonly called “EQ”.  We were all made familiar with “IQ”, our intellectual intelligence quotient many years ago, when intelligence testing was considered the ultimate measure of a person.  Fortunately, that has since been found to be a very small part of the story.  It’s now recognised that a person’s “IQ” is not really as important as how the person is able to utilise their “IQ”. That level of utilisation is often a measure of their “EQ”.

Let me give you an example.  I went to school with a really brainy guy.  In my own high school up to Grade 10, I was considered reasonably intelligent and won class awards in some subjects. Alongside this guy, I was a dunce!  We did a physics exam one day when I was in Grade 11 at College, and he got 65 questions right, out of a possible 66.  HE WAS FURIOUS!  The question he wasn’t marked correct on had a full stop missing!  That’s all!  But he wasn’t used to not getting everything right!

However, brilliant as he was in the science laboratory or the maths class, this is the guy who would walk out of the dormitory with his shoe laces untied, his shirt buttoned crookedly and was forever asking for someone to help him with his neck tie!  In the world outside the laboratory, the poor guy was hopeless and helpless!  I don’t know if he ever got a drivers licence, but I hope not….!

He had a very high IQ, but almost no EQ.  And that is the difference.

EQ is the ability to relate to others, to communicate effectively and to empower others.

What is empowerment?

Empowerment is the ability to influence the environment around you for the benefit of all.  #Empowerment through emotional intelligence is the way you utilise your communication skills, your ability to create rapport and empathy with people, to influence outcomes and the behaviours of other people.

Let’s face it:  Personal empowerment only happens when you empower others.  You cannot be empowered in isolation.  The most powerful person on the planet is no more powerful than anyone else if they are sitting alone in a dinghy miles offshore.  Put that same person in a room with other people and their empowerment becomes evident.  Their influence is felt throughout the room.  Even if their identity remains unknown, their effect on the people around them will be felt.  That is empowerment.  But your own empowerment only happens when people around you respond positively to your behaviour and treatment of them.

#Empowerment through emotional intelligence

Empowered Couple
Image from www.essentialoilspedia.com.

You see the evidence of this in many places.  A loving couple together may be a formidable team, a unit of considerable influence, power and passion.  However, before their meeting and becoming a couple, either of them may have been described by their friends as lacking in confidence.  Together, they empower each other.

A political leader can be a dictator and through absolute power wield much influence.  However, the most loved leaders will often have more power and influence and especially the respect of their people, than the brutal dictator.  As a fringe benefit, they also have more job security and in retirement will be welcome anywhere in the world.

#Empowerment through emotional intelligence

Dictators from history – how many can you name?
Image from www.freemediaproductions.info.

An example of that would be to compare Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi with Nelson Mandela.  Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi were dictators, responsible over their long and brutal reigns for the deaths of thousands of people.  Their armies kept them in power, but ultimately rebellions and civil wars cost them their leadership.  They died as they lived.  Nelson Mandela had the same struggle to begin with, perhaps even harder, but when he came to power, he was loved and respected by all, and empowered other people throughout his many years as president of his country of South Africa.  When he retired, he remained the most respected elder statesman in the country.  The respect for him was global, and even the Pope sought meetings with him.  Other world leaders sought his counsel. When he passed away recently, the nation of South Africa was just one of the nations around the world mourning the passing of one of the greatest statesmen the world has ever been blessed with.

#Empowerment through emotional intelligence

An empowered leader, Nelson Mandela
Image from au.lifestyle.yahoo.com.

The same happens with us on a personal level.  We need to be empowering others, for us to become empowered people and leaders.  Empowerment does not work in a vacuum, or in isolation.  Our empowerment is measured by the degree of empowerment we give to those around us.

How do you gain empowerment through emotional intelligence?

The first part of this is understanding the power of our emotions, and the effect they have on our behaviour.  Below is the Empowerment Tone Scale Chart.  The range of human emotions is captured down the left side of the scale, from the lowest of emotions, apathy, to the highest, up above enthusiasm.  It goes much higher, but those are states not relevant here.

#Empowerment through emotional intelligence

Emotional Tone Scale.

The critical point on the scale is the red empowerment line, just above boredom.  Below this point, a person is purely reacting to stimuli, but not operating rationally.  That is not to say they are not capable of high level thinking and planning, but their thinking is not constructive.  In some form or another, it is destructive.  Above the line is where interest and constructive thinking begin, and win/win solutions and new concepts are possible.

A person in grief is way down on the scale.  In this state, the person is more introspective, turned inward.  To communicate with this person, we need to empathise with them, and find a way to reach their emotional state without entering into it ourselves.  Then we need to raise them up to the level of the Empowerment Line, even if only briefly, to get them to apply rational thinking to their situation.  That doesn’t mean they will stay there, nor should they.  There is an established grieving process that people need to complete before they can move on with life.  Empowering this person is entirely appropriate, but to try to keep that person, who is suffering with their grief, in an empowered, enthusiastic state for an extended period is denying them their grieving process and unrealistic.

#Empowerment through emotional intelligence

Comfort through grief
Image from www.yourdictionary.com

To raise a grieving person up to an empowered level for a time, respectful questions that require processing are needed.  Processing can only be done in an emotional state above the empowerment line. To answer the question, their mind needs to rise to the empowerment level.  Gentle questions can do this, and will rouse the person from their grief and enable them to function more rationally.

However, if the person is angry, in emotional pain or hostile, their emotions are directed outward to inflict their pain and angst on the world, to retaliate.  Much as a friendly dog will bite when cornered or in pain, the person’s behaviour is also a non-rational reaction to circumstances.

Again, gentle but firm questions that require processing will have a positive effect, although it may take a series of questions and the format is quite specific.  Questions such as:

“How can we sort this out?”

“How can we change this around?”

“How can we fix this problem?”

This format aligns the person asking the question with the person feeling the pain or anger, where formerly, they felt alone.  It also puts the source of their pain or anger or grief out as an issue independent of the person.  It identifies it as a problem that can be solved with rational thinking.  Thus the person is raised to the level of rational thinking and empowerment to deal with the issue that was formerly their millstone.  This is empowerment through emotional intelligence – your use of your “EQ” can provide a powerful influence on anyone suffering from a lowered emotional state.

Once the emotional state begins to rise, when appropriate, offer the opportunity for some responsibility in and a share of the positive outcomes of the solutions.  Offer the hope of brightness of the future, and show them that it is their responsibility to claim it.

How important is empowerment through emotional intelligence?

Look at the vertical blue arrow in the scale.  That is the emotional region where most people live, and the majority of them are probably between boredom and hostility, tapering more towards the extremities.  In other words, most people you meet will need to be empowered BEFORE you can relate with them!  They will need a reason to think and to start a rational thought process before you can have a positive relationship with them, because that is not a normal state for them!

Can empowerment become a normal state?

Yes, absolutely, and empowerment through emotional intelligence is the pathway.  It is a learned process, and once learned and the success behaviours and actions of empowerment are formed and become habits, empowerment becomes the normal way of life.  And yes, anyone can do this.

Empowerment is not an event; it is a series of success strategies that are lived moment at a time, day by day.  It is a way of life.  You already have a way of life, a series of strategies that you live, moment at a time, day after day.  If you want empowerment in your life, some of those strategies may need to be changed.  And you can do it. CLick here to learn more about Empowering YOU!

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!  If that was that special person in your life, then congrats: you just changed your own life too!

Til next time, fair winds and full sails,

Ray Jamieson

“emotional self-awareness is the building block of the next fundamental emotional intelligence: being able to shake off a bad mood”
― Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ

Please also refer to my previous posts on Empowerment:

Financial Empowerment

Empowerment

Empowerment for Men

Empowerment for Women

Empowerment for Teens

Empowerment for Children

Personal Empowerment

What would an empowered man do?

Empowered by love

 

What would an empowered man do?

#What would an empowered man do

Empowered Man
Image from theredlist.fr

“The only thing that stands between a person and what they want in life is the will to try it and the faith to believe it is possible.”
― Rich DeVos

What would an empowered man do?

It’s easy to preach.  It’s easy to lecture.  It’s harder to live what you preach and lecture about.  It’s especially hard when Spirit or fate or the Gods on high decide to confront you with a problem straight out of the box you were preaching from!

The question is, when something like this happens, what would an empowered man do?

Now, an empowered man here refers to empowered women, children, teens, civic leaders, politicians, and anyone else you can think of.  It’s all of us, and I’m lumping us together under the term ‘man’.

The guy (or girl) comes home, tired and well and truly over the day, it’s been a tough one.  Their partner is frustrated as their day was tough too, the kids are noisy, but they just want to sit with a beer or wine and relax, let the day go and when they feel like it, come join the family.  But the kids want to play, their partner wants a hand in the kitchen, stuff is happening all around and this is not a time when they can opt out for a while.

#What would an empowered man do

Home at last!
Image from www.huffingtonpost.com

What would an empowered man do?

The question really should come back to “what is important in this life?” and start from there.  Attend to the first priorities and work outwards from there, once they have been attended to.

First priority?  There’s their partner standing there, tired and very frustrated with their day also.  This person committed to spend their life with them, and share the joys and hassles of their family forever.  WOW!  Number one priority?

#What would an empowered man do?  He would kiss this lady, tell her he loved her and block the world out for a while.  There’s a book called “The ten second kiss” that I have referred to in my seminars and it suggests that night and morning, and leaving for work and coming home from work is a powerful time for it, that you should kiss your spouse or partner for at least ten seconds.  At least twice a day, at those important times.

Why?  Because when you kiss someone for ten seconds with your full intention and attention on your kissing, it speaks volumes to them about your love for them, and it does them a world of good too.  Things like easing tension, frustration and giving the feeling to them that they are loved and supported in every way.  Sort of an antidote to a tiring and frustrating day.

What about the dinner on the stove?  What about the kids?  What about all the other distractions?

Take the pot off the heat – it’s only for 10 seconds!  Get the kids to time you – this is a powerful way for them to see and experience what love between their parents is and should be.  There is not much that cannot be put off for just ten seconds!

#What would an empowered man do

A great daily ritual
Image from karapearson.com

OK, that’s Priority 1 done.  Priority 2 should be a hug for the kids.  Big hug, acknowledgement for a moment, so they feel the love too, and it’s amazing how often that is enough for them for a time.  Time to enable you to handle the other issues that are demanding attention.  Perhaps you can be with the kids in a family way.  Grab a coffee or tea, sit with your spouse and children on the couch for a few minutes, have a family hug, right after your ten second kiss.  Take a few more minutes with all of you together, sharing your days.  Ask your spouse about their day, their ups and downs.  The same with the children, asking questions gets them present and takes their mind off concerns that drag energies down.  That also allows you to catch up on the urgent news and to plan the next few minutes of dealing with the other issues, such as the dinner that’s cooking, the chores to be done, homework and so on.

What would an empowered man do?  He’d first attend to his family and be nurtured by them, while he empowers them with his love and attention.  He’d make this a daily ritual.

Another scenario.  The empowered man (or woman) is at work and the boss yells at them, bawling them out over something, whether it’s valid or not.  The boss is a chump, loud mouthed and obnoxious.  The first reaction is to make a batch of ‘nose jam’ and spread it all over his face.

#What would an empowered man do

Not again!
Image from www.mccormicksys.com

What would an empowered man do?

First, is it OK to get angry?  Yes, and it’s natural to get angry at times.  The human body and most other species become angry if provoked.  It’s what happens next that matters.

We established a few blogs back that you cannot win an argument.  We learnt in another blog about how to empower people when they are angry or fearful, so that you can work with them rationally and come to a good resolution.

#What would an empowered man do

Empowerment Emotional Tone Scale

This image is the Empowerment Tone Scale.

(Click on this image to enlarge it!)

The angry person is down under the empowerment line.  The fearful or grieving person is lower still, near the bottom.  To relate with these people, you need to boost them and their emotional state up to the empowerment level at “interest”, near the top, even if only for a few seconds!  You do that with targeted questions, relevant to the topic, but ones they need to process a little.  That processing is the key to empowerment.  This is because for the mind to process a question, it needs to be in a constructive state, not destructive.  Asking a question raises the person’s emotional state.  It empowers the person you are asking the question of.

Back to our angry boss.  What would an empowered man do?

They would engage the boss with simple, relevant questions to establish the parameters of the situation.  They would go on to ask about the specifics.  Then they would ask the most powerful question framework “WHAT can WE do about THIS PROBLEM?”  This establishes the conflict as an issue separate to either of them, but a problem they can solve as a team.  A totally different scenario to when the boss walked in.

#What would an empowered man do

That’s better! All sorted now!
Image from www.act-now.ca

Does it work every time?  Of course not.  But it’s what an empowered person would do first, rather than inflame the issue with retaliation.

Of course, launching into strategies such as these without a reference point in place is going to be a challenge.  For some men, if they arrived home and without warning, took their wife and kissed her solidly for more than a few seconds, it would either frighten them or make them very suspicious.  After reading this blog, discuss it with your partner and adopt this practice of the ten second kiss morning and evening.  Make the family hug a ritual.  You’ll probably find it changes other areas of your life too.

With your boss, don’t wait until he’s furious before you try to empower him.  Use simple but relevant questions all the time to build his level of empowerment and you’ll find he is much less likely to explode if and when something does go wrong.  And at that time, he’ll respond better when you ask more questions, because you have conditioned the situation already.  It won’t be anything new!

What would an empowered man do, to become more empowered in the first place?  

How do you get to BE this way, without needing to re-read this blog when life serves you a rotten tomato?

Empowerment is not hard.  It’s simple, it’s strategic and it’s constant.  Constant implementing of daily success habits, morning and evening, practicing throughout the day and celebrating your successes at night.  It’s challenging yourself to be the best you can, and recording your efforts to be your best.  It’s dropping unproductive habits and replacing them with success habits that step you closer to your own goals every day.  It’s putting yourself in a state of mind that is empowered by the environment you create around you.  It’s choosing the people you associate with, the information and influences that go into your mind and surround you in your life.  One tiny step at a time, all the time.  It’s simple, and it’s constant. Click here to learn more about becoming Empowered and learning to use your EQ, as well as your IQ!

After a while, it becomes a habit and is the state of mind you unconsciously life in.

During the learning process, we pass through four stages of competency.  They are:

  1. Unconsciously incompetent – we don’t even know we are messing things up!
  2. Consciously incompetent – we know how bad we are at this new thing.
  3. Consciously competent – we know what to do but still need to focus to get it right.
  4. Unconsciously competent – it’s become a good, solid habit; no need to even think about it anymore; we do it unconsciously and get it right every time!

After a while, these new success habits that we practice daily, morning and evening, become a part of our subconscious program and we do them without thinking.  We LIVE them.

#What would an empowered man do

Words of a wise and empowered man
Image from wolflaguerra.wordpress.com

What would an empowered man do?  Subscribe to this program and share it amongst his family, friends and workmates, to empower them too…

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

“Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it’s time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.”
― Bill Moyers

Please also refer to my other posts on Empowerment:

Financial Empowerment

Empowerment

Empowerment for Men

Empowerment for Women

Empowerment for Teens

Empowerment for Children

Personal Empowerment

 

 

Personal Empowerment

#Personal Empowerment

Personal Empowerment – starting young!
Image from www.huffingtonpost.com

Personal Empowerment.

asinha97
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.

#Personal Empowerment

Something wrong with this picture
Image from nypost.com

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.

#Personal Empowerment

A whale of a time!
Image from selfimprovementdevelopment.com

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?

#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.

That is personal empowerment.  A program with all of this exists now for you to slip into your daily routine; you can get it here.  A few minutes morning and evening and it is done.

The bonus is that it teaches you lots of other cool strategies as well, such as communication skills, financial success tips, stress management and health tips, mental strategies, conflict resolution, goal setting and a whole heap more over the 90 days of the program.  That’s the few minutes of positive and empowered reading material, a couple of hundred words a day to get you on track with life changing strategies in every area of your life.  Personal empowerment was never so easy!  Start your personal empowerment program now! Click here to begin!

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:

Financial Empowerment

Empowerment

Empowerment for Men

Empowerment for Women

Empowerment for Teens

Empowerment for Children

What would an empowered man do?

Empowerment for Children

#Empowerment for Children

Happy, learning children
Image from www.cumc.com

Empowerment for Children

In Empowerment for Teens, we saw that the way children are raised has a huge effect on their behaviour as teens and then young adults.  This is found in the most basic of human instincts, the instinct of survival, one of the few a baby is born with, and is very relevant in #Empowerment for Children

To survive, a human being is programmed to do whatever it must.  As a baby has little conscious thought capability at birth, everything is trial, error and instinct.  Babies rely on mothers for feeding, nurturing, protection and survival.  Therefore keeping mother close is a survival instinct.  To do this, some babies cry, some laugh, some are cute and coy, some are funny little clowns.  All are survival strategies initially; the range of survival strategies expands as the baby grows.

A toddler cry baby doesn’t get much sympathy.  However, the baby can learn that a certain laugh, or a certain funny behaviour can get mother’s attention, so that becomes a strategy.  This might be the start of the ‘clown’ survival strategy.  Robin Williams claims this was his way of surviving school, where the bigger boys bullied him until he told jokes!  Now, it is his career!

With most young animals in a nest, if there is competition for food, the bully always wins.  The same with human babies – the instinct is to get in first and get the food to survive.  A bigger or more boisterous baby may become a bully as a survival strategy amongst smaller siblings.  A smaller one may realise that direct action against a bully would not work, but being sneaky and agile might – monkey like antics might become the survival strategy, or outright stealth, guile and theft.  Just as a survival strategy.

#Empowerment for Children

Feeding time – who’s going to get it?
Image from commons.wikimedia.org

However, we see these same strategies employed in adults!  This is because these survival strategies become embedded as “sub-personalities” in the mind and psyche of the child and remain embedded as the child grows up.  At one time they were all relevant as survival strategies; now, as adults many are redundant, but they remain.

Can we be sure of that? Are sub-personalities real?

Think of a young mother in an ordinary day and how many sub-personalities she operates with, just to make it through the day, from leaving bed in the morning, to bedtime at night.

Waking, she becomes a mother first, looking after the immediate needs of her children, feeding, clothing and getting them ready for school.  Then she becomes a taxi-driver to deliver them to school.  Then it’s onto the freeway in the car to drive to work, she’s a racing driver.  At work she becomes a dutiful employee, slightly subservient to her supervisor, but definitely superior to that jerk from the mail sorting room who tried to hit on her last week!  Hmmph!  Then she suddenly becomes mother again at lunch time with a call from the school that one of the children has fallen and scraped a knee, but it’s OK, the school nurse has bandaged it and it will be fine.  A text message from her husband, saying he’s thinking about her and how wonderful it was to cuddle up naked under the sheets last night.  She started reading the messages as a loving wife, but by the end of it, a nymph had emerged.  She looks up from the message and sees the other office workers looking at her and she becomes a blushing teenager!  Back to work and she becomes the dutiful employee again.  Time to go home and she enters rush hour traffic and she becomes the road rage Mama for half an hour.  Home at last, she becomes mother again.  Husband arrives home and she becomes wife for a moment as he kisses her, and then mother again as she prepares dinner and scolds the children for the noise they are making.  After dinner she becomes a school teacher while helping with homework.  Bedtime for the kids, she becomes a wife again and sits quietly with husband discussing the day.  Bedtime for her, she showers and slips into bed and the text message nymph of earlier in the day appears and for the next hour, she is none of the previous sub-personalities from throughout the day!

#Empowerment for Children

Herman’s Head Sub-Personalities
Image from www.sitcomsonline.com

Whew!  All those different sub-personalities and all appropriate at different times of the day, with different people, and different situations.  Definitely not appropriate to mix them up and when that does happen, disaster is not far away!

How are sub-personalities relevant to empowerment for children?

The baby we first looked at is developing sub-personalities as it grows older, in order to survive.  The empowered child, the well balanced and happy child will confidently move between sub-personalities almost unconsciously, provided we create and foster a supportive environment around them, making it safe for them to grow, explore and experience the world.

How do we make empowerment for children possible?

As parents, it is our responsibility to create the most supportive environment for our children to grow up in.  The best way to do that is for us to be fully empowered personally first – being the best parents and teachers we can be, for them to model as they grow.  Empowerment for Children comes after their parents learn empowerment for women and empowerment for men!

Children do not do as they are taught.  Children do as they are shown by example and that is why they model older children, rather than anonymous characters from text books!  As parents, we need to demonstrate what we want children to learn, and provide the environment where this learning is possible!

Enlightened educationalists will tell us that children learn best in a happy environment where they can experience what they are learning about.  Experiential learning has become a buzz word but really, children have been doing it for thousands of generations, learning through their childhood games.  We need to ensure those childhood games are possible, safe and that we can participate in them to the extent we need to, so that we can give guidance as and when the children need it.

#Empowerment for Children

Learning by playing
Image from lindaoconnell.blogspot.com

The best way for empowerment for children to be experienced is by parents reading to children.  If you have ever seen the rapt look on a child’s face as they explore a picture book with Mummy or Daddy, and the innocent questions that come from it, you will understand.  As the child grows, reading more mature story books opens the child’s mind to the wider world.  I remember my Dad reading “Treasure Island” to me, and another of our favourites, “Two years on Bardunyah Station”, an Australian outback cattle station where everything was larger than life.  Stories such as these allowed us to create magical images of what lay beyond and enthused us with the desire to get out and explore the world, to discover our own Treasure Islands and feel the vastness of the wide outdoors.  We were fortunate that we had empowered parents who understood this.

#Empowerment for Children

Reading to your child is empowering for them
edu101.hubpages.com

When the children do get outdoors, be there with them!  Children’s school sports days are a great place for them to show off to Mum and Dad, if they are sporting by nature.  Music recitals or dance classes are other great ways to participate in your children’s activities if they have come to love the arts.  Whether or not they are the best doesn’t matter, as long as you demonstrate your involvement, and show encouragement for their efforts!

#Empowerment for Children

School sports day
www.chengelo.sch.zm

Is it OK for a child to fail?

Empowerment for Children can only happen when the child learns to fall over and stand up to try again!  So many are nursed through childhood that when they reach teens and Mum and Dad can’t keep an eye on them every waking moment, that the first obstacle they come across flummoxes them!  They need to learn from setbacks; learn to power on despite them and because of them, learning from the mistakes and picking up the lessons!  Only in this way do they become ‘battle hardened’ for the sometimes hostile environments they will face as teens and young adults.

#Empowerment for Children

Ooops! Here comes a lesson!
Image from liketreesplanted.com

However, of critical importance is where Mummy and Daddy are when they fall, and how THEY react to their child’s failures!  Empowerment for children happens when they learn from parents that it’s not the failure that matters, it’s getting the lesson and starting over that is important!  If parents are critical of poor school results, poor sporting results or music recitals, then the child learns that it’s a hard world and their parents are just another part of it.  If instead Parents are there to encourage and teach success habits, they learn that mistakes and failings are only stepping stones to success!  They learn what we demonstrate!

This is important in another way too, because as parents we fail sometimes too, and our children know it!  They recognise in us the mistakes we make, and if we judge them harshly for their mistakes, that is what they have learned to do with us.  They become the most critical and unforgiving teenagers unless they learn the truth about mistakes – they are just part of the lifelong education system we are all enrolled in!

Empowerment for our children is directly proportional to the amount of personal empowerment we, as adult parents have.  When WE are empowered, we can empower others, especially our children.  Personal development and empowerment work for us is how we can best empower our children, and lead by example on their march into their teens and adulthood.  Click HERE to become a more Empowered Parent now!

If you feel this post has contributed to empowerment for children, please share and reblog amongst your friends and associates.  So many parents are crying out for empowerment for children, but don’t realise that it is within reach.  Your sharing may change the life of another – everyone deserves personal empowerment and this could be the day you make a difference!

Til next time, fair winds and full sails,

Ray Jamieson

Please also refer to my other posts on Empowerment:

Empowerment through Emotional Intelligence

Financial Empowerment

Empowerment

Empowerment for Men

Empowerment for Women

Empowerment for Teens

Personal Empowerment

What would an empowered man do?

 

Empowerment for Teens

#Empowerment for teens

Moving on up!
Image from everydaylife.globalpost.com

Empowerment for Teens

#Empowerment for teens

The fugitives
Image from www.dvdmg.com

In the movies, you see the police chasing the fugitives and the wily old detective says something like “to catch them, we need to understand what drives them”…  Big game hunters say something similar, even now when hunting with a camera for shots for National Geographic, they need to understand what motivates their targets before they can film them.  Do you see the pattern?

No, we are not hunting for teenagers.  We know where they are, mostly.…  But why?  Why are teenagers, just like teenagers?  What drives a teenager to behave as a teenager?

No, it’s not a trick question.  In answering it, we can understand and find #empowerment for teens and teach them how they can be happier teens.  To do this, we need to go way back into human evolution, thousands of generations.  Back when achieving and surviving your teens was a bit like reaching pension age.  The world was a savage place, survival was not guaranteed and there was no social security when things got tough.

Early humans were programmed to survive and to continue their species, in a very hostile environment where man was not the supreme predator.  Understanding the human program is the key to understanding teenagers and children, and to helping them make it safely into adulthood!

What is this “human program”?

The human program is to:

  • Survive
  • Explore
  • Experience
  • Identify
  • Procreate
  • Leave a legacy

Understanding this programming enables both teens and parents to understand how the most appropriate Empowerment for Teens can be achieved, especially in the modern world.

Looking at the programs one by one, we can see how they apply, and match behaviours according to the inbuilt human programming.

Survive

#Empowerment for teens

Fight or flight!
www.lookandlearn.com

We are born into an alien world, helpless, without language, unable to walk or feed ourselves, totally reliant on someone else to protect and nurture us and teach us to survive.

That is a scary deal!  Different people/babies react in different ways.  Some are demanding and scream until Mother comes to cuddle, feed them or give them attention.  That is how they survive, by demanding attention.  Others are cute and use being cute to keep Mother close by, to nurture, cuddle and feed their little ‘cutey pie’.  Yet others are funny, laughing and playful and their antics keep mother close by because it’s fun for her too, to feed, cuddle and nurture her little ‘clown’.  And so our babies find ways to survive.

All through our lives, we find ways to survive.  Those can become sub-personalities, but more on this in our next blog on ‘Empowerment for Children’.  Suffice to say, we adopt sub-personalities as survival strategies as we grow older.

Explore

#Empowerment for teens

Young Explorers
Image from www.prime-movies.net

Can’t keep kids at home?  Of course not!  Since they learned they had wriggly things called fingers that they could see and control, each child has been an explorer.  Some do it through books, some through TV, some on computers and some just run wild!  It’s their nature!  The young mind grows fastest in its formative years because as part of the survival process, they have to learn what’s going on around them!  Their curiosity is natural and healthy!

They explore the world they have discovered.  That is how man pushed out of Africa’s Olduvai Gorge and populated the world.  It’s why Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic in three tiny sailing ships and discovered the New World.  It’s why the Pilgrims settled in North America.  It’s why Captain Cook sailed around the world three times – it’s what he did – he was an explorer.  It’s why my family emigrated to Australia a hundred years ago!

Experience

Why do any of us do what we do?  We are experience creating machines!  Our eyes are the most powerful visual sensory units ever – the most incredible telescopes are still not as versatile as the human eye.  Our ears hear and interpret sounds across a vast range and translate them into a language we communicate with.  Our skin is the largest sensory organ.  Our nose is a delicate smelling tool and our tongue’s taste buds can send us over the moon from exquisite food delicacies.  Deeper within, we have senses that intuit and compute on a level beyond consciousness to bring our world alive in another way.

This is just what an astronomer does with a new telescope, a racing driver does with a new car, and a sailor does with a new yacht!  As a teenager, given new awareness of and freedom with this amazing situation called life and a fabulous body to explore it with, wouldn’t you want to find out how far you can take it?  How amazing an experience you could create?

Identify

#Empowerment for teens

Teens together
From www.digitaltrends.com

As babies, we experience life through our mothers, not as individuals until time has passed and we begin to exercise control over our body.  Mother is still close but we learn that we can safely venture away a little.  As years pass, we venture further, finally heading off to school, joining a class of children the same age, doing the same classroom exercises.

As teens, classroom shackles are lessened; we have freedom to explore.  Freedom to meet and form groups of our choosing, not classrooms chosen for us.  This is where friendships, group associations and identities begin to form.  This is where young people begin to search for others like them, who think and feel the way they do, who they feel safe expressing their fears and doubts and joys and delights with.  Mum and Dad are always giving us rules to follow; teachers have other rules; where can we be free, together?  This is where we see the gangs as well as special interest groups form.  Some play football, some are cheerleaders, some play chess, some hang out in the mall and pick on little kids for their pocket money.  Identities are formed, sometimes directly aligned with our survival sub-personalities from infancy.

Procreate

#Empowerment for teens

Teen romance
asp.cumc.columbia.edu

Possibly the next most powerful force after survival is procreation, the program for the species to reproduce and ensure its survival.  It is the nature of life to procreate.  Life will always find a way.

With human beings, this program is set to explode as the body reaches the stage when it is physically mature enough to reproduce – based on a situation that humans faced many thousands of years ago, when old age could be anything beyond teenage years!  In those days, with a very short life expectancy, reproduction had to begin as early as possible and happen often, because mortality was high and more children were needed to ensure there were enough who lived for survival of the tribe.

Now, the tribe would rather the teenagers waited until they were married before this process happens.  The program says otherwise; it screams it loudly and urgently to the teens and won’t take no for an answer!

Leave a legacy

#Empowerment for teens

Graffiti?
By erinsingleton.wordpress.com

Some of the most fascinating art ever done is cave art from thousands of years ago, notably the Painted Caves in France.  This is early man leaving a legacy.  So why are we surprised when kids tag trains and walls with spray cans of paint?  We venerate one form as art but vilify the other!  The reality is that it is a program, just as much as it was for Leonardo to paint the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo the Sistine Chapel, for Bill Gates to create Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and for so many of us to want to write a book.  It’s a legacy.

We are born with a burning question:  “Why are we here?”  How else will anyone ever know we were here?  Our legacy has some answers.

How does this relate to Empowerment for Teens?

Whilst this blog is not a teen operating manual, it gives insight into behavioural drives that motivate and provide empowerment for teens.  It’s handy for parents to understand, as well as for teens.  Teens want to understand themselves, because in their search for ways to survive, explore, experience, identify, procreate and leave a legacy, they want to understand other teens too.  Empowerment for teens through these inbuilt programs is a subconscious, impatient driver and motivator.  If teens were more conscious of it, and if education became better targeted in these areas, they could control it better and empowerment for teens could be managed, even harnessed!  Currently, motivators for teen behaviours are at best a mystery for many parents, as well as the teens!

How to provide empowerment for teens

#Empowerment for teens

Family fun outings
From www.telegraph.co.uk

The key to this is understanding the motivators and providing opportunities for them to occur naturally, without threatening the teenagers’ development.  When these ancient programs developed, two main skills required were to hunt and to fight.  Now, many are in school or university til mid twenties and neither of those skills are called upon.  We are programs screaming around in a body with nowhere to express ourselves!

With survival not really an issue, exploration, experiences and identity become the primary drivers for early teens.  Providing suitable safe opportunities for these enables curious teens to develop in ways that will enable them to have a safe and fun journey through their world, and take the pressure off for the next two programs to begin – that of procreation and leaving a legacy.  Education enables them to identify and form bonds with the groups most suitable for them.  Without the pressures of survival, they can take their time to decide to procreate when they have prepared for it.

Taking a giant leap forward to look at Maslow’s hierarchy, we can see that ‘self actualisation’ is at the top.  Effectively this is delaying the “leaving a legacy” until the other drives have been satisfied – suggesting that it is a more naturally occurring process after teen years, provided all other drives are satisfied.

The practical application of Empowerment for Teens 

#Empowerment for teens

Family discussion over dinner
fromdiploma2dreamjob.com

When working with and searching for real empowerment for teens, look at what stage they are at and what program is driving them.  When you know they want to explore and experience, don’t lock them in a bland room with homework.  Find a way to give them experiences that satisfy their drives, as well as provide an environment that brings their homework and education alive.  Enable them to meet and experience wider groups of people and cultures to enable them to choose the identities they relate to, but from a much wider range of options.  Don’t force choices from a narrow range of options or they will rebel in their need to explore and survive.

Educational experiences with cultures and expressions outside the norm of daily life will provide healthy empowerment for teens and an enthusiasm for more of what life has to offer.  When youth and enthusiasm meet, the other barnacles of life such as arguing with parents, chores and homework become insignificant issues that no longer represent limits to their freedom.  Rather, they see them as part of their freedom, opportunities and way of life.

This creates healthy relationships in which communication is usually much better.  Issues such as procreation – boyfriends and girlfriends, sex education, career and life directions can actually become interesting family discussions.  When family remain friends, identities are also more closely fostered and often less radically chosen.

However, remember that generalities are generally wrong.  Expect that teens will always surprise everyone, including themselves!

To assist with providing discipline that is not parental, but rather self guided and self consolidating success habits, a program of daily encouragement, teaching goalsetting, affirmations, rewarding achievement, journalling thoughts and feelings and raising awareness of emotions and the daily lessons of life is vital and incredibly powerful.  Such a program is Life Change 90.  Click HERE to begin your Personal Empowerment Program NOW!

If you feel this post has contributed to empowerment for teens, please share and reblog amongst your friends and associates.  So many are crying out for empowerment for teens, but don’t realise that it is within reach.  Your sharing may change the life of another – everyone deserves personal empowerment and this could be the day you make a difference!

Til next time, fair winds and full sails,

Ray Jamieson

Please also refer to my related posts on Empowerment:

Empowerment through Emotional intelligence

Financial Empowerment

Empowerment for Children

Empowerment

Empowerment for Men

Empowerment for Women

Personal Empowerment

What would an empowered man do?

 

Empowerment for Women

#Empowerment for women

Empowered!
Image from laracatone.com

 

Empowerment for Women

“There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” ~Anais Nin – See more at: http://livingempowered.areavoices.com/2010/10/top-25-empowerment-quotations-for-women/#sthash.xjr8fBtb.dpuf
“There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” ~Anais Nin – See more at: http://livingempowered.areavoices.com/2010/10/top-25-empowerment-quotations-for-women/#sthash.xjr8fBtb.dpuf
“There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” ~Anais Nin – See more at: http://livingempowered.areavoices.com/2010/10/top-25-empowerment-quotations-for-women/#sthash.xjr8fBtb.dpuf

“There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” ~Anais Nin

In a previous era, women had neither the right to vote, nor the right to complain.  Most women from before 200 years ago were treated like servants or objects.  The wealthy classes in western civilizations held their women in higher esteem but they still had significantly less voice than their male counterparts.  Even those who were loved, cherished and respected by their husbands were still second class citizens in the broader community, with neither voting power nor political influence.  Their goals had to be pursued through subtleties and relationship influence. There was no #empowerment for women.

#Empowerment for women

Empowerment?
Image from chersonandmolschky.com

In eastern civilisations and cultures, even today women still have limited rights, even where they have voting powers.  Many cultures and religions do not allow their women to have an education.  They insist on them being totally covered while in public.  They are strictly forbidden communication with other men and their movements within their communities is also restricted.  There is a huge rallying cry in the Middle East right now about whether or not women should legally be allowed the right to drive motor cars!

Empowerment for women throughout history.

If we look back thousands of years, Mother Earth was The Goddess and many societies were matriarchal.  Rather than the patriarchal societies which most of the world has now, women were at the head, especially in religious and community leadership.  The men were the hunters and muscle, while the women were the nurturers and spiritual and community leaders.  Some words in common use now attest to this, words such as Amazon – referring to a tribe of female warriors, Gaia, a Mother Earth deity worshipped by many, and the Gods of mythology, Athena, Aphrodite and more.  Women had great influence in Egyptian societies from time to time, ruling equally with their Pharaohs and even without them.  The Iroquois Confederacy or League created an American Indian ‘constitution’ called The Great Binding Law of Peace dating from about 1000 AD but unwritten until the late 1800s.  This enshrined women in governing roles of the society and is a powerful document to read and assimilate.  Ken Carey wrote about it in some chapters of “Return of the Bird Tribes”.

#Empowerment for women

Indian Artifact
www.webwinds.com

However, in Christian societies, the patriarchal model was adopted from the dark and middle ages and we now see the Pope as the head of the Catholic Church.  Women are not even allowed to be priests, despite their once traditional roles as Priestesses!  The great exception from this rule was established by the various Queens of England and consolidated by the current Queen Elizabeth, with a continual reign of over 60 years.

Empowerment for women in the modern era.

Back on the home front, in our modern day-to-day communities, women still face a “glass ceiling” in the workplace, lower wages for the same employment roles and a smaller proportion of women in management.  They are publicly lauded as having equality in everything and various anti-discrimination bodies are set up around the world and even within the organisation of the United Nations.  However, should a woman ‘make it to the top’, it is headline news because of the rarity of the event.  Many men still feel threatened by having to work for a woman boss!

#Empowerment for women

Burning a Bra
uncyclopedia.wikia.com

In the mad rush for equality and empowerment for women through the 1960s and beyond where ‘burning the bra’ became the standard for the liberationists.  Unfortunately, women created a rod for their own backs in many ways.  Rather than celebrating their differences, many tried to ignore them and claim total equality where in truth, women and men have differences in areas of strength and weakness.  Had the push for equality of status been along these lines, perhaps the male segment of the population may not have felt so threatened and either openly or covertly tried to crush the movement.  As it is, covert discrimination still exists.  It will exist for another couple of generations, regardless of the progress of any anti-discrimination laws.

In the home, we see a huge proportion of single parent families, many women who are divorced single parents, raising their children alone.  In many cases it is because they became personally empowered and escaped a toxic relationship.  Others are because of desertion by their husbands.  Fewer men are single parents and then it is often because of the loss of the mother through some tragedy, as in divorce court outcomes, more often than not custody has been given to the mother.

This suggests a societal situation that women are less empowered in general than men.  Certainly women have less outright power.  However, there is another way of looking at it.

If we consider a relationship where domestic violence is occurring, in most cases it is the woman who is the victim.  The male is the aggressor.  However, bullying behaviour, and that is what it is, mostly occurs because of a lack of empowerment of the bully.  If this bully was a self confident person, with high self esteem and a feeling of security within themselves and about their lives in general, there would be no inclination to be a bully, or to try to overpower or exert their will by force on another person, spouse, partner or otherwise.  Therefore, who is the person with a lack of empowerment?

Will empowerment for women change the issues of the glass ceiling and domestic violence?

#Empowerment for women

Glass ceiling
www.globaltoynews.com

On a very personal level, empowerment for women will provide women with a greater sense of self esteem and confidence in daily living.  That is vital.  It will provide the strength women need to break down the barriers of societies everywhere, in all cultures, religions and countries, at every level of communities, to really enjoy the benefits of equality of relationships and genuinely shared, happy lives.

Empowerment for women will still threaten some men.  That is an issue that will not go away any time soon. While ever patriarchal models are cemented in place, there will be opponents to the progress of women directly in community, national, corporate and global leadership.

How can personal empowerment for women be gained?

What can an ordinary woman, with little interest in politics or other leadership roles outside her family, what can she do to gain this empowerment for women?  It’s always the little things that matter.  Just as a house is made from thousands of bricks, so is empowerment, self confidence and self esteem.  It’s the little success habits that build the character of a person, male or female, to give them empowerment in all circumstances.

Empowerment for women does not mean they are to become all powerful and domineering.  Rather, it means that as an empowered person, they have the core strength of character to refuse to accept disempowering behaviour and attitudes from others!  A critical distinction.

Can empowerment for women be misunderstood?

If you find you have to force, cajole, bully or manipulate people to get things done, you do not have empowerment; you are a bully or manipulator.  If people flock to your leadership and are eager to assist you, then you have empowerment.  That should be your goal.

At times, some women will take it too far.  As a guy who was raised by a father who was chivalrous and respected and doted on his wife/my mother, I have at times opened doors for women without asking because it was the chivalrous thing to do.  I have been told rather rudely, to perform certain almost gymnastic feats on myself for my efforts.  I paid a compliment to a lady once on the incredible colours of her dress and the rebuke was “What the hell do YOU want?”  Those women were not empowered – rather, they were suffering the same insecurities that a bully character has and that is precisely what they need to evolve beyond.

Confidence is built on repeated experiences of success.  A program that delivers repeated experiences of success, through daily pats on the back, affirmations of your self worth, consolidation and recognition of your achievements and teaches goalsetting as a way of life, is a vital and necessary component of any intention to gain empowerment for women and men.  Finding your lesson from each day, acknowledging your successes of each day, gaining awareness of and control over your moods and emotions each day, breaking through the 0ld conditioning and patterns, learning to receive love as well as give it, these are critical to personal empowerment and are all built into the Life Change 90 program, designed especially for personal empowerment.  Begin your journey to becoming a more Empowered Woman here, NOW!

How will you know when you have ‘got’ empowerment for women?

I was once told by a woman that the absolute worst thing that can happen is to arrive at a function and find that another woman is wearing the same dress!  An empowered woman will not be concerned.  In fact, she will have the confidence and self assuredness to make everyone think the other lady was trying to copy her, but doing a terrible job!  That is empowerment!  That level of self confidence, that ability to walk into a room and know you created waves and not be concerned about it, that is empowerment for women.  It is way beyond how you look, what you wear or weigh.  Empowerment transcends.

#Empowerment for women

An Empowered Woman
winthem.blogspot.com

However, we are not trying to empower just one woman to be a figurehead.  Empowerment for women is a global phenomenon that most people wish for.  Referring back to the Empowerment Tone Scale in a previous post, you can see that the personal empowerment of EACH woman is a small step toward empowerment for ALL women and only in this way can empowerment for women be gained.

More empowerment to you!

If you feel this post has contributed to empowerment for women, please share and reblog amongst your friends and associates.  So many people are crying out for empowerment, yet don’t understand that it is within easy reach.  Perhaps your sharing will change the life of another – everyone deserves personal empowerment and this could be the day you make a difference!

Til next time, fair winds and full sails,

Ray Jamieson

“I do not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.” ~Mary Wollstonecraft

Please also refer to my related posts on Empowerment:

Empowerment through Emotional Intelligence

Empowered by Love

Financial Empowerment

Empowerment

Empowerment for Men

Empowerment for Teens

Empowerment for Children

Personal Empowerment

What would an empowered man do?

 

Empowerment for women

Image from edelomahony.com

Empowerment for Men

#Empowerment for men

Strength and gentleness
Image from epicanthic.blogspot.com

As we look ahead into the next century, our leaders will be those who empower others. — Bill Gates

Empowerment for Men

There is a subtle distinction between commanding respect and loyalty, and demanding it.  The actions and words may be exactly the same; the distinction lies in the heart of the one desiring it.

#Empowerment for men

King Richard the Lionheart
Image from www.themiddleages.net

Throughout history, great leaders have been loved and their legacy lives on down the ages, with fond memories of them and their deeds.  They commanded the respect and loyalty of troops, nations, families and congregations.

Throughout history also, dictators have commanded great armies and nations but are reviled and their memories and legacies are of hate and revulsion.  Idi Amin, Hitler and many more whose names you will know.  These dictators are not limited to presidents, they occur in families also and the hate and revulsion felt for them is the same except that at this level, it is very, very personal.

So what is the distinction?

Empowerment for men is about the place us guys come from when we face the world.

If we feel the need to bully to get what we want, what we are really saying is “I’m not feeling confident or secure so I need to take what I want from people less powerful or able to defend themselves than me”.  This feeling of insecurity is the root cause of most of the bullying and dictatorial behaviour on the planet.

What is the option?

#Empowerment for men

The Butcher of Africa – Idi AMin
Image from www.barnesandnoble.com

True #empowerment for men comes from a place of humility and service orientation, where we ask the world “How can I be of service?  How can I make this a better place?  What can I offer?”  Oddly enough, people rarely take advantage of a man who is strong and humble enough to ask these questions.  Instead, his open-mindedness and leadership is recognised.  People flock to him for his leadership, his strength and guidance.  Whether in a family, a congregation or a nation’s armies or parliament, leadership and strength combined with genuine humility is recognised, loved and admired.

When these two men pass, the dictator is reviled and the leader revered.  Empowerment for men is the distinction.  Guys, remember this – your legacy is already under construction.  People are already making judgements on how you will be remembered.  Think about it; if you don’t like the legacy they believe you will leave, it’s time to start over.

And yes, it can be done.  Empowerment for men is not an event.  Empowerment for men is a way of life, if it is to mean anything at all.

Empowerment for men is not an accident.  It is a state of being that is chosen as a way of life.  Sometimes the choices are unconscious, based purely on the conscience instilled in us by our upbringing – whether good or bad.

Many great leaders had miserable, poverty stricken and abusive childhoods, yet they rose to prominence despite, or was it because of their poor start?  When one is so low that there is nothing left to lose, many have thrown down the gauntlet and aimed for the top – knowing any progress at all is a step off the bottom rung of the ladder.  Look at the likes of Cardinal Jaime Sin of the Philippines, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the recently deceased Nelson Mandela of South Africa.  These men grew up through an era of incredible racial hatred and vilification in nations divided by race – between different warring tribes, by colour, between blacks, whites and other coloureds and cultures, and by wealth and poverty levels.  It is a melting pot from which you could not imagine any winners but these men shone through and created legacies that affected not only their own families and country, but the global communities as well!

#Empowerment for men

The Kennedy Brothers
Image from www.pbs.org

Some great leaders were born into the roles, such as the Kennedy brothers.  Wealth and power were their birthright.  However, it was the birthright of other men also who abused it and became monsters.  The Kennedy brothers created a legacy that has become mythical; they virtually created a royalty class in the republic of the USA.

How can the average guy, like you and me, gain empowerment for men?

It’s not hard, but it requires conscious effort if it is not already in evidence.  It requires us to be aware of these distinctions and consciously choose humility and service, it requires putting our leadership out there on offer, and it requires action to follow through.

Not all of this is going to come naturally, especially the part about it being a ‘state of mind’.  We need to stand guard at the gateways to our minds, to ensure that what we feed our minds is healthy.  We need to remind ourselves constantly, daily, that we are not here to harvest, but to plant the seeds that will become the harvest.  We do this by creating within ourselves the desire to become more, and better at being ourselves.

#Empowerment for men

Catch, Dad!
m.inmagine.com

For a father, be a better, more considerate parent, who takes time to parent his children.  This can be as simple as reading bedtime stories to your babies and toddlers, changing their diapers when they need it, cuddling them and kissing them goodnight.  As they grow, it means teaching them to play ball in the park – not because you want them to be a champion ball player, but because it’s fun for them and it teaches them to run and enjoy life and grow fit and healthy.  It gives them hand/eye coordination and a sense of achievement when they catch the ball.  When they get to school, attend the school plays, the sporting events, the parent and teacher meetings, show an interest so that when they enter their challenging teen years, you are already an important part of their life to them, and you don’t have to fight to get your message heard.  You already have their trust and love and now when they need you, they will trust you enough to come to you for guidance and help – not just cash!

For a husband, be thoughtful and considerate.  Study what it takes to be a better partner, lover, friend and

#Empowerment for men

Date night!
Image from blamebilly.com

confidante.  Earn the trust of your wife, encourage her to feel a sense of achievement in her life and be proud of her, the amazing woman who was incredible enough at some time in your life, to win your heart and accept you with all your faults.  Share the workload with her.  That doesn’t mean offering to wash the dishes and breaking them all and creating more work!  No, contribute what you do best, whatever that is, to take the load from her.  That will definitely mean diapers, taxi driving kids to sports events and sharing the discipline roles.  And be a great lover – one who takes her on date nights, surprises her with flowers and gifts, and sometimes leaves a lovely card around for her to find and show her you really do think lovely thoughts of her all through the day.

As a community member, stand up and be counted when it counts.  Wallflowers get nothing and give nothing, community leaders are in the middle and up the front, looking first to the betterment of conditions for their family, through making their community better.

Elected leaders take an oath of office, but less live it than take it.  However, genuine leaders are already living way beyond any oath that could be taken.  The oath that is sworn is the minimum expectation of the elected official – the true leader is always going the extra mile!

How will you know if you have gained this elusive ‘empowerment for men’?

You will look around you and see the evidence.  Success leaves clues, but so does failures.  Look at the faces and in the hearts of the people around you and you will know if empowerment for men has been your way.  Your people will admire, respect, love and follow you to hell and back.  It is either empowerment for men and everyone around you, or you became a dictator and have a group of “yes men” or servants – you can’t have it both ways.  The evidence will be there.  If you can’t find the evidence, just check to see if you are a wallflower, still waiting to make your contribution to the world.

On a personal level, how can you gain empowerment for men?

Empowerment for men and in fact, anyone, is best done through a structured program that puts you on a course that teaches you the self-discipline and self development necessary to change your life.  No, it’s not hard – just constant, and being human, we can forget.  We can slip up and before you know it, a month has gone by and you realise you haven’t set or checked off a goal, made an affirmation, or acknowledged a lesson from a day passing.  A simple program, a few minutes morning and evening is all it takes to reshape your thinking and feelings to empower you to make new, better and conscious decisions about your life and the people you care about.  That program could be Life Change 90.

I wrote about this recently in a post called EMPOWERMENT and it’s worth a revisit, to review the EMPOWERMENT TONE SCALE.

As you work on your daily self development program, you will see that you are continually moving your emotional and mental state up to empowerment, from where you can change your world and the world and lives of those around you. 

Worth considering.  Empowerment for men, and any guy who wants to become one!  Start your journey to becoming a more Empowered Man here, NOW!

If you feel this blog has provided empowerment for men, women and their families, please reblog it and share it with other men and families around you.  The world needs empowerment for men to lead it out of the morass of apathy, violence and destruction we seem to be plagued with.  Only empowered people will have the strength of leadership necessary to take us forward.  Perhaps you will be the one who puts this in front of such a person and makes the difference.

Til next time, fair winds and full sails,

Ray Jamieson

“The power to change your life lies in the simplest of steps.”
― Steve Maraboli

Please also refer to my related links on Empowerment:

Empowerment through Emotional Intelligence

Empowered by Love

Financial Empowerment

Empowerment

Empowerment for Women

Empowerment for Teens

Empowerment for Children

Personal Empowerment

What would an empowered man do?

Empowerment

Empowerment

“If there was one wish I had for you, one gift I could give you, it would be empowerment.  People without empowerment act from a survival basis and must do whatever they can or need to do, just to survive.  Empowered people act from their sense of what is right and wrong, their conscience guides them.  Empowered people don’t get up in the morning wondering what they can do wrong or to hurt others; they look for ways to make the world better.  I wish for you #empowerment.”

Excerpt from Executive Mastermind Program 2001

#Empowerment

Break free to Empowerment
Image from theindianuprising.blogspot.com

The daily news shows graphic images of people living in fear, striving for survival, hungry for love, affection, even just acknowledgement.  These are people who are not empowered.

Less often we see images of people walking purposefully, striding out, or relaxed with their families, feeling confident, happy, secure.  There are two reasons for that:  Firstly, it’s not graphic news and it doesn’t sell newspapers or TV airspace time, but secondly and sadly, there are fewer people living a life of empowerment.

If empowerment was a choice, why don’t people take it?

There are probably three main reasons.

  1. Power-hungry bullies, including governments, corporations and others in positions of power and authority find it easier to govern or rule people who fear them and don’t know that they can choose a better life.
  2. Ignorance.  They have been conditioned to living in fear or survival mode for so long, it’s not part of their reality and they neither know nor understand it, nor do they believe there is anything in life for them other than what they have.
  3. Challenging life situations, where people have been born into or acquired a challenging situation such as poverty, chronic illness or accident causing a massive life and/or health change or other similar circumstances.

Let’s look at these reasons, and their contradictions.

#Empowerment

Under pressure from big brother!
from gscblog.typepad.com

Power Hungry Bullies oppressing people over whom they have a measure of control.  It is far easier to herd sheep from horseback than say, a pride of lions.  Why is that?  Because the lion is not afraid of a man on horseback!  If you are in the ‘herding people’ business, it pays you to have them frightened of you!  It’s that simple.

The ‘people herders’ are governments, large corporations (think Monsanto, Halliburton, General Dynamics, etc.), employers where there are dictatorial bosses, and even within families, a spouse might dominate their partner.  These bullies think they need to exert massive and overwhelming power to get what they want.  However, in most cases, they are coming from a level of fear and insecurity also, where their fear is that if their “subjects” become empowered, they will rise up and overthrow them!

The contradiction is that empowered people don’t really need to overthrow anyone else.  They feel confident and secure within themselves and are already in control of their lives.

#Empowerment

MONOPOLY ON FOOD SEEDS
Image from worldtruth.tv

Ignorance and conditioning.  These are the people held down by their conditioning and the bullies they ‘live under’.  Conditioning is one thing – education and positive experiences can, in time, overcome conditioning and in the right circumstances, enable empowerment.  Getting out from under a genuine bully is another – their fear of losing control can be extreme and their actions to retain control can be extreme also.

Awareness is the first step for those living under oppression.  Only once the awareness is there, the long trek out can begin.

Challenging life situations.  Let’s break these down into poverty and poor birthright, and accident and illness causing an acquired chronic situation.

Poverty in a developed country may be an income of $200 per week.  It may be as high as $500 per week, depending on the location and circumstances.  However, in some developing countries, $200 per year is a fortune, it is fabulous wealth!  Poverty is relative to the location and circumstances, but just as real in any circumstances.  Where there is education, there is a way forward.  Where there is no education, intervention is often necessary.

#Empowerment

Poverty from birthright, caste and cultural status
Image from secularpakistan.wordpress.com

Poor birthright can mean a person born into a caste, race or class situation where they are deemed to have no rights.  Many developing nations have this problem.  The crazy thing is that when a person of poor caste migrates or is relocated to another country, often this condition vanishes because that caste or class distinction is not recognised outside their own culture.  Education can be the starting point for this transition.

Chronic illness and acquired injuries forcing changed life circumstances.  An insect bite can change your life.  A momentary lapse of concentration while driving can do it too.  A sporting injury can take a person from Olympic glory to total dependency on a full-time nurse.  Life can change without warning.  There is no easy way back from this and lives can change forever.

However, empowerment does not rely on wealth, power or influence.  Empowerment is firstly, a state of mind, preceding the physical changes that can occur because of it.

#Empowerment

Nelson Mandela
www.thetruthseeker.co.uk

Look at Nelson Mandela’s example:  Imprisoned by a brutal regime for 27 years, he emerged as a man ready to be president of a nation emerging from possibly the darkest period in its history.  When he passed away recently, he was revered as a leader, an example of a man who empowered and united a nation by his example.  How could that happen?

The Empowerment Tone Scale

#Empowerment

Empowerment Emotional Tone Scale

In the EMPOWERMENT TONE SCALE image, the TONE SCALE is shown on the left of the image, with the emotions listed in ascending order beside the scores.  Empowerment is shown as an emotional state, a state of mind on the image, at the top end of the scale.

The broad blue vertical arrow shows the emotional range in which most people live.  You can verify this by walking on any street and noting how many people are smiling from the inside, happy and carefree, and how many are walking with heavy hearts and steps.

The challenge of empowerment becomes one of understanding how to raise the emotional state of a person from their state of concern to where they take an interest in the world around them, and are no longer concerned with fear or survival.  There is a simple, standard starting point.

Ask the question of yourself:  HOW CAN I….?

What this simple question does is propel your mind from wherever on the tone scale it is, up into the region of creativity, as your mind automatically tries to answer the question.  Eventually, your mind starts to live up in that area of the tone scale, as you repeatedly bounce it from down where you asked the question, to where you want it to be.

However, note that between wherever you are on the tone scale, and where you want to be, you need to traverse, and experience all the other emotions on your journey to empowerment.  If you have been living in a state of ‘covert hostility’ for example, you will need to pass through and manage anger and pain and the other emotions on your way up.

At first, it will frustrate you and anger you, but perhaps that is just part of the journey.  Along the way you will experience many emotions and soon understand that you travel up and down this emotional tone scale many times daily.  However, you will soon find that by understanding it, being conscious of it and working with it, you will learn to live in the conscious, empowered part of it.

How can you train yourself and your mind for Empowerment?

#Empowerment

A little intervention to get started!
Image from weheartit.com

Empowerment must be from within you, but intervention and education is usually needed to spark the fires of creativity and imagination alight.  Once the inspiration for and understanding of the principles of empowerment are held, it’s up to each person then to continue the empowerment journey.  A supportive environment is preferable and will speed the process.  If that is not where you live, then you need to create that through the empowerment process you use.

The most effective way is to take on a program that sets out an empowerment routine for you each day.  A routine that sees you establish small, achievable goals daily, for you to congratulate yourself on their achievement each evening.  A program that gives you an affirmation each morning to carry you through.  A program that teaches you awareness and an understanding of what really goes on in your life, your heart, mind and soul as you make your way through your day.

This all happens, regardless of whether you are aware of it.  Being aware just means you can control it and create in your life those dreams and goals and experiences you want.

It’s worth empowering yourself to do it.

In coming blogs, I will be discussing more on empowerment, on topics such as:

Empowerment for Women

Empowerment for Men

Empowerment for children and teens

We will refer back to this post also, because this is the foundation of empowerment, the fundamentals on which true empowerment is based and built.  Until and unless the process of empowerment described above occurs, nothing else can change!

Begin your journey to Empowerment in your own Personal Empowerment Program; Click HERE, NOW!

If you feel this blog has empowered you, please feel free to share and reblog this information to your friends, family and other people in your network.  Every person on the planet desires empowerment and every one of us deserves the opportunity for it.  Please help.

Til next time, fair winds and full sails,

Ray Jamieson

“Don’t confuse poor decision-making with destiny. Own your mistakes. It’s ok; we all make them. Learn from them so they can empower you!”
― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

Please also refer to my related posts on Empowerment:

Empowerment through Emotional Intelligence

Empowered by Love

Financial Empowerment

Empowerment for Men

Empowerment for Women

Empowerment for Teens

Empowerment for Children

Personal Empowerment

What would an empowered man do?

Next Year

NEXT YEAR

#Next Year

Image from www.wunderground.com
A new beginning

“Although no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.” ― Carl Bard

How was your last year?

For most people, about this time of the year, thinking about last year is pretty much the focal point of their inner reflections.

What will make next year different?

Only 2 things can or ever will make a difference in your life, its outcomes and your achievements from year to year:

#Next Year

Image From www.goodreads.com

  1. The things you read, study and take into your heart and mind
  2. The people you meet and allow to have an effect on you

(Paraphrased from Charlie Tremendous Jones)

What Charlie meant was that unless we do something different, such as allow ourselves to learn something new so we can do something new, only then can something different happen to us!  If you are riding on rails like a tram, the destination is already pre-arranged!  #Next year will be the same!

What can you do to ensure that positive change happens next year?

I have two recommendations only; two blog posts for you to read at these links, and then to act upon:

  1. Self development – why bother?
  2. Why systemize personal development?

Why bother with Self Development for Next Year?

If you didn’t like what last year brought, it’s time to make some changes.  For things to change outside, first they need to change INSIDE!  To HAVE something different, we need to BECOME something different!

Why systemize Self Development for Next Year?

Systems work!  You think you are a free spirit, but you are totally systemized in everything that works perfectly.

You eat something, it goes into your digestive system.

You think, choose to move a muscle, and it works through your nervous system.

You book a flight or a hotel room, it goes into the reservations system.

You post a letter, it goes into the postal system… Hey, not EVERY system is perfect every time, but you get the idea – systems work, because they deliver a result, pretty much every time.  If you realise you need some personal development, when you systemize it, you’ll find it works better too.  That can eliminate the ‘losing track’ or ‘forgetting to do it’ problems most people find when working on their personal development.

#Next Year

Take Action NOW!
Image from www.modularhomecoach.com

Once you have read these two blogs, don’t just sit there – take action!  Plug into a ready-made system that is waiting to help you make the changes you want in your life.  Dial them in and turn up in your life each day – the system will take care of it from there. CLICK HERE NOW TO BEGIN!

It needn’t be hard work.  After all, you were going to wake up and have a day each morning, weren’t you?  This will just make it flow better and give you something to be pleased with at the end of each day, and put a spring in your step at the start of each day.

My wish is that you DO have a much better next year.  This is how you can do it!

If you feel this has been valuable to you, please share or reblog it for others to enjoy and gain from also.  Everyone deserves the chance to make their next year better than their last!

Til next time, fair winds and full sails!

Ray Jamieson

“Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” – Henry Ford
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