4 Powers You Probably Don't Know You Have
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
- Victor Frankl
Challenges are supposed to happen. Life is supposed to be constantly changing. For example now, the COVID-19 pandemic is testing the physical and mental capacities of the entire world population. There is not only the direct effect of the virus itself, but there are also many associated effects, impacting us such as: isolation, exposure to news about the growing number of fatalities, remote-work demands, coexistence in confined spaces and economic uncertainty.
The biggest challenge people face when encountering difficulties is making peace with the ‘new normal’. Instead of thinking about that current situation as a problem, a pause in reality or waiting for things to go back as they were before, how can we accept the current circumstances and make the most of it?
Often when we feel at our most powerless with the external world, our only choice is to use the powers we do have within us.
Victor Frankl Already Taught Us How to Do This
Leaving aside the many differences, this pandemic reminds me a lot of Victor Frankl and his experience inside a concentration camp (If you haven’t read it, I extremely recommend his book “Man's Search for Meaning”).
Frankl spent three years (from 1942 to 1945) in between four nazi concentration camps including Auschwitz. During this experience, he developed a philosophy that states that a man’s deepest desire is to find meaning in his life, and if he can find that meaning, he can survive the most challenging life situation.
In his case, he decided to give his concentration camp experience the meaning of making him a better person. Instead of becoming apathetic, he chose to embrace his suffering. For him, even in the worst possible situation, humans always have the freedom to choose their attitude towards life.
If You Don’t Feel Powerful, Your Brain Is Working Great
If you don’t feel free or powerful right now, that doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you. Our ‘primitive brain’ is always looking for instant pleasure. It is always choosing to avoid pain or risk and will always try to stay inside its comfort zone. The point here is: your brain is very clever. So If you are feeling anxious, confused or unsafe, that is very normal. It is your brain initiating fight-or-flight mode to avoid any potential problem.
It is really important to be aware of how our brains work, because in many ways, external challenges become a beautiful reason for our brains to hold ourselves down from our own potential, from the unknown, from our challenges and from all the capacity we have to achieve our goals and change our lives.
For example, one of the main questions I ask when I’m coaching clients about this is: is the challenge you are facing now “due to the pandemic” actually new? Or can you find the same thought patterns in your life before the pandemic?
For most of us, we are just hearing fears, ideas, beliefs or thoughts that were already there, only that now they have changed shape and are probably louder or more intense.
The first point to regain your power back is to become aware of how you are using your mind. Which thoughts and emotions do you usually choose for yourself? Remember that you are not experiencing reality, you are experiencing your thoughts about reality.
Regain Your Freedom: Use Your Four Human Powers
Identifying the power you do have in this situation and how you choose to use it can present a paradigm shift that has the potential of changing the way you relate to your mind and your life.
Gaining ownership of your powers will allow you to see how self-dependent you are, and external circumstances will then lose their influence over how you feel about yourself and your life.
There are four powers you have and they are divided into internal and external:
Your internal powers are your thoughts and your feelings;
Your external powers are your communication and your behaviours.
Regardless of any external circumstance (including a pandemic) you are always responsible for the way you think and the feelings those thoughts create. Those are the two internal powers that no one will be ever able to control or take away from you.
Within the same paradigm, even in the hardest circumstances, you can always choose how to communicate and how you want to behave, each day of your life.
“A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes - within the limits of endowment and environment- he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualised depends on decisions but not on conditions.”
―Viktor E. Frankl
How Can You Use Your Powers?
As Victor Frankl said, while our reality is certainly affected by the global circumstances in which we are at, we are ultimately free to choose how we want to think, feel, communicate and behave in this moment of our lives.
We are free to decide if we want to blame the outside world for its current situation (and maybe avoid taking action), or we can decide to use our creativity to discover how we can better add value to the world, creating what we want. Right here, right now.
“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.”
― Viktor E. Frankl.
So now more than ever it is really important to be able to understand our minds - to witness and explore our thoughts, feelings, behaviour and communication with openness and curiosity.
Allow yourself to dive deep into your brain. When you’re looking at your thoughts, be careful not to label them as true, just observe them. What do you see?
Meditation is an amazing method to help you observe your brain with more clarity. With regular practice, your awareness expands and it becomes easier and easier to observe your brain. As you do, you begin to realise that you were confusing your thoughts with reality and through that awareness you are able your consciousness evolve.
You can also simply write down about how you think you are currently using these four powers when you are facing any challenge or situation in your life to find clarity as to how to move forwards.
“Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfil the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”
― Viktor E. Frankl
(If you feel you would like to explore yourself in more depth, book a Free Intake Session so you can learn how can your life change when you begin this individual process. You already have the answer, I will guide you to find it.)
