As women, we are experts at one thing that permeates every aspect of our lives and that is giving our power away.
Most little girls are brought up to: keep it together; let it go; don’t make waves and be nice to everyone. But the issues we deal with as adult women rely on our inner power and this programming is what contributes to the destruction of this power.
Inner power is what guides us, as women, to live and breathe the life we want with the family ties; relationships; career, mental, emotional and physical health and a purpose. We seek it our entire lives and rarely locate it until we’re in our late 40’s or 50’s. Learning how we give it away daily is the first step to keeping it, building it and using it as intended.
Here, l share five of the mistakes we make and will go into more detail and how to avoid each one in additional articles focusing on each mistake individually.
5 Mistakes We Make As Women That Give Our Power Away
- Feeling Obligated To Share Our Body – We often feel obligated to share our body (for various reasons) before we’re entirely ready. This is destructive to our self-esteem and it’s a very delicate issue to locate and repair later in life when relationships consistently fail.
- Failure To Establish And Enforce Personal Boundaries – Without clarity of knowing what is acceptable and unacceptable to us, as women, we can never be truly happy and may never be treated in a way that feeds our passion and purpose. Once we determine our boundaries we must enforce them and this can be tedious.
- Failing To Recognize Our True Value – As young girls and women, we compare ourselves to others in an attempt to fit in or be like everyone else – the only thing we can never be, which immediately sets us up for failure. Recognizing our inherent value, without being thin or beautiful or helping everyone else is VITAL to keeping our power!
- Failing To Recognize The Most Important Relationship In Our Life – The relationship we have with our self is the most important human relationship of our life and the one that makes or breaks us, usually breaking us in some way. We seek relationships with others for comfort, companionship and acceptance but rarely have a truly healthy relationship with our self.
- Failing To Set Up Our Life As A Winnable Game – Anything in life can be made into a winnable game but most of us play our life with the wrong rules or no rules at all, just a desired outcome of finding success in relationships, career and family. The lack of rules to our game speaks volumes about ultimate failure.
There are simple, empowering solutions to correct and avoid these mistakes and teach young women and girls how to nurture their inner power so they can be better prepared to become women with healthy self-esteem.
Read this article at YourTango
Do you feel like there is something more to your life that you’re not getting? Please leave me a comment.
This list is different from any I’ve seen before. It’s appropriate since your focus is energy and inner game that rules all aspects of our lives.
Many women give their bodies so freely, thinking sex is love, that it can make it more difficult for those of us who want to find and keep a great guy. Any advice on that?
Thanks Kelly!
Meredith
Hi Meredith!
I appreciate your feedback and agree that women who give their bodies freely can seem a challenge for those of us who seek great guys. Many men are used to working very little for the “gift” and have been programmed that if they put in the time and dinner bills, they get dessert! This very topic prompted me to share too soon (hence article after realization) until I attracted, by way of Universal Law, better men who know the “low hanging fruit” is just that, usually without value for him OR HER.
Note: Women who don’t believe this have never experienced it because their disbelief brings only what they believe IN not what they don’t.
Kelly
Hi Kelly,
Very thoughtful empowering article for women! You clearly outlined important specific ways in which women can be happy within relationship we desire with men by recognizing and honoring our value…not giving away our bodies by setting up and staying within our designated boundaries …we teach men how to treat us by showing them how we feel about ourselves…it’s so important for us as women to have clarity as to what our boundaries are…men do respect them and may be inspired to step up and meet our needs 🙂
Thank you, Wendy. 🙂
I appreciate your comment and agree that “real men” (as I call them) most certainly DO step up and they love to respect and love a woman who loves and respects herself. Our self respect also shows them that we respect others and that includes them if they are someone we choose to be with.
Thanks,
Kelly
Hi Kelly,
Wouldn’t it be great if young women, especially, could learn and really act on these principles? It would launch their lives into a healthier direction. So many of us have had to learn and incorporate these ideas later in life, although one is never too old to have a new beginning! I’ve never given my body away, I have always had strong boundaries in that area, and hence, I think that’s why most of my long-term relationships were with healthy men who were as committed to the relationship as I. I have finally come face-to-face with the boundary issue in terms of being too nice, of always helping others when asked even when it put my own needs on the back burner. You know, the good girl, the one who keeps her word, everyone’s free counselor! Just in the last year I really enforced my boundaries, and yes it can be tiring, and I also had to prune several draining people from my life. It took me decades of life experience and major life challenges to really do this in a serious way. It can be a painful move, but also a very necessary one. I expect to benefit greatly from now on from having made this decision – and sticking with it.
Thank you for your comments, Jill! You are one of the few women I know who has had healthy self-esteem and therefore healthy relationships. Here is a blog post about agreements https://positivewomenblog.com/responsibility/loyalty/ My personal boundaries article in this series is coming up! I appreciate you and your guidance as a friend. Thank you! 🙂
Very true & very important for us women to hear! It’s too often we spend our time worrying about others and forget to nurture ourselves – that always causes me burnout
I agree, Agatha! Burnout is HUGE for busy women. “Me Time” is vital. Getting away from people is also vital to learn who we are and how we feel and what we think about things. Thank you. 🙂 You have a nice website and service!
Hi Kelly,
I had a toxic friend who was always gossiping about people and trying to plan my life for me.
I knew she was trying to get me to spread her poison for her. I decided she was not good for me. I put some distance between us, and also I called her on her gossiping and found out she was a vicious liar.
She used to make remarks like I was nothing I was shocked to realize she was personally attacking me on one hand and trying to use sweet words to deceive me.
I stopped being available for her to talk to.
When she realized this she got my land lord to let her in my apartment by claiming she thought I might be sick inside my apartment. I couldn’t believe this, that anyone could be so controlling. She started visiting my sister gossiping about me and got caught in a lie.
She was telling everyone I was pregnant. How I stopped her was by exposing her as a gossip and a liar. I realized that I was giving my power away by being to nice and polite allowing her to take advantage of me.
Arletha,
That is a very powerful story I appreciate you sharing! We often play into other people’s plans without realizing until it’s too late.
You handled getting away from her well. It’s a difficult, uncomfortable situation for us to be in.
Boundaries in relationships are VITAL and knowing yourself really well before establishing boundaries is really powerful.
The person you speak of was an attacker in the attacker mindset and we often cower to people like that because it’s such a weird situation we don’t know what to do about. I’m grateful to share information with women on how to create our own game plan so that 1) we avoid people like the one you mention and 2) we create the life WE want instead of playing into someone else’ plan.
Thank you for sharing, Arletha!
Kelly