They say struggling is the essence of life. Without it, you won’t grow and mature as an individual. However, if such is indeed the case, this also gives life a lot of opportunities to knock and wear you down.
Self-empowerment involves consciously choosing to take charge of your destiny. It means that no matter what life gives you, whether lemons or stones, you deliberately choose to hold your ground. It includes making positive and confident decisions and taking action. Self-empowered individuals acknowledge their strengths and weaknesses and use these to take on whatever situation comes their way.
When you’re self-empowered, you become healthier in both your mind and body because you’re able to make significantly better decisions for yourself. On the contrary, having low self-esteem makes you weaker, making you more vulnerable to depression, anxiety, and other serious issues.
In shorter words, self-empowerment is a process of bettering yourself. But how?
By Exercising Regularly
Exercising doesn’t just benefit your body but your mind as well. When you exercise, your brain releases endorphins. These are your body’s natural painkillers, which help create a general feeling of well-being. With your brain producing endorphins regularly, you increase instances of feeling satisfied with yourself instead of feeling down. Likewise, exercising helps with better blood circulation resulting in improved mental clarity and performance.
Therefore, exercising regularly can help boost your confidence.
By Meditating Regularly
When you take time to regularly reflect and meditate, you give yourself more opportunities to rest and listen to your body and what it needs. Listening and understanding yourself helps you become more self-aware, leading to self-empowerment.
Here is a list of mediations which you can do during your free time:
● Yoga: Yoga is a group of physical, mental, and spiritual practices. It mixes physical and mental disciplines to achieve a peaceful mind and helps ease the tension in your body.
● Journaling: Journaling is the process of writing your thoughts and feelings every day and reflecting on them. The purpose of writing about these is to have the means to remember and think of why you felt that way, how you can avoid feeling such next time, or how you can better cope with that feeling.
● Mindfulness Meditation: By its name, mindfulness meditation is the process of being fully aware of your thoughts. It allows you to anchor yourself on the present – where you are, what you’re doing, and whatever you’re feeling at the moment – so you’re able to better control your emotions and reactions.
On top of these, you can also meditate and learn by reading books for spiritual growth and guidance. Books with this theme usually offer a lot of help for people looking to improve their lives.
By Listing Things Down
You can also empower yourself by listing things about yourself you’re aware of, such as your passions, dreams, likes, and dislikes. Jot down whatever you want to write about yourself. You may make it as detailed as an autobiography – it’s all up to you. It may seem unimportant, but when you list things down, you get to have something to remind you of who you are and what are the things you want to achieve. Doing this can help ground yourself whenever you don’t feel like yourself or when you feel unmotivated and lost.
By Acknowledging your successes
In line with jotting things down as a reminder, you can also list your achievements every day and look back at them whenever you feel doubtful of yourself. But acknowledging your success doesn’t finish after you’ve written them down. You should also practice not downplaying your achievements.
A lot of people unconsciously do this. Whenever they do or achieve something, they sometimes hold themselves back from celebrating, thinking, “Anyone could do that.” While this certainly makes you humble, it only damages your opinions about yourself. Make it a habit to affirm yourself whenever you achieve anything. Emphasize the fact that you’ve done it instead of immediately comparing yourself to others.
Don’t talk about anyone. Instead, say: I did it.
By Not beating yourself up over mistakes
Nobody is perfect, and that includes you.
As humans, it’s only normal for us to commit mistakes. But how you react to them is solely on you. Instead of moping, use them to encourage growth instead. For instance, think about how next time, you’re surely not going to make another mistake. Or that with that mistake, you’ve learned something new about yourself.
Beating yourself over a mistake discourages you from taking any more risks and trying out new experiences in the future. It also prevents you from growing as a person. But while committing mistakes do have benefits and advantages, this doesn’t mean you should encourage yourself to commit them.
In life, even though you feel as if you’re already confident, there can still always be situations where your confidence will get shaken down. Not everything’s going to go your way. There will always be ups and downs, wins and loses in life, and it’s up to you how you’re going to react to them. But with these steps, you can keep your head up.