Self-Empowerment: The New Mantra for Growth

Story: Grandfather, Children and Wolf  (Source: Google Baba)

A group of children gathered around their grandfather. They were filled with excitement and curiosity. That day, there had been quite a tumultuous conflict between two adults and their grandfather was called in to mediate. The children were eager to hear what he had to say about it. One of the children in conflict asked a question to the grandfather that was puzzling him.

“Grandfather, why do people fight?”

The old man replied, “Well, do you know my child, we all have two wolves inside us? They are in our chest…. and these wolves are constantly fighting each other”.

The eyes of the children had grown big by now.

“In our chests too, grandfather?” asked another child. The Grandfather nodded his head in agreement and said, “Yes.”

“And in your chest too?” asked a third one. The Grandfather replied, “Yes, in my chest too.”

The grandfather sure had all the children’s attention now. The grandfather continued. “There is a White Wolf and a Black Wolf. The Black Wolf inside us is filled with fear, lies, anger, envy, inferiority, sorrow, regret, jealousy, greed, ego, lust and arrogance. The White Wolf is filled with peace, love, hope, courage, humility, compassion, kindness, empathy, generosity, truth, and faith. And do you know – there is always a terrible fight between these two wolves. They battle constantly.”

Then he stopped. There was complete silence and all children were curiously looking towards him for him. It’s the grandson that asked the initial question could not handle the tension anymore broke the silence “But grandfather, which wolf wins?”

The old fellow smiled and replied…

“That’s simple… the one whom we feed the most.”

What is the Meaning of Self-Empowerment?

The true quality of your life is not defined by how you handle yourself when things are going well. What truly determines your destiny is how you behave when things go wrong.

When the going gets tough, many people will choose to avoid, deny or escape by shutting down, self-destructing, running away or giving up their visions and dreams — rather than insisting on success by taking unrelenting, massive action.

Self-empowerment means when you chose to empower yourself to do what is right for you at that moment. When we empower ourselves with the right perspective, we achieve what we want and lead a healthy and satisfied life.

When we empower ourselves with a negative perspective, we will always find problems in front of us, we will always say that life is not fair to us, people are always trying to bully us, and I do not have enough strength to fend for myself and much more.

So, the choice is within us that we are empowering ourselves.

Many times, we also empower our spouse, children, colleagues and friends positively and negatively. If the child has not scored marks as per our expectations, we can always say that your IQ is poor or we can empower you by saying that your potential is very high and you need to tap it strongly. When our colleagues fail to complete the work on time, we can always empower them (negatively) by saying that ‘Why you are always late, why do you make the same mistakes again and again’ or you can empower them positively by saying that ‘you are the powerhouse of talent, you need to challenge yourself more and become a better version every time and you can do it (like reminding Lord Hanuman about his powers)

Why Self-Empowerment is Important?

You will resonate and realize that this world is full of Black Wolf-dominated people. Not only this, if you introspect, you will find that there is always an internal conflict going inside you dominated by the Black Wolf. The brain has a built-in negative bias that causes us to focus on bad things. By giving these negative emotions (Black Wolf) to your headspace, you are fundamentally feeding them. Knowingly or unknowingly, you feed emotions such as fear, inferiority, anger, jealousy and comparison.

Unfortunately, most of us have a very underdeveloped White Wolf. For some people, whilst growing up, it was not often fed by parents or those people in positions of authority, such as teachers. For some others, the corporate and organizational cultures encourage the “Black Wolf”. Such a surrounding environment leads your White Wolf to be weak, skinny and small. But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible to change your focus and attention, moving forward.

You have a choice of which wolf you want to feed when experiencing internal conflict. You can stop feeding the Black Wolf and start feeding the White Wolf at any given moment.

It’s also worth noting that this is something you need to work on constantly. Some people indeed find it more difficult than others to choose the White Wolf, but at the end of the day, you can choose to stop feeding the Black Wolf and start feeding the White Wolf.

How to do Enhance Self-Empowerment?

The first thing to do is to identify the wolf dominating inside you. The Black Wolf is primarily self-serving and mainly interested in staying ahead of the other wolves (does not matter black or white) at any cost. She is the ‘survivor’ within you. Your brain, people and environment shrouding you feed her constantly. You need to stop people and the environment from shrouding you to feed her. Then when you can do that, the black wolf will start getting weaker. Then you must use mindfulness to stop knowingly and unknowingly feeding done by you.

Contrary to The Black Wolf; The White Wolf, however, is interested in your development and sees herself as a mere vehicle to spread loving kindness. She is led by this cause. It doesn’t feel like a choice or an obligation, she just surrenders to the call of this life force – it just feels natural.

It can be tough to get your inner White Wolf healthy when your Black Wolf is always eager to steal as much food as possible! But persevere. The day will come when you’ll notice that the White Wolf has become equally strong. That’s when you know you’ve hit the tipping point.

Although that inner battle may continue, if you consistently do the following three things listed below that feed your White Wolf, you will win more fights and keep getting stronger.

Start winning the battle by simply choosing to feed the White Wolf. The choice is always yours.

Self-Talk, Meditation and Mindfulness can play a very important role in enhancing self-empowerment.

Practice Self-Talk: A key element of giving blessings is being grateful for what you have. Practice self-talk in our daily life and learn to appreciate all of the good things in your life.

Meditate: Meditation can help you to focus your mind and clear your thoughts. This can help you to give/receive blessings of self-empowerment that are more powerful and meaningful.

Practice Mindfulness: Mindfulness can help you to be more present and aware of the blessings in your life. Practice mindfulness regularly to help you to receive/give blessings of self-empowerment more easily.