Personal power is simply this: believing you have the power to make choices that influence what happens in your life. Imagine if your child believed this about him/herself!

Personal power is one of the 40 Developmental Assets identified by the Search Institute as being indicators of how well a child thrives. According to this research-based organization, a child has Asset #37 (personal power) when “the child feels he or she has some influence over things that happen in his or her life.”

Personal power starts early and grows slowly–from her simply crawling away in glee from a caregiver, to his outright “no” at two, to eventual self-management skills–depending somewhat on how much practice he/she gets with age-appropriate responsibilities. Of course, children who feel loved and supported unconditionally are more apt to feel secure enough to take appropriate risks and learn so they can grow up confident, competent, and thriving.

As with so, so many things we want for our children, their personal power begins with us. Yes, it is another lecture on modeling! As a new year begins, ask yourself what you could do to maximize your own belief that you have control over what happens to you. How can you model setting goals and achieving them? How can you demonstrate coping skills and healthy ways to deal with frustration and challenges? How can you show your children that you have control of your own life?

Here are some tools to help you with your own personal power while nurturing that of your child(ren):

1. CHOICE THEORY

William Glasser, author of Choice Theory, summarizes personal power in a few key concepts:

• No one can control you.
• You can’t control anyone else. (All you can do is share information with others.)
• If you are not happy and content with your life, what are you doing about it?

Ultimately, what choices you make in this moment on this day will lead to the life you want. William Glasser helped me to rid my life of the word “should” and the baggage that comes with it. Now, if I want X outcome, I think: “I must do 1.2.3. to get there.” This is what life coaching is all about: defining clear goals and exploring steps to get there.

Parents struggling with their teens find this approach invaluable. Switching from “telling” adolescents what to do to “asking” them about their choices gets teens thinking about why they do what they do and the steps things take. This is an approach we focus on in our “Connect by Coaching Your Kid” class starting next month. Occasionally, you may have the shocking experience of hearing your words come out of their mouths. More often, as you give them more responsibility and choice, they will “fall down” from a poor decision and need to learn how to get back up. No one develops personal power muscle unless he/she gets a chance to practice.

2. LEARNED OPTIMISM

A fascinating glimpse behind personal power is to look at the opposite: learned helplessness. At 13, Martin Seligman watched his father go from being a successful lawyer to a depressed, wheelchair-bound invalid after a stroke. Later, in his psychology training, Seligman did research with dogs that were “taught” helplessness. Dogs heard a tone followed by an inescapable shock. Eventually, most of the dogs “learned” that nothing they did made a difference, so, even when they were placed in a new chamber they could easily escape, most of them responded to the tone alone by curling up and whimpering. Seligman related this sense of helplessness to the despair he had seen in his dad. But his research uncovered something else: Approximately one in three of the dogs refused to give in to helplessness. That exact same ratio showed up in follow-up research with cockroaches, rats, goldfish, and even humans.

In search of how individuals can defy the odds and refuse to be helpless, Seligman focused on how people explain good and bad events in their lives. He determined that people with an optimistic explanation of events spring back from set-backs, whereas a pessimistic style of brutal honesty can lead to a life of despair. According to his research, which has been confirmed with hundreds of studies, optimists take good events and globalize them; and they contain bad events. This is what we should want for our children. We don’t want to teach them “helplessness” by never allowing them to use their personal power, even starting at a very early age. Rather, we want them to be optimistic about their future and believe they have the personal power to defy any odds.

Consider some inspiring examples of personal power despite set-backs. Thomas Edison’s teachers, for example, said he was “too stupid to learn anything,” and Albert Einstein’s parents thought he was “sub-normal.”

Providing our kids with the modeling and practice for personal power is not about puffing up self esteem. Rather, it’s about raising children with optimism and skill mastery. Seligman’s book, The Optimistic Child: A Revolutionary Program That Safeguards Children Against Depression and Builds Lifelong Resilience, is a must-read. You will find in the booka quiz on optimism. You might also want to check out Seligman’s Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life as well as his website, where you’ll find many other questionnaires on hope and happiness.

3. INTENTION

Wanting to have personal power and to be optimistic-–and wanting our children to have personal power and to be optimistic–is all about intention. Life is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy. If you want a good life, you must be clear about what you want–whether the “good” relates to health, happiness, fun, love, or close connection. Then you must believe to the depths of your soul that what you intend is already true. Lastly, let go. When you align your feelings, actions, thoughts, “the good” happens. (Jim Carrey agrees that “intention is everything.”)

Granted, young kids do not have the abstract brain for intention-setting, but it is possible during the teen years. For the younger ones, hearing and seeing us model intention is paramount. Treat them as optimistic beings with personal power and they will know themselves as such. For teens, we should have set the stage for them during their young years and then provide opportunities for them to set intentions and exercise their fulfillment strategies on their own. And then let them fly!

4. CHANGE YOUR MIND AND YOU CHANGE YOUR BRAIN

Personal power and all its benefits become second nature only with practice, practice, practice. The more you practice doing something differently, the stronger the new neural pathways become in your brain. The saying is, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.” Science says it differently: “Neurons that wire together, fire together.” This means that, when I am hungry and long for a chocolate bar but I choose to put an apple in my mouth, I am laying down new neural pathways between hunger alert and “apple” that get stronger every time I practice.

This is the origin of the idea that it takes 21 days to change a habit. In 21 days, new neural pathways have begun to replace the old pathways. I am saying out loud to all of you that I am starting a new habit this month. I am getting up early to meditate at least 20 minutes for the next 21 days. And I really, really want this habit to stick. By the February emPower Monthly, it will be well ingrained. Then I plan to start drinking vegetable juice every morning. I have the power to make this happen.

What habit are you willing to commit to right now? No yelling, walking 20 minutes daily, paying bills efficiently, taking vitamins…? How will you learn optimism and practice it? How will you help your child to build personal power to set him/her on a course toward a life of health and happiness? Believe it, practice it, and it will be so!

With inspiration for all you do,

Dr Kathy

P.S. If the idea of interpersonal neurobiology intrigues you and you want more, get a group of friends together to read The Brain That Changes Itself, Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom, and Rick Hanson’s articles on family.

If you are fascinated by optimism and positive psychology, click on this link, or check out work-related optimism questionnaires here.

Lastly, for those of you who have been interested enough to read to the very end, we could not leave out this every interesting quote by Martin Seligman that explains optimism and pessimism. In an Omni interview entitled “How to make friends and win presidential elections: Try a little optimism,” Seligman says, “Optimists, it turns out, have a lopsided view of the universe that makes them resistant to defeat. If something good happens, optimists think they did it (personalization); the positive effects will affect everything else they try (permanence); the goodness will last forever (persistence). If something bad happens, they’re not to blame; the failure won’t affect anything else they try; the negative effects will be fleeting. Optimists have exactly the opposite explanations of good and bad events. Pessimists are more logically consistent, applying the same view of causality to good and bad events . . . which is probably the reason they are more vulnerable to feelings of helplessness and depression.”