Personal power is a source of internal strength and intrinsic energy that you can utilize to accomplish your personal and professional goals. It is generated from a combination of your traits and personal characteristics, including your values, beliefs, and behaviors. You can increase effectiveness in living in alignment with your purpose and at the same time improve your personal productivity to achieve your goals by tapping into your personal power more often and learning how to have it source your actions, interactions and outcomes.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?”
— Marianne Williamson
What is Personal Power?
While there are many connotations and references for utilizing personal power to have influence over other people and situations, in the context of this writing we will view personal power more as a state of mind and being. It is the way we relate to people and our working view of the world. Robert W. Firestone Ph.D. wrote an article published in Psychology Today in 2009 called Personal Power where he offers a definition that states, “Personal power is based on strength, confidence, and competence that individuals gradually acquire in the course of their development. It is self-assertion, and a natural, healthy striving for love, satisfaction, and meaning in one's interpersonal world.”
In working with this depiction of personal power, a question that comes to mind is, How do we go about attuning to our personal power? It appears we could all be capable of harnessing the power to strive for love, satisfaction, and meaning in our interpersonal worlds, so what gets in our way?
Unfortunately, it is usually our own fears, patterns of thinking, and habitual operating conditions that get between us and attuning to our personal power successfully. Attunement in this context is our ability to be aware and respond consciously, to react to what is going on from a place of calm. As discussed in our previous blog post many of us are not practiced in operating from such a place. We have typically been conditioned to operate and react from a place of fear which triggers our brain’s stress response and usually causes us to fight, flee, or freeze. Stepping into our personal power requires that we retrain our brains to see perceived threats as opportunities to respond and own our strength, confidence, and competence. It requires that we practice being in a state of awareness that taps into our power and does not shy away from it.
How Can We Achieve Personal Power?
Fortunately, there are roadmaps and methods that have been proven to successfully ignite the development of personal power and tools to sustain it and use it for the greatest of good. There are coaches in the field with a breadth and depth of knowledge and experience in leading people to tap into and hone their personal power.
One such coach is Margaret Graziano, CEO of KeenAlignment. In August of 2022, KeenAlignment held an immersion program called Awaken the Leader Within, and one of the participants praised Graziano for the way she engages people and inspires people to awaken to their potential.
The participant, Kaya Bredeson stated, “I imagined the Awaken the Leader Within immersion was going to be lighthearted and a break from the usual ways we connect with people that we work with. I got far more than I bargained for. Magi has a skillful way of cultivating a space where true growth happens, new realizations form, and she sets you up with a tangible action plan to take everything you learn and use it to become who you were always meant to be. She sets the stage for brave conversations and vulnerability in the best ways. I was challenged to face my fears and take a deep look at the things that hold me back from being the version of myself that always felt out of reach. I thought I had a decent amount of personal power before her program, and now 9 months after it I believe I am just beginning to discover how powerful I really am.”
Attuning to personal power is a unique journey for each of us and being successful in that journey requires that we are willing to be radically honest about where we are developmentally and where we wish to be. Many of us will leave our potential untapped due to fear, lack of resources, or because we do not recognize our worth. Regardless of the reason, it is KeenAlignment’s noble cause to liberate the human spirit and their skilled team of professionals ensures this is done by giving space and resources to anyone they can, specifically designed for unleashing personal power in all aspects of people’s lives.
Visit keenalignment.com to find out more and start your journey toward attuning personal power today.