Get Your Power On!
Page 6
Think back to when you were a little kid and played board games. Remember Chutes and Ladders or CandyLand? Both of these games had the random option of getting sent back—sometimes almost to the beginning of the game. I think about shame as landing on one of those squares that sends you swooshing down the chute back to the beginning. Sometimes it’s just a little setback, but sometimes it’s a complete ride.
You might be able to call to mind an experience when you were feeling pretty good, then one small thing happened to totally shift your energy. Maybe it was a phone call you got, maybe an email, or some sort of complaint, and it ignited your guilt, shame, or sense of inadequacy. It can feel like getting swooped off your feet (and not in that lovely romantic sense) and getting dumped into a pit.
—Journal Junction: Getting Thrown Off-Center from the Inside—
Grab your workbook or journal and make some notes about what makes you feel less than who you are. What challenges your certainty about decisions you make, feelings you voice, or skills you have to offer?
The External
The second category of experience that throws us off-center is more relationship-oriented—more external than internal (though, as in the example above, it can trigger the internal challenge as well).
In the workshop I mentioned earlier, there was one person who believed I was not up to snuff, not capable of working with him in the way he wanted. He entered the workshop with the attitude that he was not going to get what he needed from me. This was an external challenge that threatened to trigger my internal slide.
My task became two-fold: stay clear within myself and stay clear with him. That is, not engage in defending myself and not shut down his fears, but allow him to express his needs, wants, and fears while not losing sight of my competence. As far as personal power goes, I had to confirm and really engage with my sense of boundaries and personal energy, and function on high cognitive and emotional levels. Not a small challenge!
Other examples of external challenges to our inner knowing include disagreements with people we want to like us and respect us. Maybe when your coworker, boss, or partner takes a strong position, you no longer know what you believe. Even if you still know what you believe, you may feel entirely unable to speak coherently about it.
Many women I work with tell me about these experiences, and I know them from my own life. It can be hard to articulate our thoughts and positions when faced with conflict and disagreement. We often lose strength in our powers of cognitive and emotional functioning.
One area where external challenges have potentially greater power is relationships with parents (remember my therapist’s question—“When are you going to stop living according to the feelings in your mother’s belly?”). Because our survival early on truly does depend upon the goodwill of our caregivers, usually our mothers and fathers, we become intensely attuned to what they are feeling. Even as adults, we remain attuned to their feelings.
Let’s just take mothers. If your mother invites you to a family gathering that you do not want to attend, how free do you feel to decline? How sensitive are you to her response? Do you have to have a good excuse? Even if you manage to decline, do you feel so much guilt and anxiety afterward that it feels like it would have been easier to attend?
—Journal Junction: Getting Thrown Off-Center from the Outside—
Take a minute and write some notes about what kinds of external experiences throw you off-center. Get specific about the kinds of conflicts, disagreements, and the people that can really impact your sense of freedom to decide for yourself.
The good news is that there are practical strategies we can use to combat these inner and outer challenges to our staying centered and grounded. Most of us tend to rely on our minds, and we try to talk ourselves into or out of feelings. But because of the triune make-up of our brains, (primitive brain, emotional brain, and cortex), talking ourselves out of guilt, anxiety, or shame is generally not effective and is certainly not efficient.
The techniques that can shift us quickly are body-based practices. We ground through our eyes, hands, and feet—the areas where we contact the outside world. So any exercises that help us engage our eyes, hands, and feet can help us ground. All the grounding exercises I give below you can also find in the free companion workbook.
Practices to Ground Yourself
Modified Mountain Pose
The yoga “mountain pose” is a great grounding exercise. To do a modified version of this pose, plant your feet hip-distance apart and focus on the four “corners” of your feet. Press down the inner ball of your foot, then the outer edge of your foot (while maintaining the first pressure). Add to this by pressing down the inner edge of your heel, then the outside edge of your heel.
Maintain this pressure of all four corners of your feet and feel the muscles in the legs engage. This activates your reaching down into the earth, as opposed to passively standing on the earth. Add to this the “drishti” (focus of the gaze), with hands pressed flat together, level with your sternum, and fingers pointing up, and you’ve got a serious grounding pose. This modified pose is using the eyes, hands, and feet to ground.
Eyes, Hands, and Feet Grounding Pose
This pose is another great grounding exercise because it engages all three areas that contact the world: the eyes, hands, and feet. To do this pose, stand about a foot and a half away from the wall, legs off-set just a bit.
Place your hands on the wall, fingers spread, and arms straight with elbows almost locked. Then look intently at a spot on the wall in front of you while pushing with your hands and grounding down into your feet. This exercise contains energy in the body (a good antidote when your energy is scattered) and grounds you into the earth at the same time. In this way, it is both a centering and a grounding exercise.
Jumping
Another quick way to get energy down into our legs and feet is to jump up and down in one place. If we wanted to make this even more powerful, we could hold hands with someone and look at them while we jump. This involves the eyes, hands, and feet—the three main areas important for grounding.
High Power Poses
The exciting research in the social psychology field about body language and its ability to shift our chemistry validates these practices and takes them a step further. In a TED talk watched by millions, Amy Cuddy told how spending two minutes in a “high power pose” can increase our confidence hormone and decrease our stress hormone. The opposite is also true. Spending two minutes in a contracted, or “low power pose,” increases the stress hormone cortisol and decreases the dominance hormone testosterone.
The implications of this research for you and me are huge! Think about how you sit and move during the day. Are you expansive? Expansive poses are high power poses. Remember Wonder Woman? Her high power pose is standing with legs apart and hands on her hips.
Or think of runners you’ve seen finishing a race. They’re engaging in the universal “victory pose.” This is the pose everyone takes when they’re proud of an accomplishment or victory (across cultures whether they’ve seen the pose or not). Arms are in a large V overhead, often with the hands balled into fists pumping the air.
You know those executive chairs that allow the back support to release backward? Imagine sitting back in your chair, interlacing your fingers behind your head, elbows out to the side. This is a high power pose. It’s also a high power pose when you keep that posture and put your feet up.
Other high power poses include leaning onto your desk while standing a small distance from it, arms wide, and hands placed expansively forward and wide. One high power pose I like to call the “water cooler” pose is when you find something to lean on with one arm while placing your other hand on your hip. Your legs can be in a separated stance. This one is great because you look casual, but you’re actually changing your chemistry while you do it.
It’s useful to purposefully engage these poses whenever you need to connect to your power, maybe because you feel small
, inadequate, or unsure of yourself. This can be a recovery pose to regain your sense of self and your inner confidence. We’ll come back to other ways to recover when we lose our composure or feel our energy and confidence take a downward spiral.
The Ungrounding Impact of Low Power Poses
On the other end of the spectrum are the low power poses. Think about how you might sit while waiting for an interview, waiting to be called into the office. Often we take a really contracted position. Any position that involves folding in and forward can be thought of as a low power pose.
Think about how you sit, walk, and move when you’re cold. The shoulders hunch up and in, the belly contracts, and the chest moves forward and down. Maybe you’ve seen women who cross their legs and hook their foot around their leg. These are ways of becoming small.
The really significant thing about these postures is that they’re not neutral. They have an impact beyond what they might communicate to someone else. They communicate something to us. They actually shape who we become.
If I’m a fearful person and often sit in contracted, low power pose ways, I will actually increase my stress hormone and perpetuate the fear cycle. BUT, if I can interrupt this process through awareness, I can shift into a high power pose and not only not decrease the fear, but shift my chemistry and boost my confidence.
Uses of High Power Poses
This is a game changer!! These poses are available to us pretty much anytime and anywhere. We can do them subtly while in public, or we can take two minutes in a closed conference room, office, or even a bathroom stall.
Imagine being able to access your inner confidence in two minutes! No longer just wishing you could calm down, trying in vain to soothe your nerves. Get into a grounding pose or a high power pose and let your energy shift naturally.
Two occasions come to mind when I used this technique. One, I was getting ready for a radio interview, and I had some waiting time before the interviewer was ready. I found myself sitting with legs crossed and hands on my lap while I reviewed my notes.
Becoming aware of my own body, I stood up and engaged in various high power poses for the next few minutes. By the time the interviewer came to meet me, I was connected to my authentic self and able to speak with confidence.
The other occasion was sitting in a classroom setting. Most of us have had the experience of sitting in a roomful of people and struggling to find our place within the group. In this setting, there were enough people that we needed to raise our hands to speak and to answer questions by show of hands.
There are two ways to raise your hand: the high power pose way and the low power pose way. I realized my tendency was to raise my hand low—with bent arm, my hand about jaw height. This is more typical for females as it turns out. I willed myself to raise my hand high. And in so doing I felt more of a sense of belonging and more confidence in my ability to participate. Hard to believe maybe, but the research is there. Give it a try!
This ability to recover our poise is critical for being able to think on our feet, respond to challenges, and make quick decisions. Who doesn’t remember a time when you’re clicking along in your day, an email comes in (or a phone call, text, or your boss stops by), and then your energy completely deflates?
Maybe we fall down the shame spiral. Maybe we get angry, but there’s nowhere to go with it. Maybe we get anxious and start the endless spinning in our minds. Or, worse yet, maybe we go blank and have no idea what just happened. Maybe we go find some snacks!
When we get derailed like that, we need a way to recover. In the moment, we can try things like meditation or visualizations (to reconnect to our center). Or we could use a grounding technique or a high power pose. Any of these can be helpful in the moment to boost our personal power in our cognitive and emotional functioning, personal energy, and capacity to take risks.
Practices to Regain Grounding and Shift Energy
Recovery from Deflation Practice
For long-term success and to be less susceptible to these energy shifts, we can engage in some practice of these skills.
—Journal Junction: What Derails Your Energy? Identifying the Taboos—
Here’s how the practice works. Grab your workbook or journal, so you can write down some phrases or comments that stop you in your tracks. Let’s say, in the personal arena, you’ve just had a talk with your mother, and she implied you were being selfish.
Maybe now you’re stewing about not feeling like a good daughter. But it’s more complicated because you really believe that the action you want to take would be good for you. But you find yourself unable to get out of this dilemma of whether you’re right and justified to make this decision or you should relent and do what she wants.
In your journal, see if you can get to the “taboo” involved. For the example above, it would be something like “Nice girls aren’t selfish.” Or “Good daughters don’t say no.” Or “Being selfish is bad.” Notice what you feel when you write these down. Notice what your breath does, what your belly feels, what tenses up, what releases.
The idea behind this “recovery practice” is that you start out grounded. Then you tell yourself a taboo or an injunction such as the examples above. You attune to the impact on your energy—whether it knocks you off-center, whether you feel deflated, whether you feel defeated, whether you feel sad, anxious, or angry. Next you use grounding techniques to shift your energy purposefully. You recover.
Permission Practice
It can also be helpful to give yourself permission to be anxious, sad, or angry, and express it (to your empty room or to a trusted friend who’s exploring this exercise with you). You can really dive in, shouting, swearing, and disagreeing. Or you can state things matter-of-factly. The idea is to give yourself a new experience in response to the old message.
This recovery practice is more of a protest against taboos. It involves allowing yourself to experience your full range of feelings in response to the taboos and to express them the way you feel them—in all their variety. This is another way to purposefully shift energy. This is particularly effective to do in a group setting as part of a workshop, but it’s possible to use this on your own using your journal or the companion workbook.
—Journal Junction: What Would You Like to Express? Protesting the Taboos—
Once you have identified the taboos (in the previous exercise), you can work with your reactions to them. In the recovery exercise above, your focus was on regaining your ground by shifting your energy and literally finding the ground beneath you. In this exercise, the focus is on moving through the feelings that may block you.
In the workbook, begin by writing what you’d like to express. For the example above, where the taboos were “nice girls aren’t selfish” or “good daughters don’t say no,” you may notice anxiety, guilt, or maybe anger. Maybe you get angry in response to your guilt!
Allow yourself the freedom to express whatever it is you feel, working through the feelings as you express them either in the privacy of your own room or with a trusted friend. Writing and doing allows this new experience to become embedded in your mind and body, creating avenues for change.
Up Next . . .
So we’ve learned to find our center, discover what this inner wisdom has to say, to stay connected for longer periods of time, and to reconnect as needed through grounding postures and high power poses. Now it’s time to think about the container for all of this: our boundary system.
Chapter 7
Boundaries—Honoring Who You Are
Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others.
—Brené Brown
As our skin provides a boundary for our muscles, blood vessels, and tissue, our psychological boundary helps us know the limits of who we are (and who we are not). This is a hard concept to articulate because, in some ways, it seems really obvious what our psychological boundaries are; however, in other ways, it seems totally nebulous.
We can have boundaries around different activities—yes, I’ll zipline, but, no, I won’t bungee jump; or yes, I’ll read a book, but, no, I won’t go jogging. And of course, we have boundaries around our physical space.
Go back to the exercise in Chapter 4 where you had a friend walk toward you until you told them to stop, the “boundaries and bodily cues” exercise. Our physical, energetic system is constantly giving us messages about what we want, what feels okay, and what stresses our system. Depending on our experiences growing up, we learned to either override these messages or to honor them and listen.
We can think of boundaries and our use of them as occurring on a continuum. If we think of boundaries for a moment like a cloak or second skin, we see that the “fabric” could be full of holes and gaps, or very tightly woven so that not much passes in or out. In this way, then, we can anchor the two ends of the continuum with the idea of a porous boundary on one side and a tightly woven or rigid boundary on the other side.
Our capacity to establish and maintain boundaries falls somewhere on that continuum.
The “Country” Concept
If we further develop this concept of boundaries, we can borrow the metaphor of how a country has both territory and resources to protect. The country may use one of two basic ways to safeguard those resources. If the country has an abundance of soldiers, it may use these soldiers to provide “border patrol” around the perimeter of their territory.