5 Myths about Empowerment

As an intimacy practitioner and a Resilience Toolkit Facilitator, a lot of the work I do involves empowering the artists and creatives. Through ongoing, informed consent, stress reduction, and bodily autonomy, I help my clients cultivate their own felt sense of agency and safety.

But before we dive too far in, let’s get a definition from Merriam Webster:

Empowerment:

1 : the act or action of empowering someone or something : the granting of the power, right, or authority to perform various acts or duties

2 : the state of being empowered to do something : the power, right, or authority to do something

In some respects, empowerment is relative; what empowers one person, may not empower someone else. In order to meet people where they are at, I, as a facilitator, must have flexibility and options for my clients to choose and nurture their own internal authority. My clients get to decide how to define, act, and be empowered, including re-examining how we thought about empowerment in the past!

The purpose of this post is to provide more nuance and complexity when re-examining some myths about empowerment. There’s definitely more to this than I can post here, so please take what’s useful, leave the rest:

Myth 1 : Empowerment always feels good.

Empowerment can feel great!! When we are confident and make the best choices for our wellbeing, careers, and lives, empowerment feels good. But empowerment also enables us to make uncomfortable and hard choices.

For example, I have yet to meet a performer (or creative) who likes saying no to an opportunity. Say we’re offered a juicy role but the dates don’t work for our schedule. Most performers I know would give up their vacations, miss large life events, double (and over) book, or run through every consideration or possibility to at least try to make it work. Many performers find it super difficult to turn opportunities down.

Empowerment helps us make these difficult decisions with grace and self-compassion. By being the authority in our lives, we can feel confident and safe enough to make hard choices, like turning down work. Empowerment is what enables us to stand strong in our convictions, when it feels good and especially when it doesn’t feel so good.

Myth 2. : When we’re empowered, we always speak up.

Empowerment means using your voice! Act up! Speak truth to power! And yes, vocally advocating for ourselves and our communities is certainly empowering. Where it gets tricky though is if we reduce empowerment to only using our voices.

If empowerment only looks like speaking up, then we may feel ashamed in those situations when we don’t. Even if it is unsafe for us, where it could cost us our job, our healthcare, or even our lives, we may blame ourselves for not being “empowered” enough to speak up.

Empowerment is about choosing when and when not to use our voices. There are many reasons why we choose not to speak up: exhaustion, power dynamics, silence as a choice, saying no to free emotional labor, protecting our energy…

  This is also cultural. Here in the U.S., we prize vocal participation over all others. Listening, reflecting, processing, waiting, observing, etc, are all valuable (and often overlooked) ways of participating. When we fortify our internal authority, we empower ourselves to choose which method works best for us when. This frees us up to stop shaming and blaming ourselves every time we choose not to speak up.

Myth 3 : Only we can empower ourselves.

We in the U.S. tend to “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps,” push through on our own, no one else will do it for us. And in some respects, yes, this is true. When we follow our internal authority, we reinforce our belief and trust in ourselves. It’s like an empowerment supercharge!

Yet there are other ways to supercharge it, such as witnessing empowered people! By providing us with a roadmap of what we might not have thought possible, they can help us kickstart our own internal authority. This is true for people irl as well as those fictional characters in the stories we tell as artists.

Communities, organizations, unions, and groups can also boost us. Take affinity spaces for example. The autonomy, connection, and safety they provide, can help foster individual empowerment. We don’t have to rely solely on ourselves to feel and be empowered.

Myth 4. : When we are empowered, we always know what we want (to do).

Some people are really good at articulating what they want, while others struggle with it. Some can do it in one area of their life (like at work), and not so much in another (like with friends). It doesn’t mean we are more or less empowered.

What empowerment does grant us though, is to be more responsive when and if our desires and boundaries shift. As an intimacy practitioner, I can tell you with confidence that boundaries change moment-to-moment, day-to-day, year-to-year. Again, going back to that internal authority, empowerment helps us trust and believe in ourselves to learn what we want and then take action.

And we might not know what that is right away! Especially on big, difficult career or life decisions, empowerment gives us the strength to sit in discomfort, ask questions, negotiate, call a friend, stand fast, take our time, muddle through, or even just sleep on it. Empowerment increases our awareness and our confidence to figure it out for ourselves.

Myth 5. : Empowerment is always a fight.

When dealing with systemic oppression and engaging in change work, it can be incredibly empowering to fight back, particularly for historically disenfranchised and marginalized groups. In fact, the fight response is useful, necessary, and protective! This is especially true in activism.

For context, the fight response is a mobilization towards threat. Each person’s fight response looks different, for one it might be speaking truth to power, for someone else it might be organizing and participating in a picket line, and for someone else, yes, it might look like literally fighting.

Here at Cheek to Cheek, we don’t think power equals bad. Having power does not always look like domination, control, or authoritarianism. Power hierarchies do exist that are non-abusive, in fact, we’ve participated in a bunch! Especially if those in positions of power are actively encouraging the autonomy (and empowerment) of those “below” them, power is then a resource for all of us to engage with.

Cause power dynamics are nuanced! When we build our own internal authority, we are building more self awareness of where our power lies, where we can use it within larger systems (to fight back), and where we can build our own autonomy outside of those systems and hierarchies.

So how do these resonate with you? What other myths would you add?

And if you’re looking to build up your own internal authority, check out this Free Offering. For more personalized attention, get in touch here.