by Nancy Jonker
As you go through these strategies and record your reflections, your workbook or journal will transform into your personal roadmap to a more powerful and satisfying life.
Young women in their teens, twenties, and thirties, as well as women in their forties, fifties and sixties have used these time-tested strategies to think on their feet, improve their relationships by speaking up and holding their own, and increase their credibility and impact in the workplace.
Kathryn’s Story—From “Wanna Be” to Be
Kathryn, a twenty-six-year-old radiology technician, approached me because she wanted to empower herself both at work and at home. She knew what she wanted but needed guidance on how to achieve it.
After working with me using the same practices I share in this book, Kathryn now reports, “I no longer have panic attacks or anxiety I can’t control. I’m functioning better at work, I’m less overwhelmed and more organized. These tools help me in my relationship with my husband and my mom, staying clear about what are my issues and what are theirs.”
With targeted assistance, Kathryn was able to move from a “wanna be” phase to a place of actual achievement. It’s sometimes tempting to stay in the “wanna be” phase—“I wanna be an independent woman, so I’m going to pretend that I am and put up a good facade.” Or “I wanna get off this treadmill of protecting perceptions, but I don’t think I can.”
In so many areas of life (organization, fitness, health), it’s easier to think about BEING something than BECOMING something. Perhaps you know of those who dream of being fit, but don’t want to start going to the gym and face their actual level of fitness. Or you may know those who want to live a simplified lifestyle, but don’t relish the idea of actually simplifying.
Don’t get caught in the “wanna be” phase.
Become that woman that teen girls look up to and want to emulate. Become that woman that other powerful women want to get to know and hang around with. Become that woman who gives younger women a hand because you developed your capacity to hold your own, to speak your mind, and to have an impact. Become that leader the world needs. And become that woman who could attract any partner!
The Roadmap Defined
In this book, we will talk about the seven dimensions of personal power and what the anchors look like at each end of the continuum. We’ll look at the stories of women who show varying degrees of personal power to flesh out important concepts.
We’ll take a look at what the barriers are to having and developing personal power and some of our attitudes that need to shift. Then we’ll cover three skills that are critical for developing personal power. We’ll review potent methods for building these essential skills.
Finally, we’ll talk about my POWER formula and review holistic strategies for not only developing personal power, but consistently using it across the different arenas of life. Of course, we’ll talk about the benefits of doing so—how it helps us take more risks, live more fully, have more fun, and be more effective.
If you read the guide below and practice the strategies provided, you’ll see an improvement in your ability to function effectively in this world. You’ll be able to stand on your own two feet, recover when “the rug gets pulled out from under you,” and keep a clear head even when you feel guilty or are challenged about a decision you’ve made.
You’ll also be able to step out of the box of the self-reliant woman who can’t afford to be vulnerable or show who you really are. You’ll learn ways to stay connected to your very best strengths while allowing yourself to be approachable and human.
Don’t wait for someone to give you permission to be fully yourself—develop and exude all of your strength and all of your feminine softness.
Onward we go!
Chapter 2
What Is Personal Power? Identifying the 7 Dimensions
One of the most courageous things you can do is identify yourself, know who you are, what you believe in and where you want to go.
—Sheila Murray Bethel
Perhaps the easiest way to address the seven dimensions of personal power is to look at them depicted in the life of Sarah.
Sarah’s Story
Meet Sarah, a 35-year-old photographer, mother of two, wife, daughter, friend, and volunteer. Sarah loves photography, in general, and, in particular, likes to capture intimate moments between mother and child, husband and wife, or lovers in general.
Sarah has a part-time photography business that she runs out of her home where she also cares for her two young children. Sarah’s husband, Tom, is supportive of her but doesn’t always know what to do to help.
Despite the many good things in Sarah’s life, her happiness quotient is not high. She is plagued by indecision, missed deadlines, and anxiety around scheduling her photo shoots. To make up for some of these shortcomings, she charges her clients less than other professionals of her caliber and discusses financial matters as little as possible.
Though Sarah’s friends and family tell her she is extraordinarily talented and should charge more for her work, Sarah is not at all confident of this. She takes classes and attends workshops to improve her skill. Every now and then, she feels resentment when she sees other photographers’ work displayed but consoles herself with the reminder that she works part-time.
Sarah’s children, in kindergarten and preschool, demand much of her time and attention. She worries and often feels guilty about not being with them when they’re not in school. Yet, even when she’s with them, she’s often scattered, exhausted, and overwhelmed with tasks unfinished. She longs for a system that would help her stay organized and focused.
Sarah’s relationship with her husband, Tom, is steady overall, but filled with nitpicky kinds of conflicts. They seem to keep an unwritten tally of who is doing what and contributing the most.
Sarah often feels lonely, is resentful of Tom’s long work hours, and frequently asks that she and the kids be made more of a priority. In the evenings, when Sarah is alone, she often gets a case of the jitters and eats to calm herself and to ease the loneliness she feels.
Holidays and extended family gatherings are a struggle, as Sarah and Tom must decide when to visit each of their families. Sarah is uncertain how to make these decisions and often defers to Tom’s preferences or her mother’s wishes. She vacillates between the two, lacking a strategy to figure out what she really wants. Sarah dreads the onset of the holiday season.
Sarah values fitness and tries to find time to exercise and eat well. Before she had children, she worked out three to four times a week and ate a plant-rich diet. More recently, however, Sarah eats mac n’ cheese with her kids and struggles to work out even two times a week. She doesn’t know where her energy goes. Sex is something she rarely thinks about, and she and Tom make love only when he initiates.
Sarah often worries about being taken advantage of and is quick to stand up for herself with friends. When conflicts arise, she takes a broad stroke approach, letting her friends know that she was wronged. She seems uncertain about how to resolve such conflicts as she does not want to be seen as giving in. Friendships seem a bit tricky to her and she often wishes to feel more connected to people than she does.
Lessons about Personal Power
Sarah’s story, while not typical in all its dimensions, helps us see where she lacks personal power. Her story also portrays how having good things in life, like a steady relationship with a spouse, healthy children, talents in a particular field, and a good income, don’t necessarily add up to living a life with confidence and power.
Sarah’s story also illustrates how many of these dimensions are intertwined. For purposes of clarity, we will separate them into 7 distinct, yet interrelated, dimensions and talk about each of them in turn.
At the end of this section, there are instructions how to set up these continuums in your journal. Alternatively, the free companion workbook has these continuums set up and labeled for you.
Click Here to Download the Free Workbook
The 7 Dimensions of Personal Power
Cognitive Functioning
Emotional Functioning
Boundaries
Personal Energy
Relationship Quality
Finances
Capacity for Taking Risks
1. Cognitive Functioning
The first dimension, cognitive functioning, includes things like being decisive, clear-headed, and able to call upon your mental faculties. It also includes being relatively free of distortions in our reasoning. That is to say, not being prone to overgeneralizations or “catastrophizing,” and being able to accurately discriminate between what is real and what is not.
The other end of this continuum is indecisiveness, difficulty concentrating, being mentally scattered, and having a tendency to ruminate. Rumination is the excessive worry that can plague us well before or after an interaction.
Rumination can be a symptom of shame as we continually replay the interaction in our minds while almost jumping out of our skin, wishing we had said this, wondering if saying that was okay.
Shame tells us we not only did something wrong, stupid, or embarrassing—it goes a step further, declaring that we are a worthless, idiotic person. Shame is an example of a cognitive distortion and how it may be difficult to discriminate between what is real and what is our distorted sense of what’s real.
With Sarah, we see that her cognitive functioning is characterized by indecision and rumination. She is continually evaluating herself and her interactions with others, sometimes falling into shame, sometimes just worrying. She is unclear about her value overall and the value of the work she does.
2. Emotional Functioning
Sometimes we actually choose worry over other painful or difficult feelings. This transitions us into the realm of emotional functioning. So this aspect of emotional functioning is about being able to move on from mistakes, to stay clear about who we are and our sense of worth, and to navigate the highs and the lows of life without tipping over.
Having personal power in the emotional realm means having the ability to regulate our feelings and their expression without getting overwhelmed by them. Having an inner fortitude that enables us to withstand the ups and downs and to have enough capacity within ourselves to feel happiness, sadness, pain, grief, loneliness and anger, all without becoming undone.
So on the one side of the emotional functioning continuum we would write:
Inner fortitude
Emotional regulation
Ability to experience range of emotions without being overwhelmed
On the opposite side of the continuum we would write:
Inability to experience range of emotions
Difficulty regulating or transitioning out of intense feelings
Overwhelmed
Unstable fluctuations in mood and feelings
Sarah’s emotional functioning is characterized by self-doubt, anxiety, guilt, and feeling overwhelmed. In the evenings she has trouble settling down and often engages in “comfort eating” to alleviate her loneliness.
She feels resentful of other photographers’ success and of her husband’s long work hours, and seems unaware of how these resentments could inform and guide her decisions about her own desires and goals.
We will talk in later chapters about how to develop the capacity for self-regulation and how to have and express feelings without getting consumed by them. So stay tuned because this is an all-important area of personal power.
3. Boundaries
Boundaries, the third dimension of personal power, are the container for all the energy that flows within us. Just as our skin keeps our muscles, blood vessels, and tissues intact, our personal boundaries help us own and channel our energy.
Boundaries can be as simple as the capacity to say yes or no—to someone begging on the street or to a request that we head up a new project. Boundaries serve our personal power by keeping a rein on our energy, so that we choose where and with whom to spend our precious time and limited resources.
On the one side of the boundaries continuum, we would write:
Capacity for differentiation (more on this coming up)
Capacity to protect physical boundaries
Capacity to protect time and energy
On the opposite side of the boundaries continuum, we would write:
Tendency to lose oneself, one’s needs, and/or one’s preferences
Limited ability to protect physical boundaries
Limited ability to protect time and energy
In Sarah’s story, we see that boundaries are challenging for her. She struggles a bit with differentiation—being able to soothe herself when alone, being able to talk productively to resolve relationship conflicts, and being able to decide her own preferences around holidays and other gatherings. She may tend toward a rigid, one-size-fits-all style of boundaries (more on that later) that leaves her feeling more disconnected than she likes.
4. Personal Energy
Personal energy, the fourth dimension of personal power, is really about how able we are to focus where our energy goes and how it flows. Are we in charge? Or is our energy spent suppressing feelings from the past, cutting us off from present-day opportunities?
Do we have the ability to channel our energy where we want (such as taking a class, taking on a new project, or having coffee with a friend). Can we direct how it flows in our bodies? Or do we get cut off from our bodies and chase thoughts endlessly round and round in our heads?
On our continuum of personal energy, on one side we would write:
Energy available for current opportunities
Energy able to flow freely in the body
Energy that is able to flow freely in the body is characterized by pulsation—dynamic movement in the vertical dimension (up through the ground, all the way up and through us with a forward and outward movement) and in the horizontal dimension—a pulsating, expansive breath. A good flow of energy is characterized by aliveness in the body, easy natural breathing, and good sexual functioning.
On the opposite side of the personal energy continuum, we would write:
Energy drained by suppressing feelings and/or conflicts from the past
Energy locked up and unable to flow
When energy is drained or locked up, there is a lack of aliveness in the body and sometimes an accumulation of tension in the muscles—often the neck and shoulders.
Sarah’s personal energy is characterized by feeling drained and exhausted. She no longer works out as she used to and has trouble making decisions that foster her own health and well-being.
This is partly a boundary issue that impacts her available energy. She may also be low on energy because she’s avoiding conflicts with her husband and within herself. Unattended conflicts create quite the drain on our energy.
5. Relationship Quality
The quality of our relationships is another indicator of our empowerment quotient. When empowered, we are able to hold our own, connect with our partner or loved ones, gather with friends, and all the while NOT LOSE SIGHT of OURSELVES. This process is called differentiation.
For many of us, it may not be all that hard to be with someone, and it may not be all that hard to be with ourselves. But to stay in touch with ourselves AND connect with someone at the same time is the real challenge.
Especially when we’re with people we love and connect deeply with, we can become more attuned to them and their needs than to ourselves and our needs. “Differentiation,” as described by David Schnarch in his book, Passionate Marriage, “involves balancing two basic life forces: the drive for individuality and the drive for togetherness” (55).
This essential, yet difficult, skill is one we can work on over our entire lives. Indeed, as our relationship becomes more important to us, our need for differentiation—the ability to stand on our own two feet as an individual—increases.
So on the continuum of relationship quality, on one side we would write:
Cap
acity and desire for connection and mutuality
Capacity for differentiation (again)
Capacity for raising conflicts and expecting resolution
On the opposite side of the continuum, we would write:
Lack of mutuality (an it’s-me-or-you approach to conflicts)
Relationships characterized by distance or by clinginess (lack of differentiation) or a fluctuation between the two (come close, go away)
Disinclination to voice disagreement, no expectation for resolution
For Sarah, her personal power on the relationship quality dimension is mixed. She tends to avoid conflicts with her husband, often deferring to his preferences because she doesn’t want to create conflict or does not expect resolution.
Sarah lives with multiple small irritants that are likely the result of those larger, unaddressed conflicts. Her sense of self is tenuous enough that it is difficult for her to be truly differentiated—that is, both emotionally close and emotionally capable of being on her own.
6. Finances
Personal power in the financial realm is about being financially informed—knowing where your money goes, being able to live within your means, not drowning in debt or living paycheck to paycheck, and being paid what you’re worth. It’s also about knowing you can go out and earn the money you need. That sounds like empowerment, doesn’t it?
On the one end of the finances continuum, we would write:
