Personal empowerment means taking control of your life. It requires you to set meaningful goals for yourself to identify what you want from life, and then take action to achieve those goals and have more impact over the world around you. And, if you are a leader in your company, then empowering people should be one of your responsibilities.
There are several areas that can help you teach people more about personal empowerment.
Confidence is a great motivator to anyone trying to change their behavior and become more empowered. Most people only perform tasks that they feel capable of doing and it takes great effort to overcome a lack of confidence in their own abilities. Therefore, improving confidence and building self-esteem is an important part of empowering people.
Self-awareness involves understanding yourself and how you are likely to respond to various circumstances. This helps you build on positive qualities and be mindful of any negative traits that may reduce your effectiveness. Self-aware people make conscious decisions to improve their lives whenever possible, learning from previous experiences. For example, your team may need to improve their awareness of their strengths, weaknesses and limits.
Steps to Personal Empowerment
Here are steps you may teach your employees about their personal empowerment:
Assess your impact. Empowerment is about changing the impact you have on others and on situations. Empowering people means they should learn to assess their impact. At first, the changes are not noticeable, but even small changes count as success.
Identify a goal that is focused on power. This is to increase your influence over colleagues, or to have more influence over the choice of your family, for example, of the next holiday destination.
Increase self-efficacy, or belief that you can accomplish. You need to believe that you can achieve before you take action. Knowing that you have the essential information can help. Understanding your strengths and weaknesses will also help you to understand where you are likely to succeed.
Increase skills and competence. When it comes to empowering people, they may need to hone their skills to become more influential. As you start to talk to more people and try to influence them, you can learn what works, and thus, develop your skills.
Increase knowledge. You need to understand more about a topic or situation. For example, if you wish to have more influence over your colleagues, you need to understand the politics in the company. To influence your choices of your family, you should know what each person wants, and who has the most influence at the moment.
Take action and continue doing it. Personal empowerment means not acknowledging defeat by the first problem you encounter, but having the persistence and resilience to keep going and seek other ways to achieve your goals.
Developing personal empowerment often involves making some fundamental changes in life, which may not always an easy process. You should view empowering people as ongoing personal development. As circumstances change and develop, and as people change and develop, so do the needs for development and empowerment.
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