An Empowered You in 2022
Becoming Your Best Self in the New Year by: Vin Infante
Hey you! Yeah you, reading this article, you’re looking to find empowerment, right? Did you try the grocery store, maybe the mall, perhaps the local bodega? You did?! And it wasn’t on the shelf right there for you to grab!? Well then where the Hell do we find it? It’s actually much closer than you may think, pretty readily available, and the best part…. It’s FREE! You may have guessed I’m having a little fun with you. The truth is to be empowered is to actually pull parts of yourself out that you didn’t know existed, or maybe they did exist at one point and you locked them away to deal with some sort of pain; or you felt that you weren’t good enough to be empowered and bold so you shrank that part of you till it was unrecognizable.
Well the good news is there’s hope. You CAN become that bad-ass empowered super star you know deep down you were meant to be. The first part of empowerment is learning to master your mindset. Everything in life boils down to the narratives we tell ourselves, about life, people, experiences, and most importantly ourselves. A narrative is essentially a little narrator living in your head giving you interpretations of the world around you. They tell a story and give you info based on their own thoughts. Another fun fact about your narratives is they get programmed into the subconscious mind, which means your views of life become habitual. For a comprehensive one-liner it means: You become programmed to think a specific way based on your interpretations,. Isn’t that fascinating?!
Most of the emotions we experience each day is a result of our subconscious programming and the brain’s ability to recall familiar situations and pull a familiar emotion/response for it. On average humans have roughly 75,000 thoughts per day and the research suggests that 91% of these are unconscious. This means that to empower yourself you need to be more aware of not only your thoughts, but how you respond to them, because they are always shaping your reality, every second of every day.
If you can conceptualize this thought, you are on the way to empowerment: “We do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are.” This is a reflection of how we view life. If you see life as hard and terrifying, you will see everything as if it were a problem. Your top emotions may be somewhere along the lines of fear, anxiety, sadness, helplessness, exhaustion, rejection, and hopelessness. If you, however, view every day as a blessing and a chance to live in a beautiful state you may experience a range of emotions along the lines of joy, happiness, gratitude, curiosity, eagerness, peace, love, and hope.
One of the best ways to start empowering yourself is to challenge all the narratives in your life. This isn’t an easy task, this requires a high level of consciousness. (Don’t worry, I know some tricks for that, and by the end of this you will too!) As I mentioned before, everything we do is essentially run off unwritten scripts that we have programmed into our minds/bodies. The way to start chipping away at these programs is to analyze them in depth. One amazing exercise is to journal every day for about 3 weeks to a month, and make notes of every emotional response you have. You’ll begin to notice that patterns will form within the time frame, and these are your programs.
As you learn more about your programming you will be able to start actually challenging the thoughts. To challenge your programs and thoughts is to really poke holes in the false logic that was formed, the way to do this is with higher quality questions. Instead of indulging in your emotions or thought patterns ask why you feel this way, is it logical or illogical, what can you do to feel a different way, what would you like to feel right now, and how can you take control over this situation to resolve it? By constantly questioning thoughts and feelings you will find that their logic begins to fall apart like a sand castle that’s getting rained on.
The biggest problem we have with unlocking our inner leader’s and mastering our mindsets is really our own ability to question everything. To drag the subconscious into the conscious and make better sense of it. One of the biggest sayings that I learned that shaped so much of my own self work was the phrase “feelings aren’t facts” which is 100% true, they aren’t feelings ARE indicators. It’s your job to understand what they are indicating, not just habitually respond to things. Don’t you think your life would be drastically different if instead of responding to your emotions, you questioned them more?
The truth is empowering yourself is as hard as it is difficult. You can live an extremely empowering and fulfilling life by asking better questions and breaking habitual patterns. However this requires more mindfulness, patience, and curiosity. This year for 2022, I would love to give you a challenge, as I would with any client, so if you’ll allow me, please let me coach you. My challenge to you is simple, when you feel an emotion, resist the urge to react, and ask a question to yourself about it. Get curious about yourself, and work on really understanding how your feelings are guiding the direction of your life, I promise if you do this, the results will be completely life altering! Good luck, let’s crush 2022!