Welcome everyone. I'm Kim Christiansen and this is The Peaceful Productivity Podcast, where I share strategies to help you get the most outta your time and feel better in the process.
Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Peaceful Productivity Podcast. I was thinking about the title for today's episode, and I couldn't really decide whether I should call it feeling empowered or taking ownership, and I thought, well, feeling empowered is the destination. It's the Hawaii of the vacation, whereas taking ownership is the pathway, the journey, the airplane.
It's gonna get us there. So today's episode is titled Feeling Empowered, and we're gonna talk about taking ownership. You know, we hear a lot about empowerment, at least I do. I think maybe it's because I'm in the coaching community. Maybe it's out there and it's pervasive, or maybe it's because I like to surround myself with powerful people.
I even talk about a lot in my business. My mission is to give women the tools and knowledge to feel empowered around their money. So what does that even mean? Feeling empowered. I got to thinking about it and I was thinking, well, for me, feeling empowered is feeling powerful, obviously, feeling in control and feeling confident.
Confident in my abilities and trusting myself to be able to manage any uncomfortable situation that should arise. So it's a combination of confidence, trust, and feeling in control. Intellectually. We know that we create these feelings for ourselves. No one can actually. Help us feel empowered or powerful or confident.
Like the saying goes, it's an inside job. However, I think we lose sight of how much power we actually have to create. The feeling. The feeling of powerful. Ironically, we have power to create the feeling of powerful. We have more control over those feelings. Even in practice when things are coming at us or when we're really deep in the weeds, in the minutiae of our lives.
So today I wanted to share with you my process for reminding myself that I have a lot of power when it comes to my own feelings, that I'm in charge of my own feelings, and I get to create the experience that I'm having in my life. I can create the feeling of empowerment whenever I want to. Really? How do I do that?
Well, for me, it starts with taking ownership. My family and I have been doing a lot of work around ownership lately, and let me tell you, it's not fun. Taking ownership is not fun. In fact, it's downright uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable, but it's so worth it. It's uncomfortable because owning the feeling comes with it, the responsibility of managing the feeling.
So it's much easier to deflect and defer and delegate that responsibility to somebody else and then tell ourselves that we have no real control in this area. That's much easier. But actually taking ownership means that we're also taking responsibility. And responsibility can be uncomfortable. The reason why taking ownership is so important in terms of creating empowerment because it's like a gift.
It's giving myself back my own power. With the responsibility comes the power. When I don't take over ownership, I have no power. I slip into this unconscious mindset where I feel like everything is happening to me and I feel like I'm at the whim of the universe. This is a really uncomfortable place to be.
If you've ever felt helpless or out of control, then you know how very uncomfortable that can be. So I like to remind myself of that when I notice myself feeling disempowered. I remind myself that that helpless, disempowered feeling is actually a cue. It's my cue to step back from the situation for just a moment and own the feelings that are coming up in that moment.
So what does feeling helpless look like and feel like for you? For me, it looks like, thoughts of blame, for example, they shouldn't have done that. Or thoughts of shame shaming myself. I shouldn't have done that, for example, when I blame others or I shame myself, or both, I feel disempowered because it's quickly followed by justification, rationalization, and avoidance.
It's the opposite of feeling powerful. This work has got me reflecting on the difference between an excuse and a reason. The way I've come to think about it, and I'll share it with you in case it's helpful, is that an excuse is when we assign responsibility to a circumstance or someone outside of ourselves saying something like, The bus was late or the stranger cut in front of me, that's an excuse.
Whereas a reason is when we assign responsibility to ourselves, we take ownership. For example, I didn't give myself enough time, or I left too late. This is helpful in all areas of our lives in terms of moving forward, accomplishing goals, particularly in business. I think because when we're looking at our business results and the performance of our business, we might be inclined to blame and shame ourselves as a first reaction, and then there's also an opportunity to look at reasons. So for example, when our marketing initiative doesn't work, we might be tempted to say, well, I don't know what the customers want. They're not responding, they're not paying attention, they're not interested. So that's assigning all of the responsibility to them and not really looking at what I can do in that situation.
Whereas when I take ownership, I could look at things like, well, did I market consistently? Did I put it out enough? Did I repeat myself enough? Did I distinguish myself and my message from the noise that's out there in the marketplace? All of those things allow me to get my power back. So reasons don't mean shaming ourselves.
They mean looking at things with an objective eye so that we can better understand where the opportunities are for next time. It's a really subtle difference, but it's the difference between I should have and I could. If you try that on for yourself, you'll notice that I should have creates a very different feeling than I could do X, Y, Z for me.
I should have brings up feelings of guilt, whereas I could do something in the future, brings up feelings of opportunity if that's a feeling possibility, even excitement engagement. So one feels very limiting and the other feels like fuel. So I know this is a very, very delicate balance because please hear me when I say not everything is your fault.
It's not about assigning fault, it's about taking ownership and not shaming yourself. It can be a very delicate balance because when we make everything our fault, it's just a redirection of the blame game, and we're assigning fault. We're either blaming others or we're blaming ourselves. So it's not about assigning fault who's at fault, it's about taking ownership of the feelings.
So maybe a way to look at it is taking ownership of the actions for sure. However, also taking ownership of the feelings underneath the actions. You've heard me talk a lot on this podcast about how feelings fuel our behavior, and so if we can get to that layer where we're not assigning fault for the actions, where we're getting underneath the actions and we're looking at the feelings and taking ownerships of the feelings, that's where our real source of power is, because every feeling is justified and helpful.
Some feelings are protective and some feelings are directional, but all feelings have a purpose. All are very useful. We just have to take a moment to understand them. When we don't feel justified in our feelings, that's when we spend a lot of energy on justifying, rationalizing, defending, avoiding. So I'm gonna talk a little bit more about how we take ownership of the feelings.
Once I recognize that I'm feeling a certain way, that's when I can take ownership of it. I might say to myself something like, I am feeling helpless, or I am feeling frustrated, or I am feeling irritated. I am feeling angry. Naming the feeling is incredibly powerful. Now, once we've named it, we know what we're working with instead of just dismissing it or trying to work against it.
Naming the feeling is an incredibly big step to reclaiming our power. You've probably heard the expression, name it, to tame it. That's what they say and that's what they're talking about. Name it to tame it, means we are taking ownership of the feeling and we're accepting it all in one fell swoop. This is incredibly powerful because the problem is never the feeling itself. The problem is our reaction to the feeling. In fact, the feeling itself is incredibly helpful, understanding the feeling and why it's there, points us towards the next step. It points us to our response. So the first step in reclaiming your power is owning the feeling. The next step is to think about how you are helping yourself.
When I feel helpless, when I tell myself that there's nothing that I can do, this is actually a lie. Yes, it's a protective lie. It protects me from taking risks like risking a relationship or risking financial loss, but it's a lie all the same because I am not helpless, even though my brain can't come up with other options in that moment, that doesn't mean that options don't exist.
Trusting myself enough to know that when I give myself space, the options are endless. Just maybe not in that moment when my nervous system is activated and I'm feeling overwhelmed with a little bit of space and grace, I will move through the feeling of overwhelm and possibility is on the other side of that, I like to say possibility is on the other side of overwhelm.
We just have to give ourselves a bit of space to get there. When I shift into the mindset of possibility, then the options are abundant. They're endless, and I no longer feel helpless or out of control. So I just have to be a little bit patient with myself and my feelings and remind myself that possibility is right around the corner.
I like to remind myself that the pathway out of feeling helpless is feeling like I'm helping because that inherently contradicts the lie that I'm telling myself I'm not helpless because I'm helping myself. Moving from that mindset of, I can't help into that reframe thought of I can help. I can help myself.
So knowing that I'm not helpless, that I do have options even when it doesn't feel like it. That's the next step. I can help myself shift from overwhelmed and helpless to possibility.
So to summarize, the first step was owning the feeling. The second step was reminding myself that possibility lies on the other side of overwhelm, even though it might not feel like that right in the moment. So there's two extremes to taking ownership. There's not taking ownership at all, and then there's taking too much ownership.
For me, I think this is where I sewed the seeds of perfectionism. I took on too much responsibility and started believing that I could prevent situations in which I might potentially feel anger or frustration or anything that felt uncomfortable. I used to work in emergency services and so I was a witness to many horrific situations for people.
And then I became a parent and there was a large part of me there still is, that wants to protect my child from experiencing any type of discomfort. I think this is a normal and natural desire for many of us. It also explains why we may not be willing to take any type of risk at all. We naturally want to prevent any type of misfortune that we can.
However, this can be a bit of a slippery slope because we can take it to the extreme, at least I did, in which you can become too protective, too guarded, too focused on prevention that we don't give ourselves the opportunity to get out and enjoy life. We become so focused on the negative that could happen, that we forget to spend an equal amount of time creating and enjoying the positive that is actually happening right now.
So the first step is to still experience the anger and frustration, not push against it, not resist or blame or shame ourselves for it and take our cues from it. Knowing that every feeling has a purpose. You can turn, I can't into, I can experience anger, frustration, overwhelm, sadness. That's where the empowerment comes from.
Owning the feeling and embracing it, not dismissing it, because dismissing it is really a form of resistance against it. I was recently working with a client through self-doubt around her business. Through our work together, she noticed that underneath the self-doubt was a feeling of sadness. This is quite common.
There are often layers of feelings that at first glance, they seem like maybe irritation as an example, but upon second look, we uncover anger or maybe even sadness or grief. The only reason that my client was able to uncover the sadness is because she was willing to stay with the self-doubt long enough to understand it and see what was underneath it.
Generally, we so quickly wanted dismiss, self-doubt as not helpful, even harmful, so we dismiss it or we try to change it into something else. We try to force ourselves into self-confidence. However, forcing ourselves into self-confidence never works. What we resist persists. All of the positive self-talk in the world won't lead to self-confidence if there's unacknowledged self-doubt or unacknowledged sadness underneath it.
I'm so proud of my client for being willing to stay with the self-doubt long enough to find the wisdom below it. It's not easy. We're not trained to do that, nor are we encouraged to do that. We're taught that fear and doubt is weakness, so it makes sense that we wouldn't want to acknowledge that fear to ourselves.
We might even criticize ourselves for feeling fear. However, fear is a very healthy, normal, and natural response to a perceived threat. So instead of beating ourselves up for feeling fear, for perceiving the threat, we need to own the fear and celebrate it. That's how we move through it. A helpful question around fear is what is this fear protecting me from?
This is also why the, the coaching container is such a powerful space because it's a safe and secure relationship that. Gives us the opportunity to explore those things that might be holding us back without judgment. It's a judgment free zone if you want to create that safety in your own self-coaching practice. I always recommend giving yourself lots of self-compassion and self-appreciation. That's the antidote to judgment. If you find that challenging. What you can do is you can tell your judgmental self to take just a short break, maybe even just 10 minutes, enough time to allow you to explore your feelings without judgment.
Creating this safe space for yourself allows you to take ownership and once you take ownership, not only do you get the benefit of responsibility, you also get the power that comes along with that responsibility. Ownership is the gateway to feeling empowered. One last thing that I'll leave you with around creating the feeling of empowerment is to spend some time actually experiencing that feeling within your own body.
So knowing what it feels like. Almost gives you a recipe or a template so that when you are trying to draw on that feeling of empowerment, creating that self-confidence for yourself, you have a memory by which you can draw upon to help you to create that feeling for yourself. That's what I have for you today, everyone.
I hope you have a wonderful, peacefully productive week. Take care. Are you looking for a coach who will help you increase your business profit while protecting your time and your wellbeing? If so, I'll invite you to check out my website, financialwellnesscoach.ca.