Empowerment: Definition, Theory, & Examples

When you feel empowered, you feel confident and in control of your life. You stand tall, ready to take on whatever the world throws at you. The opposite of this feeling is powerlessness or defeat. This mindset may cause you to have a victim mentality and believe that your life is out of your control. While it isn’t possible to feel fully empowered one hundred percent of the time, having a defeated attitude may have negative consequences for your health. 

A lack of empowerment (high powerlessness scores) are associated with:

• More limits on physical activity with age
• More negative psychosocial symptoms with age
• More health problems five and ten years post-survey 
• Deterioration of health in general (Seeman & Lewis, 1995)

Try not to worry if you often feel powerless. Empowerment is a trait that we can cultivate within ourselves with time and practice.

Feeling empowered allows you to pursue your goals and dreams with enthusiasm. If you feel you lack motivation or confidence, working on empowering yourself may help your self-esteem and quality of life. One study used an online psycho-educational program to help treat people with depression and measured changes in empowerment. Immediately following the program, participants noted an increase in self-esteem and empowerment. Improvements in their quality of life were noted even six months after the completion of the program (Crisp et al., 2014). This means that improving your self-esteem and feeling more empowered can have a positive effect on your overall quality of life. 

Now that you have a better understanding of empowerment, how can you start to build it within yourself? For some people, feeling empowered and confident may already be a part of their personality. Building a sense of empowerment may take a bit more work for others. The following are suggestions of behaviors you can develop within yourself and actions you can take to increase your feelings of empowerment.

Develop positive self-talk​
Negative self-talk can be detrimental to your state of mind. This is something that I struggle with. To develop more positive self-talk, I replace negative thoughts with positive ones. For example, instead of thinking “I can’t do that”, I think “I can do hard things”. This simple switch has made a world of difference for me. Positive self-affirmations can also be a helpful tool in replacing negative thoughts.

Create an action list for your goals
Ideas and goals are great but they are essentially useless without taking action. Empowered people recognize the need to put in the work to reach their goals. Start by identifying your large goals and then break them down until there are actions you can complete today, this week, this month, this year, and so on. 

Practice confidence and assertiveness
Feeling confident and powerful in your abilities is a key component of feeling empowered. It’s okay if this isn’t naturally a part of your personality. With practice, you can learn to speak up and make your voice heard. As Robin Sharma said, “Speak your truth even if your voice shakes.” Try practicing what you are going to say in your head before you say it out loud if you feel extra nervous.

Empowering others can be beneficial for everyone involved but it is important to recognize when it has slipped into enabling behavior. Enabling occurs when you try to help someone but end up supporting their bad behavior or habits. Unfortunately, sometimes kindness can be taken advantage of which is why it is important to be aware of the help you are giving someone and how it is being received. Empowerment means you build them up to do the work themselves; enabling means you are doing the work for them. 

School and learning may come easily to some children but others might find it more difficult. Some children might have learning differences that mean they need to take in information in other ways than traditional methods. Educators need to be encouraging and build empowerment within their students as it can have many benefits down the road.

Benefits of student empowerment:

• Better grades 
• Fewer behavioral incidents 
• Increased extracurricular participation
• Higher educational aspirations (Kirk et al., 2016)

Affirmations are phrases that you repeat to yourself to help increase your self-confidence. Try choosing three affirmations from the list below–or create your own–and say them in the mirror to yourself once a day. It may feel uncomfortable or strange at first but with practice, you can use affirmations to empower yourself.

• I am powerful, capable, strong, and smart.
• I step into the power I have to create the life I want.
• I believe I am capable of achieving my biggest dreams.
• I have the power to respond–not react–to triggering people or situations.
• I am confident in my ability to accomplish whatever I set my mind to.

• “I choose to make the rest of my life the best of my life.” – Louise Hay
  
• “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.” – Nora Ephron
  
• “Just don’t give up trying to do what you want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.” – Ella Fitzgerald
  
• “We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all of the power we need inside ourselves already.” – J. K. Rowling
  
• “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.” – Charlotte Brontë
  
• “Believe in your infinite potential. Your only limitations are those you set upon yourself.” – Roy T. Bennett
  
• “Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don’t.” – Steve Maraboli
  
• “I always did something I was a little not ready to do. I think that’s how you grow. When there’s that moment of ‘Wow, I’m not really sure I can do this,’ and you push through those moments, that’s when you have a breakthrough.” – Marissa Mayer
  

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Empowerment is a wonderful tool to drive you toward your goals and dreams. This feeling happens when you feel confident, assured, and powerful in your capabilities. Feeling empowered is important for personal development as well as other areas of life, such as school and work. People who are empowered engage in positive self-talk, take action to reach their goals, and act assertively and confidently. Feeling empowered can be difficult for people who struggle with self-worth and confidence. Use positive affirmations and practice being self-assured to build a feeling of empowerment within yourself. Once you start believing in yourself, you will find you are capable of much more than you realize. 

• Crawford Shearer, N. B., & Reed, P. G. (2016). Empowerment: Reformulation of a Non-Rogerian Concept. Nursing Science Quarterly. 
• Crisp, D., Griffiths, K., Mackinnon, A., Bennett, K., & Christensen, H. (2014). An online intervention for reducing depressive symptoms: Secondary benefits for self-esteem, empowerment and quality of life. Psychiatry Research, 216(1), 60–66. 
• Kirk, C. M., Lewis, R. K., Brown, K., Karibo, B., & Park, E. (2016). The power of student empowerment: Measuring classroom predictors and individual indicators. The Journal of Educational Research, 109(6), 589–595. 
• Page, N., & Czuba, C. E. (1999). Empowerment: What is it? Journal of extension, 37(5), 1-5.
• Seeman, M., & Lewis, S. (1995). Powerlessness, health and mortality: A longitudinal study of older men and mature women. Social Science & Medicine, 41(4), 517–525.
• Ugboro, I. O., & Obeng, K. (2000). Top management leadership, employee empowerment, job satisfaction, and customer satisfaction in TQM organizations: an empirical study. Journal of Quality Management, 5(2), 247-272. ​