It is my absolute pleasure to be on board for the inaugural issue of Embacadere! Congratulations to the Visionary and the entire team. I wish you all success as you grow from strength to strength. Today’s topic was specifically chosen for this issue because it takes personal power to start anything worthwhile and to continue with it.

But before we go any further, let’s define ‘personal power’. Power is … control, authority, muscle, dominance etc. So we are looking at our ability to have personal – control, authority, muscle, dominance in our lives. Tall order you say? I submit to you that it is not, because there are many people around us who are continually working on building and using their personal power for good. ‘For good’ is emphasized because so many use their personal power for wrong reasons, and too many are hurt as a result.

It must be explained here that we must first believe that we have personal power before we can begin to use it. In coaching others, it is very obvious when self doubt reigns in the client’s life. Any suggestion to start something new … to turn their life around is met with rebuttals and refusal. So the first task at hand is to guide the client in the direction of truly believing that they have personal power because our beliefs or thoughts guide or determine the direction our lives will take.

This – working on our beliefs/thoughts – is an integral part of learning to use our personal power. “Where the mind goes, the rest of our body follows!” I recall battling with thinking that I could not do without drinking coffee some years ago. I mean I just had to have that coffee everyday at least three times. But there was a down side to that – I had to deal with the effects of drinking coffee knowing that high blood pressure was already a health challenge for me.

I was slowed down as a result of this, and so I eventually had to exercise my God given personal power to stop drinking coffee because I was praying for good health. I tell folks all the time that we can pray until we are blue in the face, but unless we take a step in the direction that we say we want to go – change is not going to happen.

If we want a better life, as many of us say that we do – then we must first understand that it is in exercising our personal power that the change(s) take place.

The question to ask at this juncture is this – ‘how much do I really desire positive change in my life?’ Strong desire propels us to take action. That’s the next step in using our personal power – Action! Action! Action!

Having recognized and truly accepted the fact that we have the personal power to change the direction of our lives, and understanding that we will have to change the old sabotaging ways of doing certain things that gave us undesired results – we must now take the necessary actions to use our personal power to turn our lives around. Exchanging sabotaging habits for empowering habits is exercising personal power.

Examine this question carefully – ‘who and/or what influence my decisions?’ Answering this question should reveal why you do some of the disempowering things that you do to yourself – because it is your life after all is said and done. Hopefully it will also reveal that you are really the only one in charge of the choices you make, and that it is up to you to make empowering choices or not.

When we do not use what we have, we inevitably lose it, and the same applies to personal power. Sitting there all day long and doing nothing with what you already have to make the good changes in our lives, will probably mean that we do not have the motivation to change. Motivation comes from within as we already know. I can only suggest, encourage and guide you accordingly. You have to motivate yourself – to the extent that you believe you have the power to do so – to make that necessary and positive move.

I always recommend that we start with the little things that need to be changed. When we take on too many changes at once, and we do not get the results we thought we would have, we tend to turn on the personal critic and our confidence takes a nose dive. Do not be too hard on yourself. Know that you have the strength and the power to keep going. And after a while thinking empowering thoughts and taking empowering actions will come naturally to you, because that has become your focus.

And this leads us to the next step – and a very important part of the process – FOCUS! I know for sure that what we focus on becomes our experience after a while. So you want to literally train your mind to think about the things you want to experience, instead of what you do not want! This is personal power at its highest and best – when you can become so focused on a better you, and better experiences – which ultimately means a better life! You have the power!

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Ava (AP) Toussaint is an Author;

Newspaper Columnist; Life Coach and Inspirational Speaker.

apgatco@hotmail.com