Power Trip
How to Take Control of Your Own Life
Personal power is all in your head
When we think about power, we typically think about it as the ability to influence others: through coercion, through manipulation, through punishment.
But power can also be more inward-facing. Your sense of personal power is a mental state, encompassing your attitudes and beliefs about the extent to which you can control your own life, success, and happiness. In Psychology Today, psychologist Robert Firestone describes it this way:
Personal power is based on strength, confidence, and competence that individuals gradually acquire… It is self-assertion and a natural, healthy striving for love, satisfaction, and meaning in one’s interpersonal world. [Personal power’s] primary aim is mastery of self, not [mastery of] others.
As a life coach and social worker, I often meet people through my practice who are looking for more personal power. They want to be happier at work. They want a greater sense of purpose and direction. Most of all, they want to improve their self-confidence. They come to me because they’re sick of feeling helpless, and they crave more control over their own lives. What I try to help them realize is that they can’t cultivate more personal power until they make a radical change in how they…
