"The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don’t know why or how."

~ Albert Einstein

 

The still small voice within, inner feeling, gut feeling... is a voice beyond our rational mind, a voice of our deeper wisdom, an inner compass telling us which way to go when we're not completely sure. In order to hear it, we need to be in touch with ourselves, our emotions, our desires, our true self. We need to be present in our body too, because intuition doesn't work when we're cut off from our body and living only in our head.

 

"People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall."

~ Thomas Merton

 

Many people experience a midlife crisis because even though they've had certain accomplishments in life – perhaps they've raised a family and achieved a level of material and career success – they still don't feel happy, as if something were missing from their lives. They start asking themselves about a deeper meaning of life, and what it is that would make them happy and fulfilled.

 

We all want to be successful, but we often follow someone else's idea of success. For example, your parents might expect you to become a lawyer and join your father's lawyer's office. All you need to do is graduate from college, and a well-paid job is already waiting for you. You don't want to disappoint your parents and be ungrateful for such a great opportunity, so you play along and try to adjust. But something is always missing, and a few years down the road you end up feeling miserable and are seeking a way out.

There are people who have a very clear vision of what they want in their life, and who they take the necessary steps to create it, while for others it can take years and even decades until they finally realize what it is they want. In order to take charge of your life, you need to get clear about what is important to you, what areas of life are your priority (e.g. career, romantic relationship, family, friends, health, finances...), what values are important for you in your relationships, what values are important at your work place, etc.

 

"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

~ Viktor E. Frankl

 

We sometimes react with too strong or inappropriate emotions, losing our temper over small things. For example, we might get upset in business meetings, and are later embarassed for not being able to keep our cool. Or we often get snappy with our family members, specially after a hard day at work.

If you're shy, you know how hard it is to ask anything for yourself. I remember many years ago when traveling on a train, it was very hot in the compartment, but I didn't dare to turn the heating nob down, nor ask the other passengers if I may do so. I'd rather suffered than made a simple step to help myself.

"Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously".
~ Prentis Hemphill

 

One sign that we value and respect ourselves is healthy boundaries. For example, we don't allow a family member to speak rudely and throw insults at us, or we don't allow an overspending friend to constantly borrow money from us. We protect our personal space, our time and energy, so that we don't feel taken advantage of.

It’s so easy to beat ourselves up if things don’t work out the way we’ve planned, or if we make a mistake. But guess what – we’re human, we’re allowed to make mistakes. That’s how we learn and grow. Albert Einstein said „A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new”.

 

Many of us believe we aren’t good enough („I am not pretty enough, smart enough, witty enough, successful enough...”). And because we feel we aren’t enough the way we are, we try to become perfect, so that we’d finally feel worthy of love and recognition. We might want to have a perfect body, or follow a perfect diet (or, follow a diet perfectly!), or try to be perfect at our job, or be a perfect parent, spouse, child, friend.... However, we all know how that ends – we regularly fall short of living up to the self-imposed standard, and end up judging and blaming ourselves even more.

 

We often operate under deeply ingrained beliefs that we're unaware of. Such as, "Life is a struggle", "You can't have what you want", "It's not going to work anyway", "Who do you think you are?". Those beliefs stem from our family and the environment we grew up. They keep us in the victim mentality, sometimes making us give up before we've even tried.

 

 

If we want to develop personal power, we need to get to know ourselves better, know our strengths and weaknesses, our triggers, limiting beliefs and unhealthy emotional reactions. But the trick is that while analyzing ourselves, we don't start judging ourselves. We need to be able to simply observe ourselves – both our good and bad traits – without criticism and judgment.

 

The word "confidence" comes from the Latin fidere, "to trust." To be self-confident means to trust in yourself and your ability to accomplish the goals you've set for yourself, solve problems, deal with challenges, and be an agent of change – not a helpless observer – in your own life.

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