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Personal Empowerment

#Personal Empowerment

Personal Empowerment – starting young!
Image from www.huffingtonpost.com

Personal Empowerment.

asinha97
You are responsible for your life. So why expect something to happen for motivation. Self motivation is biggest drive for self empowerment. Anil Sinha

 

I recently sat with a man who had asked me to write his biography, his journey from weighing 350 pounds (160 kilograms) back to 200 pounds (90 kg).  After he told me his story, I had a question for him.  First, here is his story, briefly.

He had told me that as he grew fatter, just from being a glutton and careless, he grew too big to do his ceiling insulation batt business – he couldn’t fit through the manholes into the ceiling cavity, so he sold that business and bought a security patrol business.  Then he couldn’t get in and out of the patrol cars because of his rapidly expanding girth, so he sold that business too.  Eventually he began selling real estate in a city office because all he had to do was stand (or sit) near the front door where people would walk by, and he could talk to them.

#Personal Empowerment

Something wrong with this picture
Image from nypost.com

However, the life changing chain of events for him began with the bicycle shop next door.  Sometimes he’d stand at his front door and chat to the owner of the bicycle shop, a former triathlete champion, and one day he asked him if he could try riding a bike, as he thought he might like to lose some weight.  Just making conversation.  The reply was that he didn’t stock a bike that would hold his weight!

Then he needed to run to the back of his shop again to the toilet, for the fifth time that hour, and the bicycle shop owner told him he needed to get ‘that’ checked out.  He already knew what his problem was.  The doctor told him after a few short minutes “You have chronic diabetes caused by your eating habits.  If you don’t lose 100 pounds this year, you won’t see next year!”  It scared him; he said those words felt like machine gun fire into his chest!

My question to him was: “If that doctor had not threatened you with your own death, at what point would you have decided you were overweight and needed to do something about it?”

His answer?  “I don’t know.  I never considered it!  I don’t know what it would have taken to have that amount of personal empowerment, to recognise my problem and deal with it!”

Personal empowerment is not a big deal.

#Personal Empowerment

A whale of a time!
Image from selfimprovementdevelopment.com

My definition for #personal empowerment is the willingness to honestly see yourself as you are, and to commit to making any changes you feel are necessary for your wellbeing, on any level, physical, mental, emotional or spiritual.

That just means that if you know you are not fit, you decide to change that and you do what you need to do, to become more fit.  If you have bad breath, you brush your teeth.  If someone tells you that your breath is bad, you don’t abuse them for being rude to you; you thank them for being honest with you and then you brush your teeth.

Being less than you can be, less than your human potential is a crime against yourself.  That doesn’t mean that you need to be training to be fit enough to run the next marathon.  It doesn’t mean you need to immediately begin to diet, or take any other radical steps.  It has nothing to do with vanity, and everything to do with your personal pride.  Look honestly at yourself. Ask yourself if you are the person you always wanted to be. If you can see how you can become closer to that ideal, then you need the strength to commit to making the changes that will get you there.

OK, I hear some howls of protest!  Personal empowerment?  I’m suffering from a chronic illness, I can’t do that!  I was in a car accident and my injuries won’t allow that!  I am overweight because I have a medical condition and the drugs affect me!

Relax.  The question is; are you being all you can be?  If you are ill, then you are ill and that will place limitations on you physically.  But how is your heart?  How is your spirit?  How is your mind?

Personal empowerment will take you from where you are in your life, to where you could be.  It’s not about being fitter, faster, smarter or better than anyone else, just being the best YOU that you could be.  Sometimes, personal empowerment is just being the best parent you can be, so that you can be an empowered parent for your children.  What this world needs probably most of all, is empowered people, who can be empowered parents, so that the next generation who are our children now can take over this world and continue to make it better and fix the mistakes we have made in getting it to them.

Personal empowerment is worth it.

But how do you get personal empowerment?

#Personal Empowerment

It’s the little things that count!
Image from mylifeismymessage.org

It’s easy.  Baby steps each day.  It’s not a massive shift, it’s just a few little success habits to get into each day, and then continue to do them every day!  Not hard at all.  You already have a number of habits right now, perhaps some that don’t serve you that you could replace, others that you definitely want to maintain.  Like brushing your teeth.  But add some affirmations and goalsetting to that.  Perhaps doing a few minutes reading of something positive each morning and evening – just a few minutes.  Perhaps setting priorities for your day, specific things that will actually advance you a little closer to your goals.  Perhaps at the end of the day, doing a review and seeing what you achieved, what you learned, what you felt, and checking off what you actually did.  If you started a new habit, check off that you did it, or didn’t – make yourself accountable.

Get into success habits.  Start feeling a sense of achievement for the little things, so that when the big things come up and real personal empowerment is needed to face those challenges, you have already been practising, you have the success habits in place, all you are doing is changing the goal……!  See?  Simple.

That is personal empowerment.  A program with all of this exists now for you to slip into your daily routine; you can get it here.  A few minutes morning and evening and it is done.

The bonus is that it teaches you lots of other cool strategies as well, such as communication skills, financial success tips, stress management and health tips, mental strategies, conflict resolution, goal setting and a whole heap more over the 90 days of the program.  That’s the few minutes of positive and empowered reading material, a couple of hundred words a day to get you on track with life changing strategies in every area of your life.  Personal empowerment was never so easy!  Start your personal empowerment program now! Click here to begin!

If you feel this article has empowered and benefited you and you feel it could benefit the personal empowerment of other folks you know, please reblog it, share it with your friends and associates.  It might be the day you changed someone’s life for the better!

Til next time, fair winds and full sails,

Ray Jamieson

Be ambitious towards your own personal enhancement.  Steve Mariboli

Please also refer to other posts on Empowerment:

Financial Empowerment

Empowerment

Empowerment for Men

Empowerment for Women

Empowerment for Teens

Empowerment for Children

What would an empowered man do?

Challenges of Chronic Illness

Living with the challenges of Chronic Illness

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” James A. Baldwin

If you are living with the challenges of Chronic Illness, you already know that you face challenges that most other people take for granted.  You are living with challenges that other people wouldn’t or couldn’t put up with – until one day they may be struck down with it too!  And that’s the kicker – so many people don’t realise what you are going through, and for many of those that do, you sometimes wish they didn’t!

#Challenges of Chronic Illness

Chronic Illness symptoms,
Courtesy of http://menalive.com

Do you miss the life you had before it was changed by your condition?  Most people do.  Although there are those who proclaim that their illness was “the best thing that ever happened” because of the changes it forced in their lives.  And that may be so.  However, that’s hard to understand unless you are living in the situation.

How many times before your diagnosis did a doctor or even a friend or family member tell you “It’s all in your mind!”  Or “Just get over it!”  You’d love to, but there really is a problem, it’s just that they can’t see it!

However, when life does change dramatically, and you can’t do what you used to do, there’s a level of acceptance necessary to move forward.  Even if only for a time, even if in a few months or a year or two you can regain your old life, you still have to live in the present, and that’s where your present condition might be, to live with the challenges of chronic illness or chronic pain.  Acceptance can be a challenge, when you know what you are missing out on.

Another of the major #challenges of chronic illness you may have is the guilt you feel, at not being able to handle everything like you once did – relying on other people might not sit well with you.  If you were the sort of person who was very capable and everyone relied on you to keep their worlds working, and now they can’t, quite often they inadvertently transfer their disappointment to you and it registers with you as guilt.

#Challenges of Chronic Illness

Courtesy of www.wikihow.com
Feelings of guilt

Guilt can gnaw away at you, and combined with the feelings of inadequacy of the situation anyway, it’s hard to handle.

But that’s not all; there’s more to this yet!

Another of the challenges of chronic illness is that it often tears away your financial independence!  You might end up on some sort of disability pension or less, because going out to work is just not possible!  Even the best intentioned employer needs to know that you can at least turn up for work, and sometimes, you won’t, because you just can’t!  You may have to find a new way to create some extra income for yourself, without going to work!

#Challenges of Chronic Illness

Medical expenses
courtesy of understandinggov.org

A fact of life with the challenges of chronic illness is that no matter what your plans are, there will be days when you wake up and realise, almost as soon as you open your eyes, that all your plans for the day are out the window – you aren’t going anywhere!  It makes goalsetting, a working life or career, study and many other things, seriously difficult to plan ahead with!  You need a new way of looking at goalsetting, at life, and living and just getting by.

Your relationships also take a battering until they either evolve into your new situation, or they don’t.  It can be a serious challenge for a spouse or best friend to have you transform from an energetic and vital personality, to someone who perhaps needs a carer, and perhaps that carer has to be them!

The person and/or friends who loved you as that independent person before now have to change the way they relate to you.  They have to learn that when you are upset, grumpy, frustrated with life and the world in general, even if you are snapping at them, it’s not them you are angry with!  It’s your new situation you are angry with, and they are simply within the blast range while you are upset with the world!

Friendships will be tested by the challenges of chronic illness and those strong enough to survive this transition period will be incredible relationships.  Those that did not survive would have failed the next friendship test anyway – something that wasn’t related to you would have caused the relationship to break down, independent of you.  It’s not something to feel guilty over; it’s something to feel good about, in a crazy way – your real friends, the people who truly care about you are still here!  The fair weather friends will not be!

How do you manage living and life as a person with the challenges of Chronic Illness?

If this is you, there is a way forward, but you may need to take another look at the way you manage your life.  Structurally, practically you may have a routine sorted out, where you get through each day without too much drama.  However, is it really living?

#Challenges of Chronic Illness

The way forward! Courtesy of www.surfcoasttimes.com.au

If there was a better way, that took just a few minutes a day, morning and evening, would you consider it?  Because that’s what it takes.

It’s about the way you prepare your day and days for what is ahead of you.  It’s about allowing yourself and even setting yourself up to have little wins, and then celebrating them.  It’s about finding things to be grateful for, no matter how small.  It’s about setting goals that build into a life you desire, brick by brick, small, manageable goals, flexible enough for you to manage, numerous enough to build your dreams with.

It’s about creating a framework, a supportive environment around you and within you, independent of any illness or pain you suffer, where you create a team of people to build your life with.  It’s about becoming totally aware of everything in your life, and using your awareness to create something new.  It’s about creating habits that automatically help you choose the success path, in whatever you do.

If you think this is too much, too crazy, too far from what you believe is possible, then perhaps that is true for you, now.  That doesn’t make it the truth though……

If, on the other hand, you have had enough of banging your head against a wall for so long that the bricks are soft, then perhaps it’s time to look at another way to live.  Start building that new environment around you, and start looking at life differently.  Stop letting the challenges of chronic illness dictate how your life runs; take a look from a different perspective.

No, it might not stop the pain.  It might not cure the illness.  It might just make it less important in your life; it might take it from centre stage to just being an annoyance that creeps in from time to time…  And it might just give you a life again!

Life Change 90 – take a look.  In the next 90 days, your life can change!  Make that the next of your challenges of chronic illness – change your life into what you want in the next 90 days!

We can throw stones, complain about them, stumble on them, climb over them, or build with them.” William Arthur Ward

If you are a person suffering the challenges of chronic illness, or know someone who is, please share this with them, or reblog it, so that others can learn from it.  Chronic Illness is a challenge within my own family and we understand this issue at a very personal level.

We would love to think that others could benefit from our experiences and perhaps gain some support from what we do and what we have learnt over the last decade.

Til next time, fair winds and full sails,

Ray Jamieson

 

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