How Knowledge Leads to Self Empowerment
There’s an old saying that “Knowledge is Power”. In that case, it is likely that someone intended it for manipulation; when someone knows something about someone that the person is trying to keep secret, it gives them leverage.. That, however, is not the way to live. That leverage can disappear.
The knowledge I’m talking about is the one that empowers you to live the life you want, regardless of external circumstances. Now that is real power. The leverage that changes lives.
It may sound the same thing but it’s not. One is a negative form of knowledge, the other positive.
I’m referring to the knowledge that leads to understanding how a set of timeless principles and laws, when you know them and use them, can change your life to the way you want it, however, that may be.
If you could imagine your ideal life now, what would that life look like? Now ask yourself, why do you not have that life now?
External Circumstances
You may be in a position where a certain event has caused you to be where you are. For example, when Cyprus joined the European Union, the government decided to take money from people’s savings. Anyone who had more than one hundred thousand euros in their accounts, had the rest taken off them. People had lost their life savings overnight.
But, there were others who were not affected. There were individuals who had not planned for this event, but, had prepared for any event.
Those who lost their money did not complain over what could not be changed; instead, they looked at what they could do and started getting back to where they were.
The point is this: life may not always be fair, but, the outcome is dependant on us and how we take that failure, fair or not.
That is where this knowledge comes into its own. The knowing that’s needed to get you back on track and keep you on track. That circumstances are like waves, crests and troughs, the ebb and flow of life.
If you’re expecting a simple answer here, you’ll be disappointed. There is no simple answer to this. It is a matter of learning, understanding and applying.
I’m not going to give you the answer in this article, because it’s impossible to do so unless I write a book in this article.
But we’ll start with some basics.
The first is to understand that you have control of the outcome of your life. At this point doubts, fears and disbelief raise their ugly faces. They are those things that tell you you can’t, you won’t, and you don’t have the skill or the intelligence. All of which are false.
The next is experience, the things that you have already done. Remember the time when you decided that you wanted to do something and what you did to achieve it? It’s not about scale here, but, about the achievement. Do you remember the process you went through?
You got an idea. You saw yourself doing it. In your mind, you saw the end result and you felt what it would be like. You got so passionate about it that you started to do something – you acted on it. Then, you kept going until you reached your goal.
The bold words are always the same in any action. Thought, idea, visualise, see the end, feel it, be passionate, action, persistence and having a goal in the first place, which is the idea.
Simple enough, right? So why do so many of us not achieve our goals?
Doubts, fears, disbelief.
The key word here is fear because all the others fall under these.
I got to where I am by continued reading on how the mind and the universal laws work, and why. I’ve listened to endless videos on YouTube from people who know what they are talking about, documentaries and science. I proved it to myself!
Right now I’m at the point where I know how things work and why, and I believe. I have faith in the system.
I don’t need to know how the system got there, I just know that it is there.
That system is the laws and principles that we need to align ourselves with to get to where we want to, not where society or someone else wants us to get to.
Fears are what keep us behind, but, when you understand that fears are constructs of our OWN mind, you begin to realise that they are not real.
False Evidence Appearing Real.
Zig Ziglar
The above is one of my favourite quotes by Zig Ziglar, which embodies everything that is true about fears.
There are those fears which are solid fears – when in war, natural disasters or a dangerous environment. They are substantiated. But only to a given extent. They should not cause you to freeze when flight is the answer.
Then there are those fears that we make up in our own mind with no proof, that can’t be substantiated – they exist ONLY in our own mind.
Power
What I want to tell you here, is that the power you seek and need to get what you want, you already have within you. You always did, you do and always will. This is not a “you have to look within you”, spiritual master quote. It’s a point of fact.
It’s not a secret either, but more a case of not being informed. You don’t know what you don’t know. It’s information that is freely available, but, we are either not drawn to it or find ourselves disinterested in it.
We give our power away, because, we fail to recognise it for what it is. We don’t know what we have to do to “get there”, or how we are meant to achieve it.
And so we go back to the beginning – knowledge is power. By learning, reading, listening, and having the humility to do all of that, from a variety of sources, we begin to gain knowledge in understanding how our mind works, the principles we need to abide by and how the universal laws, including the law of attraction (or cause and effect or sowing and reaping), always work for us.
One last CAVEAT –
The knowledge is useless if we don’t use it and act on it. It is the action that makes the knowledge powerful.
The difference is how we apply those forces – to our detriment or to our benefit. It really is our choice.
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. – John Locke
The heart of the prudent getteth knowledge; and the ear of the wise seeketh knowledge. – Proverbs 18:15
Photograph by: David Iskander on Unsplash
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