Taking Back the Power
SUMMARY
Have you started yet another year doubting yourself — lacking confidence in your abilities? Perhaps you're still trying to seek the approval of others in everything that you do.
Well, stick with me because this week, I want to help you build a foundational competency to remove all that stuff from your life for good.
Personal Power is the ability to know that you've got everything within you and around you to get ahead in life. It's about being teachable and humble but realising you're on a journey.
It's about having confidence in your own ability to move forward and shift the needle towards where you want to go.
It's not about being perfect, and it's certainly not about taking power from others. It's about a power that comes from within to allow you to be who it is that you are created to be.
TRANSCRIPT
Have you started yet another year doubting yourself — lacking confidence in your abilities? Perhaps you're still trying to seek the approval of others in everything that you do.
Well, stick with me because this week, I want to help you build a foundational competency to remove all that stuff from your life for good.
Hi, this is Grant Herbert, VUCA Leadership and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today I want to continue our conversation by helping you take back the power.
For most of my life, I cared far too much about what others thought of me. I was fighting against those 3 universal fears of not being good enough for people, not belonging and being a part of what I was involved in, and not being loved. This fear stops you from being who it is that you really could be.
Seeking approval from others was going to validate me. This is all about our identity and talks about not what you do but who you believe you are.
I was depleted of any personal power by my thoughts, the meanings I placed on past events, and what that meant about me.
On the exterior, I looked so confident. If you asked anyone else, they would say: “You can do anything, Grant. You can speak to anyone.” Other than that, my “results” from my technical roles within my employment were really good.
What was going on was like a swan gliding across the top of the water. It looked like everything was under control on to, however, underneath the water, the legs were flapping around to get that propulsion.
You may feel a little bit like that and put on this brave face (this front) that says: “Oh, I'm okay. I've got everything together.”
However, inside, you’re having this internal conflict and feeling less than you're feeling all the time. Some people call it the “imposter syndrome”, where you feel you're not worthy of the role that you're in, and surely someone's going to find out soon and catch me out on this lie that I'm living.
Well, this is all created by a lack of personal power.
Personal Power is the ability to know that you've got everything within you and around you to get ahead in life. It's about being teachable and humble but realising you're on a journey.
It's about having confidence in your own ability to move forward and shift the needle towards where you want to go.
It's not about being perfect, and it's certainly not about taking power from others. It's about a power that comes from within to allow you to be who it is that you are created to be.
Imagine what your life would look like if you got up every morning and you were grateful for who you were. Imagine what you could do if you shifted some of this thinking around who you believe you are and who you believe you're not and started every day ahead of that curve.
To do that, it's about focusing firstly on your inner dialogue.
It's about retraining that mini-me, as I call it, that inner voice that holds you back and reminds you of what you can't do, what you haven't done, the mistakes that you've made, and every time that you've failed, rather than keeping an open mind and reminding you of the times when you could, and you did, and inspiring you to take a chance and do it again.
It's about removing from your thoughts what other people think of you as being what validates you.
I'm not talking about being arrogant here and not caring about anyone else. I'm talking about confidently knowing that you are still on a journey and you're still growing and learning, validating yourself and not taking the external to tell you who you are.
Your identity is your responsibility. It's not something to outsource to anyone else.
The performance trap is where you perform on a daily basis to get approval from other people. And you don't always get it. IF you get it, it builds up your identity — how you feel about yourself — but if you don't get it, it erodes it even further.
One of the key things to do here, when you take responsibility for that identity, is to build that up, to work on the things that I'm going to keep continuing to take you through, to get yourself a coach, and to get to the root cause of those challenges.
It's not what happens in life; it's what you made it mean. And what you made it mean about you is making that roadblock that's stopping you from going from where you are now to where you want to go.
Isn't it time to finally get rid of that — to take it down, to reshape those beliefs and those thoughts, to shift the dialogue and to behave out of that new and empowering language and confidence?
The first thing you need to do is get to a position of self-approval. It's no use expecting to get from other people what you're not even giving yourself. Getting to that point where you approve of yourself means that now, instead of performing to get that approval, you're performing out of a far more powerful position, which is approving of yourself. When you do that, the motive for which you do things will shift.
Instead of doing things to avoid being rejected and to get other people's approval and all those things, you'll be doing it for something that's even more resourceful and powerful. Instead of disempowering you with your thoughts, it'll empower you with your results.
Is it time for you to start developing more Personal Power?
Personal Power is (in my experience) the underpinning competency of all the other competencies that we deal with in Emotional Intelligence. It's the one that has an effect on every other because no matter how many skills you have, if you are utilising those skills out of a low self-identity and low self-worth, you're not going to behave in the way that those strategies need you to behave.
Why do I know so much about this? Well, there are two reasons.
One, I've lived it, I’ve broken through it, and I still, on a daily basis, check myself when I'm allowing thoughts that are not empowering to go in.
However, the other reason that I know is I have worked with thousands of people around the world over the last 15 years, and this lack of Personal Power (self-worth and self-identity) is so common that even with the most confident people, where you look at them and think that they’ve got everything together, don’t have it.
By the way, it's okay that you don't have it all together, either.
So, what are you going to do this year differently so that the results that you have at the end of this year are different from those that you have at the end of the years that have gone by?
Build your identity.
You are worthy.
You are lovable.
You do belong.
You are enough.
Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week as we continue this conversation and help you regain your true purpose in life.
I'll see you then.
