Are You Ready to Find Your Personal Power Zone?

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“I’m finally ready to own my own power, to say, ‘This is who I am.’ If you like it, you like it. And if you don’t like it, you don’t. So, watch out; I’m gonna fly.”

Oprah Winfrey

How to find your personal power

Spoiler alert! Power doesn’t come from who you know, what you do, what you own, how you look, or how much money you have in the bank. It comes from unconditional love you have for yourself and embodying your talents and gifts. Your personal power – your zone of power – is defined by your personal truths that nurture you and form the foundation of your life force.

Your personal power zone contains or is bounded by your personal truths. Knowing your personal truths is essential to authentic leadership and forming your own leadership style. When you embody your authentic leadership style, you will be more satisfied, productive, and effective.? Anchoring your personal truth in your body and your mind is as necessary as having a compass, GPS system, or chart to map your current location and your destination.

Finding your personal power zone requires clarity, and the ability to see the big picture and the steps required to achieve your goals.

Your personal power consists of your level of clarity, confidence, creativity, and courage to stand in your personal truths. To embody your personal truths daily, you need to answer these questions:

• What do I appreciate about my strengths, ambitions, and motivations?
• What gives my life meaning and purpose?
• What do I value and want?
• What are my boundaries?
• What are the problems I want to solve or the changes I want to make in this world?
• What is my personal definition of success and how will I measure my success?
• How can I become more conscious, intentional, and authentic?

The answers to these questions become the foundation of your personal truths and become the standards by which you will measure yourself. Without knowing your personal truths, you have no way of knowing whether you are growing, evolving, or contributing to the world. Without asking these questions, you will not experience your inspiration, energy, motivation, momentum, or life force. When you know your truths, you establish for yourself and the world that you respect yourself and others.

Knowing your personal truths is imperative to maintaining and raising the level of your personal power. Getting to know your personal truths is one of the most important steps you can take to accelerate yourself toward your goals. When you stand in your personal truth daily, you will be inspired, guided, and prosperous in your life, career, and business.?

Your truths are your compass and your barometer as an authentic leader. Managing your personal power levels is part of your self-care routine and is a requirement of accelerating you toward your goals. If you are like most people, you move in and out of your personal power zone moment to moment, unconsciously.

When you learn to monitor and manage your personal power, you can stay in your personal power zone longer. When you are in this zone, you experience a “flow” state. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, describes the traits, benefits, and ways of finding your flow state.

When you feel focused, happy, strong, empowered, and engrossed in the moment or activity, you are in your flow state or power zone. These moments will make you feel alive, satisfied, and productive. Getting into and staying in your flow enables you to experience more energy and results. Learning to power up is learning how to move into your flow to accelerate and sustain your personal power and your results.

To accelerate yourself forward toward your goals, it is important to find your personal power zone, as well as the strategies that put you into and keep you in that zone. Equally important is your ability to quickly learn the patterns or ways of operating that draw you out of your power zone or those situations where you leak your power.

To identify this power zone, start by asking yourself these personal power questions to assess if you are containing or leaking your personal power. Ask yourself:

• Am I operating from my strengths? (Abilities, ambitions, accomplishments, attitudes, agency, and authority)
• Am I designing my life, career, and business in alignment with life’s purpose?
• Am I making my choices and decisions based on my values?
• Am I acting and communicating without fear?
• Am I backing myself in my decision making?
• Am I creating healthy boundaries?
• Am I comfortable making choices, leading, expressing myself, and leveraging resources when the outcome is uncertain?
• Am I inspiring myself and others to imagine and innovate to add value?
• Am I connecting within and with others to create, celebrate, and sustain change?
• Am I developing myself to be more a conscious, intentional, and authentic leader?

Your answers will help you begin to understand the mindsets you use naturally and those you may want to develop to close your power gaps. If you answer “yes” to these questions, you are taking personal responsibility to manage your personal power zone. You are setting yourself up for success as an authentic leader and powering up your leadership.

When you keep your energy and personal power reserves high, you are in a better position to achieve your goals. If you answered “no” to these questions, you are at a choice point. You can decide to close a gap, build your mindsets, and develop a roadmap to achieve your goals. Or you can stay where you are. Refer to these questions regularly because the answers will change!

Creating your personal power container

As you form your intent to increase your personal power reserves, it is equally important to focus daily on creating the container that holds your personal power.? This container fuels your mind, body, and spirit connection to your personal power, which enables you to tackle your goals. This container holds the space for both your personal power and your positive energy, and can define a boundary from the fears, limiting beliefs, and turmoil that comes with daily life.?

During this transformational journey, you will be challenged, shaken, scared, exuberant, and confident. You must learn to hold yourself with self-compassion and to contain your personal power. You must learn to trust yourself – your intuition and your choices.

To create your personal safe space and build your container, you must be willing to:?

• Recognize your strengths and accomplishments and be willing to rewrite your personal narrative as you evolve, grow, and gain more insight into your abilities, value, the progress on the changes you are making, and the impact you are creating.
• ?Create an inspiring vision of what success looks like for you that fuels your ambition and motivates you toward your goals.
• ?Be clear on your goals and plan for achieving your definition of success, which inspires your confidence and courage to navigate beyond real and perceived barriers.
• ?Know your personal truth and watch your confidence and courage increase in the face of adversity, which can boost your decision-making and problem-solving ability, increase your motivation to achieve, and reduce stress.
• ?Be self-aware and embrace all aspects of yourself, which amplifies your self-trust, confidence, and resilience, and can increase your levels of satisfaction and happiness at each stage of your leadership development journey.
• ?Know and befriend your emotions – they are indicators of your thoughts, beliefs, and dreams, and can indicate areas where you feel conflicted, fearful, or powerless.
• Learn to reflect and reframe your personal assessments of yourself and your progress, and bring to the surface buried or unconscious emotions, beliefs, influences, or patterns that limit you.? Start by noticing when your Inner Critic calls your choices into question.? Look for damaging ways of thinking that hold you back and begin advocate for yourself by reframing your thought, beliefs and becoming curious about emotions that block your momentum from moving forward.?

Building your container for your personal power and your personal truths is essential to accelerating and powering up your leadership. This will call you to know your passion and purpose, which is referred to as your mission or your “why.” Margie Warrell, PhD describes a process for this in her Forbes article Do You Know Your “Why?” 4 Questions To Find Your Purpose. Building your container to hold your personal power will have many benefits.? First among them: building your self-awareness and finding your personal truth.? ?

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How do you power up your leadership?

To begin the next steps in your journey of transformation, choose one or more goals for powering up your leadership in your life, career, and business. Begin to consider your current relationship to your personal power and learn about how you embody your personal power. Then move on to monitoring and managing your personal power. This will require you to reconnect with the sources of your personal power.

To get started, here are some questions you can ask yourself:

• What does it feel like to be in my power and what pulls me out of my power?
• ?What mindsets can I adopt to shift into my power??
• ?As I raise my power and learn to manage my personal power for good, what is the problem I am solving in my life, career, or business?
• ?What is my purpose for making a change for myself and those around me?
• ?What steps or pivots can I make to shift back into my power zone?
• ?How does my level of personal power contribute to the solution I want to create?
• ?What is the specific change I want to achieve within myself to solve the problem?

These questions require you to have a sense of your personal power, and how you tap into and manage your internal resources to raise your power and to motivate yourself and others to get the results and impact that you are seeking.

I came to Sydney Australia to live my life differently—to find live my life without fear and regret.? I made a conscious choice to challenge myself to step up and take responsibility for my choices even when there were chances that I could fall, felt like giving, or up, or go back into my comfort zone.? When I chose to learn to sail, I was excited about the idea of sailing, but I was also afraid, however, I learned to stand in my personal power, living true to what I wanted for myself, what I believed, and what was important to me.?

I asked the questions you see above and connected to my power source—acknowledging all that I was capable of, and knowing and accepting who I was—the good, the bad, and the ugly.? This challenge and others that I chose for myself required me to live and speak with authenticity and truth, and to make choices that felt right for me.?

I advocated for myself and was committed to my self-discovery and growth, setting boundaries and rules to live by that prevented me from giving my power away.? Join me and find ways to start standing in your personal power:

• Identify your values and what is important to you.? Know what you believe in and what lifts you up.
• Set boundaries.? These boundaries are essential to protecting your personal power and help you communicate your needs and protect your time and energy.
• Practice self-care.? Put yourself first and care for your needs because it helps you be confident and energized.
• Speak your truth.? Be honest with yourself and others by expressing authentically and without fear of judgement.
• Act—activate your personal power and move toward your goals and dreams.? Be proactive, don’t wait for others to make things happen for you.

When I learned to sail, there was so much to learn.? I hated the discomfort of being a novice, making mistakes, or letting the crew down during a race.? I kept with it because I knew the experience of sailing was teaching me so much about myself and helping me step into my personal power.? It took time and practice, and it was worth it. I learned that stepping into my power was a journey and not a destination.

When you stand in your power, you outwardly project your strengths, accomplishments, abilities, ambitions, agency, authority, assertiveness, attitudes, and mindsets. When you stand in your power, you are conscious of the demands and forces around you. As a result, you make conscious choices to raise yourself and others, and embrace this power for good.

If you are ready to find your personal power, then you are ready to accelerate toward your goals!

My new book Accelerate You! will give you the insights and tools to power up your leadership, life, career, and business, including:

• ?5 power gaps limiting your success.?
• 5 mindsets you can use to increase your sense of personal power and close your power gaps.
• 5 steps or power pivots that will accelerate you toward the future you desire.
• Much more!

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Accelerate You! is packed with researched-based strategies, tips, and hacks that will help you create your own playbook to power up your leadership and achieve your goals in life, career, and business.

Jeri Childers, PhD, is the founder of Accelerating You! which provides coaching, leadership, and business development services for leaders, entrepreneurs, and business builders.? Dr Childers is the author of the book, Accelerate You! The power pivots, mindsets, and steps to power up your leadership.? Jeri works with business accelerators and organizations that want a coach or business catalyst to commercialize their ideas, enabling them to startup, scaleup, and lead high impact change.? Dr Childers offers leadership development services, particularly for women and the organizations that seek to advance them.? For top-level career and leadership growth resources, training, and coaching, visit JeriChilders.com.? Are you ready to make big changes in 2024? Check out Jeri’s book Accelerate You!

#AccelerateYou! #Success #Leadershipdevelopment #bettercareer #FemaleLeaders #FemaleFounders #ClaimYourPower

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