Feeling empowered to do something is a good feeling. You feel like you are in power over your live. You feel like you have the power to create and move and change where you see things that must be created, moved or changed. You feel invincible, almost. You know where you're going and you know how you're going to get there. You know what you need to succeed and you know that even if you fail you will keep trying until you do succeed. Your thoughts are solution oriented, looking at ways to move forward and through any obstacles. You see problems as challenges, you recognise that you have the ability to overcome them. You persevere. You know that even if there is no solution available at this moment, you will continue developing yourself and doing whatever you are able to until something changes and you can move forward in solving the problem. You are realistic about yourself and about your environment. You will recognise when you need to consider a different direction. Feeling dis-empowered, or powerless, is a completely different experience. Where you feel strong and confident within empowerment you feel weak and fearful within powerlessness. The experience of powerlessness brings with it a dark and ominous outlook, a feeling that you will never be able to do or be what you want. You feel like you have no ability to effect change in your life, let alone the world. You feel like you have no direction, because you don't know how to get to what you want. You feel insecure. You lash out at the people around you out of frustration. You feel anxious. You experience something akin to despair. You feel lost. You might even feel like you have lost yourself, or like you are just drifting through life. Your thoughts are self defeating, focused on all the problems or possible problems, in a way justifying to yourself why you are powerless. It is almost like a self fulfilling prophecy, you keep yourself in the experience and in that frame of mind. Your focus on all the problems is such that you may not even recognise if a solution was given to you in your hands. You give up when you see no way out. You are likely to not look very hard for a way out. You will accept defeat easily. You are not likely to consider alternate paths. You will tend to wallow in a depressive state.
The current design of the human includes the tendency of people to be "followers" instead of "leaders". This means that people kind of like being told what to do because they feel a little lost without that. Self determination is not really part of our programming. So when you find yourself in a position where you are not empowered, your tendency is likely to be that you will simply stay there out of a form of petrification - an inability to move - borne from the fact that you simply do not know how to move yourself (how to give yourself direction). You would rather sit and wait for someone to come along and rescue you - someone who will give you the purpose that you do not know how to give to yourself.
Redesigning yourself to take the initiative and be solution oriented is a process of changing your thought patterns, changing your responses and approaches to yourself and to situations you are in from being focused on all the problems and reasons 'why not' to being focused on developing solutions (even when those solutions are difficult). Power is not something that is "given" to you by others, it is something that you must create and develop within yourself. You need to be able to objectively assess your skills and abilities so that you can place yourself (or develop yourself) in a space where you can be effective at whatever you are doing. The rest is about slowly but surely changing your thoughts, not participating in or allowing self-defeating thoughts and deliberately moving yourself to shift your focus to being objective, practical and solution oriented.
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