Image: Muscle-flexing optional (via Youtube)
Here’s a question: in the past week, have you:
(a) felt like “a fraud”
(b) said ‘Yes’ to doing things you didn’t really want to, or
(c) uttered the phrase “I can’t” more times than you can recall?
Maybe you’ve done one of these things; maybe you’ve done all of them. While they seem like normal, harmless behaviours, they could also say a lot about how you’re currently feeling about yourself. More specifically, how empowered you’re feeling.
We hear a lot about empowerment and how to achieve it, but we need to be equally mindful of disempowering ourselves — that is, doing or thinking things that erodes our confidence and self-belief, whether or not we realise it at the time.
“We often think of disempowerment as something that is done by other people to us, however it is also something that we do to ourselves. There are certain automatic thoughts and habitual behaviours that take away our sense of mastery and power,” explains psychologist Victoria Kasunic.
Unfortunately, it can be hard to pick up on these because they happen in such an unconscious way. Kasunic says women tend to be more susceptible to disempowering themselves than men, because they’re often driven to foster connection over autonomy. (Post continues after video.)
However, personality factors also come into it. “Generally, people who are sensitive and empathic to others have more of an issue with this, as their ability to put themselves in another person’s shoes also means that they may struggle to put their needs and desires before those of other people,” Kasunic says.
