Six Steps to Personal Empowerment

Identify a goal that is focused on power.

This might be, for example, to increase your influence over your colleagues, or to have more influence over your family’s choice of holiday destination.

Increase your knowledge

Your next step is to understand more about the subject or situation. For example, if you wish to have more influence over your colleagues, you need to understand the politics in the organisation. To influence your family’s holiday choices, you need to know what each person wants, and who has the most influence at the moment.

Increase your self-efficacy, or belief that you can achieve.

Before you to take action, you need to believe that you can achieve. Knowing that you have the necessary information can help. Understanding your strengths and weaknesses will also help you to understand where you are most likely to achieve.

Increase your skills and competence

You may need to improve your skills to become more influential. However, as you start to talk to people more, and try to influence them, you will rapidly learn what works, and therefore develop your skills!

Take action – and keep taking action

Personal empowerment means not being ‘knocked back’ by the first problem we encounter, but having the resilience and persistence to keep going and seek other ways to achieve our goals.

Assess your impact

Empowerment is about changing the impact that you have on others and on events. It is therefore important to assess your impact. At first, you may not see much change, but even small changes count as success.