Transcript
Hello everybody Gail Kraft here from the Empowering Process Podcast. I’m so glad that you’re here with me today because today we’re going to talk about personal power and you know that purpose, power, and presence is what this podcast is all about. So of course, it’s appropriate that maybe we should be talking about these things.
So today is about personal power.
There are a variety of different types of power. There’s positional power, you know, and we’re not going to get into the psychological clinical terminology of power.
We’re going to talk about you.
We’re talking about what power means to you.
What does power mean in this podcast series, right?
And it’s power, not force.
And yes, there’s a book Power Versus Force, one of my favorite books I like and go to it frequently.
It is about having this sense of knowledge, this knowingness of who you are, that brings an air of certainty and strength to your decisions and to your presence and to your purpose.
So, it’s very important that you take the steps to understand who you are, warts and all.
None of us are perfect. We all have our little idiosyncrasies.
As I say that, we all have these personality traits that makes us who we are, makes us so different than the person next to us, but we also all have this power within us and we’ve either embraced it or suppressed it, or for most of us, a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.
So, we’ve embraced it, but maybe not fully so.
We’re going to talk about some of the things that you can do to get into a better sense of who you are and accepting it.
The first thing is to first of all, acknowledge your ambitions.
And say them out loud.
“I want to I see myself.”
Declare it to the world, because if you don’t do that first, you’ve already started suppressing. You’ve already started this feeling of unworthiness, because “I don’t deserve that.”” How dare I dream that big?”
How dare you not dream that big this year?
My word that I’m living by this year is unapologetic.
See, unapologetically declaring that my intention is to travel.
My intention is to be in front of you wherever you are.
To bring a message that maybe will resonate with you or someone you know.
To bring enlightenment.
To show that anything is possible, if you truly believe you deserve it, not believe that you can make it or believe that it can happen but believe that you deserve it and be unapologetic for it to declare it.
“This is who I am.”
Yes!
“This is what I’m doing.”
And that’s just a fact and there will be naysayers, and there will be people who will try to convince you otherwise, and there will be people watching waiting for you to fail, and that’s OK.
You’re not going to apologize; you’re just going to do it.
So, first of all, declare it and then start focusing on your life.
Are you living a healthy life?
And when I say healthy, I’m not just talking about the food that you eat, and you don’t have to become a vegetarian.
You don’t have to.
Do whatever works for your body.
Definitely eat in a way that is congruent to you but eat in a healthy way.
Exercise in a healthy way.
Get some fresh air in a healthy way.
Treat others in a healthy way.
Treat yourself in a healthy way.
Have healthy relationships with you and others.
Have healthy relationships with food.
Have healthy relationships with money.
Have healthy relationships in your career.
Everything outside of you is a relationship, a fact.
Everything withinside of you is a relationship.
How congruent and healthy is it?
And then focus right.
There are ways to practice focusing. Of course, one of them is meditation. If you can focus for 10 to 15 minutes on a sound on a word on a vibration on your breath on a scene on a feeling. then you’re learning to focus.
Nut there’s this other training on learning how to focus, which is a physical focus, which also opens up your mental focus and I’m going to tell you how to do it right now.
Pick a spot on the wall. A little teeny-weeny spot on the wall and you stand there, and you take a look at that spot and just focus on that spot.
That’s right, focus on that spot.
That’s right, and I’ll keep focusing on that spot and as you focus on that spot, be aware that there’s something going on in your peripheral vision.
Focus on that spot, but you have to focus on the spot and the peripheral vision.
Open it up a little wider.
Notice what you’re aware of, but still focus on that spot.
Peripheral Vision is a little wider now, but you can still see it and focus on that spot.
And a little bit wider and you could see it and focus on that spot.
And keep doing that every day again for 10 or 15 minutes and what this will do with your focus is get you physically focused and, believe it or not, mental focus is expanded.
Is that weird?
It works.
Try it.
Focus.
Self-development is also another tool for personal power. I have been working on myself since I was 21. Yes, I slowed down. There were times when my focus was working, raising a family, living in suburbia, whatever, that was my focus at the time, and then I came back to focusing on me again.
To meditation, lots of self-development. Then I took a break, a hiatus and came right back to it.
That’s where I belong and there’s not a year that has gone by in in over a decade and actually longer than that, but definitely focused on self-development.
Because there’s always something more for me to learn. There’s always a different perspective to what I think is true. I can go and take a class and take some training and work with someone and find out that their perspective is true to them.
And if I can look at life from their point of view, I get a broader perspective as to what’s going on in this world. I get more tools and more capabilities to make different, more impactful decisions.
Because I have broadened my scope of who I am.
That’s a personal power.
The broader I scope.
The more sure I am of who I am.
And there’s strength and power and self-development.
And then there is this word called responsibility, and there’s two sides to that coin I want to talk a little bit about accepting responsibility and responsability.
Accepting responsibility, I really call that accountability. When, if you do it, own up to it. You made a mistake, that’s fine, own up to it and what are you going to do to make it better?
I, Fortunately, in my business career, for the majority of the time that I was in corporate America, that’s what I heard, “Gail, you messed up. What are you going to do to make it better?”
Yep, you’re right I messed up. I realize it and here’s what I’m going to do to fix this and prevent that in the future.
So, fix it.
Future actions now are going to be different.
That means there’s a lesson, so there’s nothing wrong with a lesson.
Lessons are awesome, but that’s taking accountability.
If you don’t take accountability, you will repeat and repeat and repeat and you’ll be harming others as they are trying to pick up the mess that you left behind.
Now there’s responsibility and I look at that as your “ability to respond” to a certain situation, right?
And we talk often about not making decisions from a bad state.
Anger, sadness, fear, shame, guilt.
Not a good place to be making a decision.
How able are you to respond in an appropriate way when you are in those emotional states?
Not.
So, you need to have the ability through personal development, self-development, to recognize the state that you’re in and take the tools you’ve learned to get out of that state in the very quickest way.
Tony Robbins will attest to this.
The quickest way to change a state, an emotional state, is to change your Physiology.
It’s the quickest way, and so if you stand with your feet apart, shoulders length apart, put your shoulders back, head up not downright.
Not even a little bit, but up.
Breathe in and breathe out.
You can’t cry.
You can’t be sad.
You actually can’t be angry if your head is up, shoulders back and you’re breathing in.
And you calming: deep, deep deep perhaps, and calming your body down.
Once you calm down, then you’re in a position where you’re able to respond.
Probably in a much better way, making conscious choices rather than reactive choices, this is personal power guys.
And one of the most confusing for some folks is forgiveness, the ability to forgive.
Forgiveness is not condoning.
Forgiveness sets yourself free.
Forgive yourself from being in a situation that may not have been healthy for you.
Forgive the other person for not having all their wires together, right?
Their wires may be crossed to have done some physical or emotional harm to you. Maybe both.
I understand, they’re who they are, and you’re not going to change them. But you can forgive the situation to let yourself get rid of that guilt that you’re carrying for thinking you’re responsible for any of this.
Love yourself and move on.
Forgiving doesn’t mean you have to accept that something did not happen.
It’s not sweeping it under the rug.
Look!
It’s looking at it, having a conversation with that person about what were you thinking, why were you even thinking, and why did you think this was OK?
It wasn’t OK, but I forgive you for you being so messed up at the time to have condoned this.
And I forgive anyone that supported it.
Anyone that turned a blind eye to it.
And then move on.
Just a few steps guys to talk about what it is did to you.
Could you step into this to personal power? Because personal power is just knowing who you are and the knowing. Those of us who have come to a certain level of this personal power, understand when I say you can’t put a word to this experience, because it just is.
And there’s a peace to it.
There’s a quietness to it, and there’s a strength and power in that quietness.
So personal power is not loud.
It doesn’t scream, and yet it does.
It is strong.
It is steady.
It is purposeful.
It is in the present.
And your personal power is the biggest gift that you can give yourself in this lifetime.
I certainly hope this has helped some of you. Maybe you’ve gotten a couple of tools, a couple of things that you can practice doing to become more engaged with who you are and step more into the power that is yours. And I want to thank you for your time.
If you enjoyed this, please comment, and share it out if you know someone who might also enjoy it. And if something came up for you during this conversation, please let me know. I’d be happy to discuss whatever came up in another podcast. In the meantime, here’s to your life your purpose your power, your presence, and the Empowering Process.
Gail Kraft saying goodbye.
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