The Powerful Woman’s Manifesto

The Powerful Woman's Manifesto

Did you ever notice how different you are when you feel empowered vs. helpless? You know the emotions are different, and as a result, you think different, act different, be different. It’s energizing, invigorating, even inspiring.

Such empowered moments are, of course, when you most easily manifest what you want. You take the risks necessary to make leaps; throw caution to the wind; keep going on the adrenaline rush alone.

You’re invincible.

Inevitably we come down from the high and settle back into neutral, often still energized into action, though, with things generally rolling along. Then something doesn’t quite go as planned, and the doubt creeps in. It’s a slippery slope from invincibility to impotence, but we’ve all succumbed at one point or another to feeling powerless. Other people make choices that permanently change our lives, and even the most confident of us can get stuck feeling victimized.

Whether due to historical precedent, culture or biology (and maybe all three) women seem to have a harder time than men reclaiming their power after a downward spiral. After riding my own emotional roller coaster this year between confidence and doubt, abundance and lack, invincibility and fear, I had to ask why. Why powerful one day,

When You Think the Journey’s Over: Fear and Insights from the Scariest Flight of My Life

When You Think the Journey’s Over: Fear and Insights from the Scariest Flight of My Life

The truth in life is that we probably have countless brushes with death every day that we never know about.  Just crossing a busy city street or shuttling the kids to school, one careless driver more or less at exactly the right moment and your number could be up.

There’s nothing, however, like a violently turbulent flight to make you think maybe, finally, despite the overwhelming odds against crashing, this is really it.

Today I had that flight.

It was a routine Delta jaunt from West Palm Beach Florida (my home airport) to New York City for one of the seminars I teach there several times a year; routine for Delta, routine for me. I hadn’t clued in much to the weather other than to know it would be rainy in New York and to select the most appropriate coat to bring.

About half way through the two-and-a-half hour flight, we hit

Burning Down the House

burning down the house

 

There inevitably comes a time on any journey when you question everything you know.  Everything.

First, there’s the healthy questioning of what you were taught growing up.  By this I mean the belief systems you were conditioned with — the result of religions, cultures, schools, races, rules, or even simply your generation.  This is normal and natural since as we mature, our direct experience either does or does not align with these beliefs to support them and as the world changes, such beliefs either do or do not stand the test of time.

When direct experience doesn’t align or worse yet, is wildly contradictory to what we were taught, we realize such beliefs are someone else’s truth (or possibly even a complete lie) rather than our own.  Most of us learn to trust our direct experience instead and build on that.

A personal life philosophy can work well for a while.  Our seeking, searching, and questioning will eventually lead to answers, and direct experience will usually support our new found beliefs based on those answers.  Until one day it doesn’t.  That’s when you might arrive at a deeper, scarier, lonlier level of questioning.

I’m talking about that level of questioning.  Yeah, the level you get to when you think, “What if all this I now believe to be true actually isn’t?”

In other words, “What I’m wrong? What if I think I have it all figured out and I don’t? What if it’s all wrong? What if what I now hold dear that made sense five minutes ago is all hocus?”

The following brief parable emailed to me by a friend brought this up: