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My Journey
Life Designs - Empower your Mind, Body & Spirit....
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My Journey to
Empowerment My empowerment journey started when I was a young
child. There are several things that taught me how to empower people. These things include my journey, what I
have learned from my clients, research and of course training, . This process works well for a lot of people, but not
everyone. I have guided over 3000 people through the empowerment process. Some people had empowerment goals that were
small and some were large. Remember that an empowered state is fluid. You may be empowered in some parts of your life and not others.
Empowerment can come and go based on many factors. It is important to realize that you can be partially empowered and make a choice or choices
that lead you to be in a situation that is very disempowering. It is very easy to get locked into place and stay there.
I
use a lot of metaphors, visual and verbal, to help people start the process which is begins with gaining momentum in the direction
that you want to go. One of my most successful tools are my empowerment cards. I make them up while we are in
session. I give them to you to read multiple times a day in between our visits. I've given so many cards out that
my clients are running into one another, recognizing my cards in their purse or possessions (not knowing they were both seeing
me until then). My obesity was a result of a lot of factors and my weight loss is only a small part of my empowerment journey.
People ask me "how did you do it?" I say hundreds of small changes. We cannot maintain big changes
if these changes occur quickly. Large changes goes against human nature. We must break change into tiny changes,
ones that we can maintain. There are core issues to disempowerment and unless we work to resolve those core issues, our
situation is likely to return What is DISEMPOWERMENT? To me, disempowerment is a state of being and awareness where we feel held down, oppressed, and sometimes
smothered. The core issue for disempowerment is trauma and toxic shame. Toxic shame is the thoughts and feelings
of being flawed, worthless, contaminated and a mistake. Our biggest fear is the exposure of these flaws and rejection
or abandonment from this exposure. I often describe to clients that it is like you are in the middle of the football
field during the Super Bowl, you are by yourself, lying naked and everyone is looking at you and your flaws. Talk about
panic stricken. Generally we are not aware of shame, only the panic that causes reactionary behavior changes. You can
feel imprisoned. What is EMPOWERMENT? To me, empowerment means a state of being and awareness where we feel free to be ourselves.
That yes we make mistakes, but we are not a mistake. That we are okay just the way we are. Empowered is
a state where we are valid and worthy of connection. Our true self is free or not held down by toxic shame. We embrace
our authentic self along with our own personal set of short comings. We can feel light and free flowing, full of love
for ourselves and others. Along with empowerment is knowing who we are and setting boundaries with others to protect
our identity and our being. Recently I was introduced to Brene Brown's research on this subject. It was very validating
to find her research support and validate what I've been teaching to others the last 20 years. Empowerment is another name for self realization. Because of conditioning
from our environments our whole life we learn and believe a lot of false messages about ourselves. We are taught that
these things are facts. Believe me they are not. We are perfect at our core. We just have to learn how to
remove the untruths. Remove the layers of conditioning. Replace inaccurate messages with accurate messages. Thus
we unveil who we truly are. This process of conditioning is the root of problems.
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