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Your Sources of Empowerment That Can Help Control Your Resistance

Mark Sanford, Ph.D.
3 min readJul 20, 2022

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How to identify abilities that empower change

My experience with empowerment focused on using it as an instrument of control. I like the term because it lends weight to serious attempts to wrestle your demons.

Empowerment is about whatever allows you to gain control over your life. Once I decided that personal development was a dominant theme of my life, searching for what might give me the power to change became paramount.

I arrived at this conclusion because of patterns of reluctance that continued to bedevil me: I wanted but was reluctant to lose weight, stop smoking, make cold sales calls, improve my posture, and become less shy with others.

But with every attempt, I often felt like I was moving a ten-ton boulder.

Tools for Fighting Reluctance

All these wants repeatedly got beat back by reluctance of one kind or another. Have you had this experience where your wants and desires were blocked by innumerable internal obstacles? Did they stop you in your tracks, accompanied by incredible frustration?

If you managed to avoid admitting defeat, and you persisted, as I did, you came to realize that the issue was personal power: how to harness it to help you achieve…

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Mark Sanford, Ph.D.

Ph.D. sociology. I help those working on personal development to attain self-respect and self-affirmation.https://medium.com/@sanfmark/membership