Does This Make Me Feel Powerful

I was skipping along merrily and with blissful ignorance in 2019 thinking I was well on my way to bringing my little venture to a whole new level. There were so many warning signs but I paid attention to none.

Like when it took me ages to get over the flu I managed to come down with or when a few months in a row I forgot to make my regular mortgage payments on time.

Don't worry, the bank was ringing me, ever so kindly, to remind me how remiss I was. Paid the same bill twice in a row while not paying another, pushing my body from one weekend to the next with not enough sleep and running on caffeine fumes. To me that was just a kind of normal.

I was brought up by parents who never stopped, always cramming something that "had to be done" in every single second of the day. So busy-ness was in my veins. Busy was what all good people, productive people, people of worth did.

This 45 (give or take a few) year old belief was challenged and turned on its head at the end of 2019. I didn't see it coming from all the busy-ness. What wasn't in my diary didn't exist in my universe. Burnout wasn't in my diary and wasn’t something I did. Or so I thought.

You know that thing you think can only happen to other people. Not you. Yeah, that.

It's amazing what you notice about yourself when you come up for air for a second and are forced into self-awareness.

Mine started with a particularly horrific period. My normal mild muscle and joint ache was now excruciating. I had heart palpitations multiple times a day. No matter what I ate, my digestive system was protesting loudly. The amount of hair I was losing every wash, you would have thought I was on chemotherapy. I couldn't go from our lounge room into the kitchen and back without feeling like I have climbed KII without an oxygen tank.

I think you get the picture.

All this just a sudden hit of realisation one day when I had a moment to come back to my body. First that hit and then the realisation of powerlessness.

All these things were happening and I felt I had no power over my own body anymore, my mind was doing its own thing as well.

I felt the powerlessness of not being able to control how I responded to my environment and my life.

Shutting down was never an option I considered until I fell into that black hold of burnout.

Enter the full-on panic attack.

That didn't help. Surprised? I wasn't.

I shut down.

I stopped posting on my social media, I stopped reading and responding to my emails. I stopped everything.

For someone who always has control, I felt this was the only thing I was able to control.

All the while the guilt of not working on my business has kicked in after 2 or 3 weeks. The anxiety started again. The confusion.

What do I do?

Do I make myself go back to how it was before my meltdown?

Just the thought of it made me nauseous.

I had to do more of doing less. Just reducing my biz stuff workload wasn't enough.

I decided to cut it completely. Radical decision but radical change requires stuff that's just as radical.

I had no idea that I will find power in stepping away from something completely.

I knew that biz and leadership wasn't the only area of my life I needed to revolutionise.

I hated that powerless feeling of being in burnout mode and clawing some of my power back was a priority and I knew it.

I was tempted to set a big goal for myself and just tackle it head-on but I quickly realised that it's that attitude that got me into burnout to start with.

You can't get yourself out of a jam using the strategy that got you into it in the first place. So, how about the complete opposite!

Instead of cramming stuff into every free minute I had, I worked on clearing stuff. Not in the Marie Kondo kind of way of what brings me joy can stay. Nope.

My question, instead of "does this bring me joy" was "does this make me feel powerful".

Oh boy! Is that a trigger or what!

Power is such a taboo!

I had all sorts of hangups about it.

Like, power is bad.

How dare I have power.

Power is only for the dark side - very Star Wars-ish, I know!

Does this make me power-hungry?

Triggers, triggers, triggers, triggers!

It was tempting to do the love and light thing and "let it all go with love", which surprised me.

Instead I decided to sit with the discomfort that word power evokes in my body.

I say evokes because even though I worked through a whole bunch of shit that triggers me about being powerful, I still have plenty more to explore.

I decided that I will, deploy this question every time I have to make a decision or I feel like I'm falling back into my pre-burnout habits.

Does this make me feel powerful?

Fuck it was hard at first. Because when your body and your mind are both fighting the very idea of power, how can you make a decision coming from that place?

So I floundered through the first few weeks. I got pissed off with myself for teetering on the edge of my pre-burn out self a few times. I got annoyed with myself also, for being too harsh on myself.

Felt like I just couldn't win.

One word kept coming up so much, I felt like telling it or whoever the messenger of it was, to just fuck off.

That word was SURRENDER.

I'm familiar with that word. A mentor of mine brought it up with me a few years ago. Just surrender, Andrea, and your path will be clear, blah blah, blah blah, blah. I dismissed the idea. I'm not the surrendering type, I said.

So when this word was coming at me left right and centre, I, well, surrendered to it.

I started to understand that power is not about controlling your life down to the most minute details. That's powerlessness.

Power is surrender.

Surrendering to your powerful self. Not withholding yourself for the benefit of others. Not cramming your life full of stuff just to keep your powerful self silent, invisible and in the back seat. Not glamouring yourself with false beliefs about who is truly holding your power and why.

When you need to make your next decision, give this a go. Test drive this question and pay attention to how it feels in your body. The power you're tapping into isn't a power over others. It's not about feeling powerful over someone or something else. It's about tapping into your own intrinsic power by yourself.

Ask.

Does this make me feel powerful?