Where in your life are you avoiding power? Can’t think of one? Then look at where you feel like a victim or you have some massive jealousy going on and you’ll find under that a need that’s going unfulfilled to express your inherent or earned strength. I guarantee if we explored your life we would find areas where you are extremely powerful acting in total confidence and others where you’re doing the opposite.

Where are the victim areas of your life? Where are you denying that you have the skills? Is it your business? Is it your marriage? Your finances?  What crisis do you keep repeating in order to avoid facing the need to take the power into all areas? Where are you distracting yourself? Where are you saying yes when you should say no to more drains on your time and energy and is this ongoing drama the way you keep yourself weak?

We have a tendency to approach our businesses whether or not we’re self-employed as though we have no power, as though success however you define it is completely out of our control. To some degree a large number of things in all areas of our life are outside of our control however we have a great deal of world defining power in our control and that is the attitude in which we approach our potential for success. Your boss may be an unethical pig but you need not give him and his petty antics any more energy than absolutely necessary. Co-workers are jerks? Ok well do your internal work, be polite as necessary and look for the areas of untapped power and skills sets you can begin accessing. It also helps to secretly write your resignation letter at least once a week!

The issue is most often not one of having no power but rather one of failing to generalize competency from one area to another. When you train a dog to sit you master it at home, then out in public, then in a crowd, etc. You’re teaching the dog that “sit” applies anywhere any time. We generalize skills from one area to another about as well as dogs do which is to say we’re not so great at it.

If we believe or have demonstrated that we have skills to learn new things (and we all have) and that if said skills are applied with regular consistency those skills can grow a business then we approach every new business with that same attitude of eventual success. We understand from previous experience that life is not linear, many mistakes will be made and we don’t let fear stop us for too long.

Without that confidence we tend to approach our business as a maybe, as a possibility, with a kind of sort of energy that leaves us floundering in the deep end of the pool. We approach tasks with an internalized belief that our efforts will be wasted because we don’t recall that we have learned new things in many areas and done well. Just because running a business is new we forget all that’s required is to use the same skills we used to get through times times in school, at other jobs, in difficult relationships, etc..

Jealousy or frequent fits of whining are both good red flags to tell us where we’re in denial of our own awesomeness. The only reason we ever experience jealousy is when we feel that we cannot do what the person in front of us is doing. We think either we don’t have the skills or we don’t have the strength or we think that we’re not smart enough or good enough or our teeth aren’t sparkly enough as if any of these alone are enough to predict success. The truth of the matter is it’s power and the owning of it that indicate success.

I have to agree with Barbara Stanny that if we were standing fully grounded in our power we wouldn’t ever feel jealous, we wouldn’t ever become paralyzed by the normal levels of doubt that come with new ventures. We could not be overcome because we would know that we had skills or we would recognize that we need to get our learn on.

There’s a time to build skills and a time to implement them and jealousy means you need to do one or the other. You need to build the skills or you need to implement and generalize the skills that you already have and are not using. Jealousy and envy can be seen as simple indicators that you need to evaluate where you are in the skill utilization process, that’s all.

Take a look around and find where you feel at the mercy of life or others and do a course correction. Thank your victim-y feelings for letting you know that you need to claim more power in some area of your life and then do so. If it’s hard to access the feeling of power straighten your shoulders and stand up as tall as possible. It’s an easy physical trick to use because your body knows how you stand when you feel powerful so taking the stance can help you access the feeling.

Where do you need to claim power today?