Where do you give your power away?

I talked recently about holding on to things that are not serving us. I want to look at that from a different place and talk about what we are giving away when we hold onto those things.

We are born to be powerful creators.

We have access to unlimited resources to help us manifest the things we want in our lives. We can do this deliberately or sometimes we get things by default. We seem to learn as we grow that we have to do something to deserve the things we want. Go potty in the toilet and you get a reward, be good and I will love you, get good grades and I will be proud of you. Some of these rewards are unspoken. For instance, the praise you get from getting an A on your report card verses the lack of praise for getting a C. We are conditioned from a very young age to give our power away so we will be accepted and loved and get a reward. The problem with that is we are placing our happiness and sense of self in someone else’s hands. Then, what I call the ‘great chase’ begins.

We spend our lives chasing ‘shiny’ things like love and approval. Every single time we do that we give some of our power away. People don’t take it, they can’t without our permission. Read that again. That was a difficult pattern for me to recognize because it was ingrained in me from my earliest memory. It took me a long time to realize that I was responsible for giving myself the love and approval I so desperately sought. Putting that power in someone else’s hands made it conditional on pleasing them.

Some of the people I admire the most in my life have learned how to stop this chase and keep their power. They get to use their power to create the life they want. They aren’t swayed by what others think of them. They don’t give their power to someone else to decide if they’re worthy.

‘Your opinion of me is none of my business’.

This is one of my favorite mantras. Try it and see how you like it.

It is necessary to look at the areas in our lives that we give our power away. Becoming aware of the big and small ways we give power away will help us to take it back. So far we’ve talked about giving our power to other people. Next week in part two of ‘Where do you give your power away’ we will look at other things in our lives that we give our power to. We will dig into why that keeps us from creating more in our lives. Looking at the ways I gave my power away caused the awareness I needed to be inspired to make changes in my life. These changes didn’t happen overnight, still each time I chose to honor myself I moved closer and closer to feeling the power I have inside me. I chose me by giving myself the love and acceptance I longed for.

When we change the world changes.