I had never really met anyone who was truly not empowered until I hosted a coaching program in Kansas City for women leaving prison. I had offered the program to an organization that provide re-integration services for these women, some of whom had been in prison for decades. The experiences I had with them, the transformation I saw in them, and the results of providing them with information on how to be empowered was inspiring and very fulfilling. If you do not think being empowered is important, you’ll understand why it has been a focus of my work for 20 years when you read or listen to this article.
I know what it is like to be disempowered after spending 5 years dealing with paralysis, two of them as a total quadriplegic with no motion below my neck and having to spend 2 years in the hospital. Even as a child, it was frustrating and scary, and I was completely dependent on others to care for me. Incapable of doing the smallest thing for myself, I remember waiting to be taken care of because I simply could not take care of myself.
When I volunteered to provide lifestyle coaching to an organization that worked with women leaving prison, I was not sure what I was going to encounter. I had never had any experience of people in prison and was hoping that I would be able to give them confidence, security, and some tools and resources to manage their lives.
I would like to say that the effort was successful from the start, but it was not. At first the women were quiet, hesitant, and not very trusting. That was understandable, given their history and the fact that some of these women had been in prison for 30 years or more.
But as time went by, and I coached them twice a month for about 2 hours each session, we got to know each other and they started opening up. They saw me as someone they could trust and who was there to share information to help them.
One day after I had been coaching for about 2 months, a woman named Mary approached me after our session and wanted to talk. She had just been released from a 30 year prison term for murdering her boyfriend, after she found him in bed with another woman. Mary was making an effort with the coaching and although she did not share much, she really listened. She asked me if I could help her manage the demands on her time and energy by the people in her neighborhood who were always imposing on her and she felt taken advantage of by.
We talked for a while about her concerns and what she wanted to achieve with this new level of control over her connections. She said she did not want to go back to prison but she did not know how to deal with her frustration and that people simply were not listening to her when she said no.
So I told her that I knew a way of saying ‘no’ that would stop that and asked if she wanted to try it. She was eager and would try anything.
So I did some role play with her and said “Mary, now you face that person who’s bugging you about things they want you to do and look them straight in the eye and say ‘Thank you for asking me but I’m not available so you will have to ask someone else.’ And you walk away.”
And another way of saying it is “I am not available today but maybe next week, let me check my schedule and commitments and I will get back to you.’
Mary said ‘can I really say that and will they listen?’ I said yes, you can say that and yes they will listen. So she practiced with me a few times until she felt comfortable, and we both left the facility where I did the coaching.
I thought about Mary a lot during the next two weeks, wondering how she was doing and whether she was able to use what I told her. So I was anxious to talk to her during the next coaching session. I arrived a few minutes early and was setting up for that day’s coaching lessons when Mary walked in, came over to me and gave me a huge hug. She was beaming, her smile lit up the room. She looked wonderful, there was a smile on her face, and she no longer looked anxious and worried.
She stood taller and held her head high (note here, Mary was a very big woman, nearly 6 feet tall and probably weighed 250 pounds).
I asked her how everything went and she was so excited to tell me it was far better than she had imagined. She said that she said that to several people who were asked her for favors, to do things for them, to go places and to do things she did not have time or the energy for. She said that she had said it exactly as we had practiced and was surprised that instead of arguing with her they said ‘ok, thanks anyway’ and walked on. When she said she was not available that day and maybe later was a possibility, they asked for other dates and said they would check back with her. Instead of bothering her with endless requests, arguing and fighting with her, they accepted her answer.
In that moment Mary went from disempowered to empowered, she felt in control of her energy, she was strong, and confident. I saw the change in her and it was amazing. I also knew that Mary would never be that sad, worried, disempowered woman again.
After that other women came forward and asked for help in different areas. I gave them tools and resources to learn how to say no with confidence, to manage their energy, to be in control of their responses, and especially, to stop being angry and frustrated when people imposed on them or were being difficult.
The coaching program was a success, and my students were changed forever. I wondered how different their lives could have been if they had learned these skills sooner. Maybe a lot. Maybe they would not have ended up in prison, maybe they would have gotten an education, a job, and had a completely different life path. I could not do anything about their past, but I could help them create a different path for the future.
And yes, Mary was the inspiration for my ‘Empowered No program’ which you can register for as part of my Unbreakable – the Codes for Absolute Empowerment program.
As soon as I gave these women the resources and information they needed to understand how to be empowered, they applied them immediately. No one wants to go through life feeling powerless, especially women who had suffered and paid a very high price for disempowerment.
Is it your time to be empowered? That’s the focus of my program – Unbreakable – The Codes to Absolute Empowerment – your framework for empowerment, which you can learn about at this link. We are born powerful and we have power, it gets diluted and scattered over the many years that we encounter negative experiences, life challenges, guilt, shame, blocks, limiters, and people who do not ‘love, honor and respect’ us. We take on the heavy burden of disempowerment and figure that is how our life will be. We live with and are raised by disempowered people, so we do not have anyone to teach us anything different.
Then one day that disempowerment takes its toll. For Mary and many of the other women in my coaching program it was a situation that sent them to prison for many years. For others it is a series of bad choices and decisions, terrible relationships, a lack of self confidence, self esteem, and a belief in new potentials.
Then we are on a downward spiral into that dark abyss of despair, hopelessness, helplessness, and fear. We need something to push us out of it but we can’t be bothered to do that if we’re in the throes of our depression, despair, and judgment.
Our once powerful self has become fragile, our energy field is weak, leaky, and scattered. We do not have the confidence to say no or the self worth to think we’re capable of something else.
Do you know some who goes through these cycles of bad choices and decisions and then repeats them over and over again? Once upon a time that was me, you can read about it in my book, From Victim to Victor. Maybe that’s you too, but it doesn’t have to be.
As I said earlier, Mary was the inspiration for my Empowered No program and many of the resources I shared with my women’s group are in that program. But before I could teach them how to say no because that requires a level of confidence they did not have, I had to work on their sense of worth and what they deserved so our first lessons were all about Self esteem, which is why this is the first program in the Unbreakable program. Without self esteem we have no sense of self worth or value because that self esteem is the source of those qualities.
If we do not value or esteem ourselves, we cannot get anyone else to value us. Why do we pick friends and partners who do not treat us well? While their behavior is not OK, the truth is they are mirroring our level of self esteem back to us. And they cannot do anything else.
You’ll never find someone who loves you more than you love yourself – I have been saying that since 2005. And it’s true.
NOTE: I am offering special 15 minute intuitive sessions now, offer expires December 18, 2023 and the 4 session annual subscription is available for a limited time (until December 21). You can learn more on the Connect page, where you’ll find all of the information about sessions and coaching. Click here to learn more. There are only a few spaces left for sessions before January 1. With your self-esteem established you can start working on your energy boundaries. It’s funny because with someone who has confidence and ahigh level of self-esteem, energy boundaries are automatically set in place and they automatically repel people who don’t want to respect them. On the other hand, with no energy boundaries, you become the victim to every taker, manipulator, and challenging person out there. But energy boundaries require that you value yourself enough to treat your time, energy, and effort like a valuable resource, and that you value yourself enough to curate who you connect with and who is able to connect with you.
With self esteem and energy boundaries you can no learn to say NO with firm grace and confidence. It is hard to say no when you just say that 2 letter word and then cringe because you know that there is going to be argument, denial, insistence, manipulation, coercion, and a lot of drama until you give up and just say yes. Has this happened to you before? Or you listen to the drama and you get angry and start lashing out, so people call you mean.
The key is to have the codes to Absolute Empowerment – the 3 programs in my Unbreakable program – working together so your self esteem helps you create energy boundaries and the both empower you to say no in a way that does not invite criticism and a lot of arguing.
If you are feeling fragile and frustrated, you have created the life that reflects what you learned from the people around you and developed from your own experience. While we would love to have a perfect, trouble-free life, that doesn’t happen. Even with the most empowered learning there will be challenges to face and you will have to try out your empowerment exercises, like Mary did.
Can you say no with conviction? Do you value yourself enough to create strong energy boundaries? Do you insist on managing your energy and connections and limiting them to people who can ‘love, honor, and respect’ you? You can and you should and my Unbreakable – the Codes for Absolute Empowerment can show you how to do that. Learn more at this link and sign up so that you are empowered, you have clarity, you are confident, and you know your value and insist on it in every aspect of your life.
Last I heard of Mary she was attending community college to become a hairdresser, it was something she had always wanted to do. Wherever she is and whatever she is doing, I know that she is a strong, confident, empowered woman who has great self esteem and who knows her worth, who maintains good energy boundaries so she only has respectful, loving people in her life, and she knows how to say no and mean it.
====================================================================
Copyright (c) 2023 by Jennifer Hoffman. All rights reserved. You may quote, copy, translate and link to this article, in its entirety, on free, non-donation based websites only, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website. All other uses are strictly prohibited including using this article as part of a paid subscription or service which consolidates articles from various authors.
