Tag Archives: TED: The Empowerment Dynamic

Four shifts to heal your life.

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(Three foundations – embodiment, awareness, and ownership – are fundamental. The four healing shifts – more soul, more acceptance, more intention, and more creation – are powerful. But making the shifts without the foundations is like building a house on the sand. I’m diving deeper into these seven facets of healing throughout November and December. You can subscribe here if this was forwarded to you.)

Shift #1: More soul, less façade. Explore the difference between your essential self and your social self. We all have both, and we all need both. Learn which one is in the driver’s seat, and how to change drivers if you choose to.

Many writers and thinkers have explored this core concept, often using different labels for these two parts of ourselves. Other names for “Soul” include Nature, Essential Self, Heart, True Self, and Must. Other names for “Façade” include culture, false self, space suit self, and should.

A couple of ways to begin to work with soul and façade:
1. Ask yourself these questions: What do you do because you should? What do you do just because you want to? What’s the payoff in doing things you don’t want to do but you believe you should? What’s the proportion of “should” vs “want to”? Are you happy with this?

2. If you played with last week’s “If God is … then I am … and my soul is ….” exercise, ask yourself what the opposite is. Is this a good metaphor for your façade?
Example: If God is an infinite underground river of living water, then I am a spring, and my soul is the place in the Earth where water emerges. The opposite of this could be something like “I am a Costco parking lot. I keep water from moving freely through the earth underneath me.” This feels like a good metaphor for façade to me, because wildness erupts when water is free to flow where it wants to go. So then I would ask myself where I’m hard and unyielding, stopping up living water.


Shift #2: More acceptance, less resistance. Explore your beliefs about the inevitable changes of being alive. To live is to change. Much of our suffering comes from misunderstanding and resisting change.

Change is a feature of this human life, not a bug. Because to live is to change, we have infinite chances to begin again, over and over. Every loss leads to new life. Where are you resisting change? Do you have losses to grieve? Thoughts about change to disbelieve?

Here are two blog posts from the archive for exploring this core concept further.
Seven things I wish I’d known about change fifty years ago.
Change and Covid.  (Written early in the pandemic, when we didn’t know what the hell was happening.)



Shift #3: More intention, less reaction. Explore how your thoughts cause your feelings, not the other way around. This is good news, because you can learn to choose your thoughts.

Learning to hear and question the thoughts that precede your feelings is the work of a lifetime. And it’s so worth it. When we’re in charge of our brain, we can choose thoughts that make us happier, healthier, and more whole. It’s that simple.

The most powerful tool I know to start hearing your thoughts is the Awareness Wheel. Remember, if a thought causes suffering, it isn’t true.  

Post from the archives: Thoughts create feelings. Feelings motivate actions. Actions determine results. Your results become your life.
If you want more of my writing about the Change Cycle, there’s lots. Just search “change” on the top right corner of the blog. 

Shift #4: More creator, less victim. Explore the victim triangle and the empowerment dynamic. Create the life you want, instead of passively settling for the life you have.

To what are you acquiescing? To what do you aspire? That’s all you really need to notice. Then ask yourself Dr. Edith Eger’s Four Questions:
1. What do you want?
2. Who wants it? (You, someone else, the culture, etc.?)
3. What are you going to do about it?
4. When?

Blog post from the archives: This will change your life. I’m not kidding. 


PS. We’re approaching the Winter Solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere. I love this time of year, not because of holiday energy but because of the growing dark. Despite the frantic nature of holiday preparations all around, this growing dark feels to me like a time for letting go. A time to embrace emptiness, silence, and waiting.

I’ve been doing this work for ten years now. I feel a new thing wanting to emerge, and I want to honor that feeling. So I’m trusting the cycle and letting go of my coaching practice as currently constituted. My surgery and subsequent newsletter hiatus created a lull in my client roster, so this is a perfect time. 

I don’t know what my coaching work will look like going forward. I have a hunch I’ll be writing and offering classes, workshops, and retreats. I’ll be organizing ten years worth of blog posts into categories and putting them under a coaching tab on my website as PDFs. I’ll continue to writing books, both fiction and nonfiction. I’ll continue to send this email as I have news and writing to share. Probably. What I do know is that I love this work, and I want to honor my soul’s mysterious “musts.” I also know that new life grows in the dark, and emerges on its own time. 

So much change happens in the dark. I’m wishing you abundant blessings of this dark time and the return of the light, and I look forward to connecting in the new year.
What does it mean that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live?  ~Mary Oliver

Photo credit: Natalie Rhea Rigg on Unsplash

This could change your life. I’m not kidding.

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In every situation you encounter, you choose to behave as either a victim or a creator. Which orientation you’re operating out of makes all the difference in how your life feels and looks, and the impact you have on the world around you. Once you see this difference, you can consciously choose to act from a place of empowerment. This is the basic idea of David Emerald’s TED: The Empowerment Dynamic, a cheesy yet profound book. I’m finding this concept mind-blowing and incredibly helpful.

Like many of you, I’ve known about the Drama Triangle—composed of victim, persecutor, and rescuer—for decades. But the antidote to it, the “Empowerment Triangle,” is a new idea for me.

I feel like I’ve discovered the secret of life, the Rosetta Stone, the key to personal and organizational growth and health.

Most of us, most of the time, are living as victims. This is completely understandable. Our culture is a victim culture. We’re taught victimhood from our cradles. We’re steeped in it. We swim in it like water. We’re mostly unaware that we’re approaching our life and our choices as victims. This Drama Triangle feels completely natural.

An alternative triangle, what Emerald calls the “Empowerment Dynamic,” is composed of a creator, a challenger, and a coach. To grow up is to become aware of where we’re living as victims and to choose to take on the creator role. To grow up is to see that we’re always making a choice. This is scary as hell, sure, but it’s also why we’re here.

When we behave as victims, we approach our life as a series of problems to be solved. Viewing life as a problem creates anxiety, which causes us to act in ways that reduce the anxiety but almost certainly don’t solve the problem. And the cycle starts all over again. Not much changes.

Creators, on the other hand, develop clarity on what they want to see happen in a particular area of concern. Clarity leads to passion and motivation, which creators then harness to move toward their desired outcome or vision. Creators change themselves and thereby the world, if they choose to.

When you’re feeling frustrated, stuck, and powerless, you’re in victim mode. When you blame others for your feelings and criticize yourself and them, you’re in victim mode. When nothing changes and you really wish it would, you’re in victim mode. When other people aren’t doing what they should and you’re sick and tired of it, you’re in victim mode.

Conversely, when you’re energized, focused, and open to surprise, when you’re making choices that move you toward what you want to see happen, when your boundaries are firm and you’re in charge of your time, you’re acting as a creator.

How do you make the shift from victim to creator? Realize that you’re always, always, always making a choice. Even if you’re truly a prisoner and you can’t actually make decisions about your actions, you’re still in charge of your thoughts, and thereby your feelings.

If Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl can be responsible for his attitude while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, we can learn to be responsible for ours. Frankl famously said, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

If you’re curious about how this shift feels, you could choose to try this exercise:

  • Bring to mind an area of your life where you feel stuck, frustrated, and powerless to change the situation. This might be your marriage, your job, your aging body, COVID, or political polarization in the US. (Many of my clients feel the most frustration with their marriage.)
  • What do you see as the problem? (For many of my clients, their perceived problem is that they crave growth and change, and their husbands or wives seem to want to stay the same. This disparity causes my clients to feel afraid that if they choose to change and grow, their marriage will end.)
  • In this scenario, who’s the victim? Who’s the persecutor? Who do you expect to rescue you? Do these roles seem to change?
  • Now, ask yourself what you want to happen. What’s your vision for this area of your life? What’s the outcome you desire? Take time to get as clear as you can. Your clarity will be your motivation.
  • What’s one tiny step you can take in the direction of your desired outcome or vision? If it’s doable right now, go do it. I’ll wait. If it’s truly not, make a plan to take that step.
  • Check in with your body. How do you feel now? Do you still feel stuck and frustrated? Or do you feel more energized, compassionate, and empowered?
  • If you’re feeling more open and enthusiastic, pat yourself on the back! You’re making the shift from victim to creator.
  • If not, please know that’s okay. This work may be simple, but it’s often not easy. Celebrate your new awareness and give yourself compassion. There are many reasons, some of them very good reasons, why we choose not to change.

Questions? Want to go deeper? Contact me to schedule a free no-obligation conversation. I’d love to talk!

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons