Hello guys,

After a conversation on a different thread a fellow poster commented that he thought the concept of personal power was a flawed one. I think he meant in relation to building self-esteem but I will leave him to clarify that.

We've chatted a little and may have different concepts of this idea but I thought it would be interesting to start a thread and find out what YOU all think.

Here's my basic starting point:
'Personal Power' is the ability to use your resources (thinking-emoting-speaking-actions) to achieve the ends you desire.

Personal power starts with re-claiming ownership of these 'powers' or tools of consciousness.

Essentially personal power is having an acknowledged ownership of your T-F-S-A and being able to use and direct them at will to change things, inside and out.

I postulate, therefore, that personal power is essential to building self-esteem and self-confidence because if you don't feel/believe you own your T-F then you won't be able to acknowledge ownership of the states and frames necessary for building self-esteem.

I've created a product to help with this at Confidence and Esteem Building Audio - but what do you think? Agree? Disagree? Have a different view?

A massive amount of personal power has to do with having excellent "maps" of the terrain and well developed procedures for behavior... a whole lot of life depends on accurate pattern matching...

Bufo Marinus wrote:

A massive amount of personal power has to do with having excellent "maps" of the terrain and well developed procedures for behavior... a whole lot of life depends on accurate pattern matching...

Hi Bufo,

Thanks for your reply. I totally agree and yet...what about room for maps NOT of the territory that help us anyway? For example, what about people who believed something that everyone said couldn't be done? - and then they did it.

What about the belief that we are unconditionally worthwhile? Some might say that cannot be proven but it's VERY useful.

So, I agree but I believe there is a place for general-lie-sations that help us without an accurate match to the territory.What do you think?

Doug

Much of what is conventionally defined as success (big fat overgeneralized nominalization) is having an extensive toolkit of effective subroutines.... little snippets of debugged code that direct one to "do exactly this now".... many breakthroughs that's I've observed are the result of having an excellent library/toolkit of micro-routines and mini-routines... the breakthrough is often a brilliant recombination of preexisting micro-mastery "behavior dots" that have been formed into a new "big picture".... quite a bit of Malcolm Gladwell seems to be gesturing in that direction... like a musician who has mastered hundreds of quick licks, riffs, and ornamentations, or unexpected chord changes, and mastered them to the point that they are his own, can take a familiar work and develop it into a unique expression unlike any other..

"Personal Power is the ability to act" - Anthony Robbins.

I think that the ability to take massive intelligent actions towards your goals is "Personal Power".