Where Are You Transferring Your Personal Power?
I am close to wrapping up my first workshop series on Personal Power. One of the key points in the program is to notice. To notice what mood you are in, whether you are reacting or responding, and when you react, what patterns of behavior you repeat.
It’s a simple thing to notice, but it’s powerful. Becoming aware of who you are being in the moment, creates the space for you to make a conscious choice. Do I want to go down that path or not? Will this help or hinder me? How much am I letting this stress me out? How reliable is my thinking right now? In last week’s workshop, we explored the distinction between being a Reactor versus a Creator.
The Reactor
When life looks like it’s being done to us, when our experience looks like it comes from the outside in, we become reactive. We see life through the lens of there being an external event that has the power to create an internal experience.
External Event = Internal Experience
When we see life this way, our happiness, contentment, our emotions become dependent on the outside world. How other people treat us has an impact on how we feel. We need other people to change so we can feel ok. That’s why we sometimes feel compelled to try to control other people, and situations because if we can bend them to our will, then we can feel safe, secure, accepted, and valued.
When we believe our experience is dependent on the outside world, we become very rigid in our expectations. We need things to go a certain way, to go our way, for us to feel ok. But we can’t control the outside world so we can end up feeling disappointed and frustrated, we blame other people for our experience and it leaves us feeling insecure. We end up being bashed around the rocky waters of life waiting for the outside world to be different so we can feel a sense of peace.
Whenever we experience stress, tension, frustration, disappointment, anger, it’s an indication we have transferred our personal power to an external person or event. You have become a Reactor to life in that moment.
The Missing Link
The ultimate personal power is in understanding there is a pause, a gap, between the external event and your internal experience. The missing link is thought.
External Event = Thought = Internal Experience
We are experiencing our thinking 100% of the time.
How cool is that? We have the capacity to choose what we think, and how we respond to life. There is a buffer between the outside world and our internal experience.
I used to have a lot of tantrums when I was a kid.
There is many a photo of me red-faced and puffy-eyed, like this one taken when I was 7 years old. I was upset yet again that something hadn’t gone my way. Judging by the bat at my side, I probably lost at Swing Ball or felt like my brother wasn’t being fair. Even as a 7-year-old I remember there being a pause. A moment before I took the well-trodden path of reacting with upset, anger, and frustration. I was too young back then to pull myself out of my default reaction of having a tantrum, but I still noticed the pause and it’s in that pause we have a choice to create our response. Do I want to have a tantrum again and alienate everyone around me, or do I want to keep playing the game and try and win, do I want to tease my brother back, or do I want to go and do something more fun instead?
The same is true for us adults. In that pause between the event and our reaction is our ability to create our response and consciously choose the experience we want to have. When you understand this and apply it to life, you stop transferring your personal power to other people and situations.
Have you ever noticed how you end up regretting your reactive behavior? Why is that?
Reactivity is the default behavior. We blame the outside world for our experience, we feel justified in our reaction because something went ‘wrong’ or someone was ‘rude’. But we have a choice and the more we choose to let our default, unconscious reactions take the steering wheel, the more stress, tension, and anger we experience.
When we are low in consciousness, our quality of thought is low, we are the worst versions of ourselves and when we make decisions or take actions from that low level of understanding and perspective, we typically regret it when we come out of the state of mind that created it.
Seeing, really seeing, that our experience comes from our thinking, means we have a choice in how we want to perceive a situation.
Our thinking is shaped by our attitudes, our perspectives on that particular day. Sometimes, when we are feeling low, and stressed, we have less capacity to pause and choose our response. We are already in a reactive state of mind. But noticing you are in a low mood or feeling reactive is helpful because it allows you to consider slowing down. To take a walk. To take some time to rally yourself. To not get too caught up in the thinking that’s creating the experience.
Noticing is Consciousness in Itself
When you can see where you are in the landscape of your moods you can never be lost in your experience. Noticing you are in a low mood, creates the opportunity for you to not react. Even when you are low, you are not transferring your power to the outside world.
This understanding has had a huge impact on my life. Knowing that I am experiencing my thoughts, has helped me feel less insecure and less stressed overall. I don’t need other people to change for me to be ok. I can make choices about whether I want to be around some people or not, but I don’t expect them to be different anymore. As a result, I am less frustrated and disappointed in others. If someone lets me down or is rude, or disrespectful — that’s their internal experience, that’s a reflection of their choices or moods. I don’t have to let it rock my internal experience.
Noticing allows me to ask myself a question. What do I want to create? How do I want to respond?
The Perfect Design
Stress, tension, anger, all those ‘difficult’ feelings, are there for a reason. When we put our hand in a fire, we feel physical pain. It’s an alert system to tell you to take your hand out of the fire. When you notice those ‘negative’ emotions, it’s an alert system that your thinking has dropped in quality. It’s alerting you that you are transferring your power to the outside world. You are being reactive and buying into some low-quality thinking. Get off that train of thought, pause, slow down enough to free up some space to consider how you want to respond.
Our society is framed around an outside-in understanding and we are all conditioned to believe our internal experience comes from our external circumstances. But it doesn’t work that way. You are experiencing your thinking and the more you notice that connection for yourself, the more you see the role thought plays, the freer you will feel, the more stable and secure you will be.
Life is not being done to us. We are the creators of our experience. Start choosing how you want to respond to the world, and what you want to create.
If you want some support in being less reactive to life. If you want to feel more secure, more creative, and more powerful in how you show up, get in touch, and let’s connect. I can help you.
melanie@therestorativecoach.com
Melanie Hopwood is a Transformative Life & Leadership Coach, she supports her clients in making sustainable changes in their lives and careers. She creates a space of reflection and exploration so her clients can find what they really want out of their lives, and supports them as they take the first steps toward change.
www.therestorativecoach.com
