When you think of an empowered person, who comes to mind?  For my part, my first thought is of someone who is witty, sharp, undeterred by criticism or others’ negativity.  Someone who will be able to jump in and pull another person out of any predicament they wandered in, willingly or blindly.  We can imagine them as some kind of modern-day super hero.  In truth, though, I know that’s not the case.  Even the most empowered among us is still human.  We cannot empower another against their will.  That kind of relationship dynamic has to be a collaboration and a choice.  It requires patience to coach the slow to learn and change, generosity to go out of one’s comfort zone to reach others where they are, and introspection and humility to keep that all-too-human tendency to slip into selfish, emotionally driven impulses.

To use David Emerald’s word in The Power of TED, the empowered person is a coach.  They lead by example, but won’t do for you what you can do for yourself.  They offer you the encouragement, the nudge and, when necessary, the means to start making those empowering choices.  They recognize that the choice to start remains with the one being coached, as does the responsibility to follow through and persevere.  They are, for their part, cheerleaders and role models.  Those who do too much for you are not empowering as they are implicitly telling you that you are helpless.

We are meant to be that coach for those around us: our family, our friends, our colleagues, you name it.  We may feel wounded or broken at times, and yet even in our brokenness, we find beauty and wisdom, pearls of compassion we would otherwise not have.  We will look at this further in the next post.

It’s one thing to coach someone needing and wanting help, but what about our persecutors (to use Karpman’s terms) or, as I like to call them, our Goliaths.  The old eye-for-an-eye adage might seem called for against those who would want to manipulate or bully us.  Perhaps indifference seems a more for fitting response.  In my opinion, the latter is closer to the truth, but still lacking.  To remain at the indifference stage seems more like seeing our Goliaths as something not worth our attention or something broken beyond repair.  There is a certain amount of indifference needed to deflect their attempts to manipulate or overpower us, but what about the individuals who engage in such behaviours?  How should we treat them?

To be truly empowered in our relationship with them, I think we need to shift from seeing our Goliaths as broken, evil people, to suffering souls seeking empowerment in the wrong way.  We need to change the relationship dynamic on our end, and call them out of their overpowering mindset.  Just as they are able to influence us, so can we influence them.  Though our ways are more subtle for lack of violence, they can be just as effective.

Instead of giving them the response they are looking for, if we set boundaries to protect ourselves and refuse to respond in kind to their tactics, we are already coaching them in the proper way to be empowered by our own example.  If we do it with grace and kindness, we are most likely to stump them as people in this role usually expect others to respond in kind rather than with compassion.  Drama inspires drama.  However, compassion and kindness can defuse many hostilities, but it takes an empowered person to do it in the face of the one being hostile to them.

*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA