257: Reclaiming Your Power

Extraordinary is a choice. Take that in, soak it up because of the hustle grind, repeat mantra that society has been touting for decades. It had it all wrong. I’m Tanya Dalton. I’m a seven figure entrepreneur best-selling author speaker, mom, and rule-breaker I’m here to help you live to your fullest potential. That’s what this podcast is all about. The Intentional advantage is doing life on our own terms.

 

Define the status quo and seeing ourselves outside of the tidy definition. Society’s name for us. It’s intentionally choosing to step back away from the chaotic rush of your every day and choosing, choosing to see that it’s your world and it’s filled with opportunities. Let’s challenge the bedrock beliefs that so many have wholeheartedly trusted because we were told they were truths. Let’s have a healthy disregard for the impossible.

 

Let’s choose to be extraordinary. Hello? Hello everyone. Welcome to the Intentional advantage podcast. I’m your host, Tanya Dalton. This is episode 257 brand new season laid out before us. I am so excited about where we’re going to go this season, because we are talking about reclaiming your power, ah, reclaiming your power all season long. I’m excited about this topic because I think power is one of those things that we tend to shy away from.

 

Maybe we worry that it seems like we’re power hungry or that we, you know, are looking for more than what we’re really do. And the truth is this season. When we talk about reclaiming your power, I think it’s going to be really eye opening and what that means and what that looks like back in episode 2 56, which was not last week, but the week before,

 

because as you know, we’ve moved to every other week with this brand new season, I announced that our season was going to be on taking ownership. And this is what I love about giving myself a little bit of time, a little bit of breathing room. I really sat and thought about it. I meditated about it. I ruminated on it. I just kind of thought about what it was.

 

I wanted to talk about this season. And as I was mapping out where I want this season to go and who I want to have as my special guests in these episodes that we’ll be exploring throughout the season. I realized taking ownership is a part of things, right? It’s this idea that it’s really something so much bigger. This idea of reclamation of reclaiming our power.

 

I’m not saying taking the power. I’m not saying, you know, overstepping bounds or doing any of those things, reclaiming what belongs to us. And that’s what I want you to think about all season long, reclaiming your power, which means truly at its heart, stepping into who you really want to be stepping in to the highest, greatest version of you.

 

When you reclaim your power. When you stand in the seat of your own power, confidence, you know, excitement, passion, all of that comes naturally. So this season, we’re going to talk about things like letting go of the stories that we’ve told ourselves, these identities that we have really stuck with over our lifetime. We’re going to be talking about our boundaries.

 

We’re going to talk about reclaiming our email even and reclaiming our calendar, reclaiming our intuition, really getting even perhaps a good handle on our finances. We’ll be talking about lots of different things this season. We’ll see where it goes. I have it all mapped out and yet just like anything else, we’re going to see where the season takes us. We’re going to let it go where it wants to go,

 

because really at its heart, what I think it’s about this podcast, this season, it’s about letting go of living life on repeat. This is something that I certainly talk about in the book on purpose. This idea of we get up every day, we fight the clock, like an angry bear. We go to work. We do the things we go back from work.

 

We do the things we go to bed, right? Like it’s just this feeling of, okay, what is the point? What am I doing here? Feeling like it’s just not going to change. This is just the way life is. Well, you know, when you have young kids, you have no time for yourself or you don’t get to shower.

 

If you’re in a corporate job, you don’t get to do the projects that you really want to do. Or if you’re an entrepreneur, you have to work 80 a hundred hours a week. That’s just the way it is. And that’s not true. Those are little tiny lies that we’re telling ourselves. What I want you to do is stop feeling like you’re living life on repeat that you’re doing the same things over and over again.

 

Even when they don’t fulfill you, even when they don’t satisfy you, what I want you to start doing, and this is what we’ll be exploring throughout the course of the season is listening to the quiet voice that comes out in the stillness, the quiet voice inside your head. We’ve talked in the past about the loud voice, the inner critic, who loves to tell you everything you’ve done wrong.

 

Who loves to tell you how you don’t do anything, right? Who loves to tell you this is just the way things are. And I want us to try to quiet that inner critic and really start to listen to our highest self, that loud voice in your head. That’s your ego. And your ego is here to keep you safe. We’ve talked about this in several episodes in the past,

 

this idea that your ego, that inner critic, that inner voice, that subconscious it’s been set in your head by the time you’re about seven years old, right? So it’s this child running the show, your ego that’s really its main job is to make sure that you survive the day and make it to tomorrow. That’s its entire job, which means it’s afraid to make waves.

 

It’s afraid to step out of the comfort zone. It’s afraid to take any risk. And this is the loud voice, right? Which is why we shy away from power. And when we shy away from power, we don’t step into our full potential. We play small well because that’s the way we’ve been raised by the world by society to be a good girl,

 

play by the rules. And the truth is boys are encouraged to bend and break the rules they’re seen as cheeky or you know, over exuberant girls who break the rules or try to bend the rules or bossy. And they’re redirected. It’s time for us to really challenge those rules. It’s really time for us to step into our power, stepping into our best self there’s this study from the Simmons school of management.

 

And what they found was women tend to interpret and enact power differently from men, women work well in partnerships and collaborations. This is actually one of our big soul gifts. As a collective. We bring people together while men seek power over things, power is the goal and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s just the way their relationship is with power. Our relationship is different women.

 

With our gifts. We can use our power for good to bring healing to the world, to make the impact we desire, but we have to stop shying away from the word power. Let’s step into our power fully, wholly and completely. So we can make that difference in the world. Michael Beckwith has this quote that I just love. He says,

 

you cannot be a light of the world. If you can’t pay your light bill, I love that, right? You can’t be a light of the world. If you can’t pay your light, bill money is just one form of power. And it’s one. We should definitely talk about more. I honestly believe that, you know, this is one of the things that,

 

that we find that women tend to shy away from talking about power in terms of money or other kinds of power. In fact, you know, I’m the heart of the networking group, the trust with Allie brown, where it’s seven and eight figure business women. And we were talking not that long ago about the fact that what we talk about as women at a lot of these groups is very different than what men talk about.

 

And this is one of the things I love about the trust is we talk about true business, but in a lot of women’s networking groups, we talk about the fluffy side of business, the soft side of business. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but we need to talk about the finances. We need to talk about how money works a lot more.

 

There was recently this coworking space that emerged that was for women. We were all talking about how excited we were about it. And it was offering programming for these women to be able to partake of if you’re a part of this coworking space. We thought that was amazing until we looked at the offerings, the trainings that they were teaching or about nail art and how to braid hair.

 

I can guarantee you at these men’s events, they’re not talking about nail art. They’re not talking about writing their hair. They’re talking about how do we, how do we work together to make a difference? How do we, how do we use our finances? How do we make investments? How do we build wealth? Let’s change the conversation. Let’s stop shying away from power because the lack of power women experience is hidden in the thousands of tiny paper cuts we experienced in our lives.

 

The things that we dismiss as just being how it is, tolerating your relationship and how it works possibly, or putting up with your work environment, maybe smashing down your gifts into the tiny box. You believe society can handle instead of allowing your light to fully shine the way even that we question our aging and we worry about being thin enough, young enough,

 

smart enough being enough, right? This is about reclamation, reclaiming, taking back ownership. And you might be thinking to yourself, I have no issue with power. Okay. Let’s just do a quick little test to see how you feel. How do you handle compliments? How do you handle it? When somebody gives you a compliment, do you Dodge them?

 

Do you rebuff them? Do you minimize them? Or do you fully receive them? That is standing in your power, allowing yourself to be seen as the light, as part of being the light of the world and paying your light bills. That’s important too. But we do. We get stuck in this pattern, this rut believing, this is just the way that our life is.

 

This is just how it goes. And you’ve heard me talk about the fact that our brain loves patterns. You probably remember the exercise I did back in episode 249. That was the episode where we talked about how to set the right goals. And we talked about this idea of red, yellow, blue, red, yellow, blue, red, yellow,

 

blue, red, yellow, and you probably just said blue, right? Our brain loves patterns. And it loves to look at what’s happened in the past to decide what’s going to happen in the future, which gets us into this whole idea of learned helplessness learned helplessness is definitely something that we have talked about on the show. Numerous times, something I go into really deeply in the joy of missing out.

 

My first book learned helplessness means that you just don’t feel like you have any choice in the matter that our life is so rigid. It’s made up of so many rules that we don’t really get to choose the life we live. We just follow it wherever it takes us. Red, yellow, blue, red, yellow, right? We just go blue.

 

Blue is next. I don’t get to have the power. I don’t get to do these things because this is just the way life is. And this is what it’s time to give up. This is what it’s time to walk away from this idea that we can’t change things. This is just how it is because the symptoms of learned helplessness or pacivity giving up procrastination,

 

frustration, low self-esteem. And this idea of learned helplessness it’s passed on to our kids. It’s passed onto our grandkids. They’ve even found that when animals in testing have been taught, learned helplessness, when they, when they try to escape and they receive the smell of cherry blossoms and they get an electric shock, they stop, they stop believing. Anytime they smell cherry blossoms,

 

they stop even trying to escape. They just stay. Even if opportunities to escape are right in front of them. And what’s interesting is the children of these mice. When they sell cherry blossoms, they hover in the corner and they cower. And even the grandchildren of those initial mice, who’ve never received electric shocks. When they smell cherry blossoms, they fear for their safety.

 

We want to change the pattern. Let’s stop accepting that we don’t have control. Let’s not give up on the opportunities on the choices that we have. I want you to remember that you are worthy of so much more, but yes, there’s probably been trauma in your life. There’s been situations where you’ve learned this helplessness. There’s all kinds of trauma that happened.

 

And I want to touch briefly on that word trauma, because it’s a word that I’ve really kind of bristled at for a long time. And I feel like it’s thrown out pretty haphazardly a lot of times, because I feel like trauma with a capital T is these big things that happen, but there’s all these little traumas that happen. And maybe we as a society need to come up with a different word for it other than trauma,

 

but it is there. And it’s funny. I was reading a book, not that long ago, that was talking about how we as women experienced trauma. And I thought to myself quite smugly, honestly, well, I don’t have any trauma. I don’t have any trauma in my life. I have nothing to complain about it. There’s no reason why I have any learned helplessness,

 

which is a lie because I do have some learned helplessness, just like everybody else in this world does in certain situations. But when I sat down and I started doing some deep work, when I started to dive into my own story, I realized, well, if you read the joy of missing out, you know, I’ve been raped. I had a stalker,

 

I’ve almost been pulled into a van. I bought my first home and it was broken into three months after I lived in it by myself and the burglar bled all over. All of my furniture causing me to stay awake night after night for three months straight. And yet I believed I had no trauma. And that’s  me just barely scratching the surface. It’s no surprise.

 

If you feel like this is the way life is or these thoughts that I have, or just how it is. I’ve thought that for a long time, too, even though I stepped out of my comfort zone fairly often, we have to remember the choices are there and we have to disrupt the thinking. And we have to realize that we, we can take control over a lot of things in our world.

 

We have a choice in everything we do and how we act, how we perceive things, how we move forward. This is so important because we need choices to motivate ourselves. We have to have an element of control in our life to understand that our actions are what make things happen when you feel like you have some control in your life. When you’re in charge,

 

it’s called an internal locus of control. Again, something we’ve talked about on the show in the past, but it’s this belief that you can influence your destiny. And you influence that destiny through the choices. You make people with an internal locus of control. They tend to praise or blame themselves when success or failure happens, they don’t assign responsibility to anything else.

 

They don’t say it’s because of this. Or because of that. People who have an internal locus of control, believe they have the freedom and the ability to make their own choices that we get to decide what happens to us and how we process it. And those people are significantly more successful. You’re not reactive to what life Hans to you or throws at you.

 

You’re proactive and that’s highly correlated with success. So when things go really well, like you have an amazing launch of a new product, you credit the things that you can control on the work that you’ve done on the, on the effort you put in on the creativity, rather than just being naturally smart. And when the launch fails, which has sometimes happen,

 

you take ownership over what happened. You look at it and figure out why didn’t it work right? When you have an internal locus of control, you feel like you have a say in how life works. Now, if you don’t have this feeling, it’s called an external locus of control that the control is not within you. It’s somewhere else. A lot of times it’s the universe.

 

Ah, the universe hates me or the universe is against me. Nothing ever goes right. And people like this feel like they’re a victim. A lot of times, they’re quick to blame anything but themselves. They avoid responsibility. What we want to do is we want to strengthen our internal locus of control. All of us have trauma. All of us have the ability to call ourselves victims.

 

I, I know I certainly do, but I choose not to see myself as a victim in any circumstance. Instead I am a survivor. I’m a person who has a choice in how I process it, how I reach out for help, how I find support, how I move forward in the world. That is something that I can control in my book on purpose.

 

On page 14, I want to share with you a section of what I talk about there. I say, we cannot give in and tell ourselves the lie that nothing can be done. We have to stop giving ourselves the excuse that the world is working against us. Do some people have it easier than you? Yes. Someone’s always going to have it easier.

 

It’s only by sheer force of choice that you can make that inconsequential. We can choose to be put down and made to feel small by the things in our lives that we cannot control, or we can choose to take ownership over what we can control. And I understand that word control is a touchy one. I feel like a lot of people bristle at it because I don’t like the idea of being controlling or being labeled a control freak.

 

We have a complicated relationship with that word because we worry what it looks like to everybody else, but understanding what we can control versus what we cannot. We’ll build our confidence and extraordinary ways. It allows us to relinquish and release that, which we do not control and allows us to take full ownership of what we can, what you cannot control. Other people’s words,

 

the situation, what others think of you, your family, other people’s opinions, other people’s reactions, what you can control are your own words, your own thoughts, your own attitude, your own emotions, your own actions and beliefs. You know, Newton’s law of inertia states that an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction,

 

unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. So in other words, the path you’re on is going to stay the same unless you act upon it, unless you do something different. If you want your life situation to change, you’re going to have to do something different. Because if you keep doing the same thing, you’ve always done, you’re going to be in the same place.

 

You’ve always been. I want you to realize that these opportunities are there, that these choices are there implement that squirrel strategy that I talk about in the joy of missing out, taking a situation and looking at it from all these different viewpoints. That’s how we really start to build up that internal locus of control. That’s how we start reclaiming our power and stepping into that best version of ourselves and this idea of reclaiming power.

 

It happens. It starts when we recognize that the choices are there. That’s a really big part of it. Again, this idea of life on repeat is because we don’t feel like we have any options. There’s no opportunities. There’s, there’s no choices. So really start to pay attention and notice when there are choices available. Notice when you’re thinking tells you that there’s not a choice and then stop and walk away from the situation.

 

I think it’s so important to really become an observer in your own life. Sometimes we get so caught up in the emotions of what we’re experiencing, that we lose sight of what it is we really want. So sometimes you have to step away from the situation, whether that means physically stepping away or just taking some time and space, but start to really look at it and ask yourself,

 

is there really no other choices right here? Because the truth is there’s a choice in every situation. It may not be great choices. It may not be choices that, that you love, but there are choices there. And then just start to write them down, start to list out all the possible options. All the different courses of action you could take.

 

Don’t get caught up in evaluating each and every one, just do it a little brain dump of, well, I could do this, or I could do that. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, but just see that there are options. There are really good way to get out of the emotions of a situation and really step into being an observer is to call in somebody who’s outside of it.

 

Phone a friend. I think especially as women, we worry that when we ask for help, we’re a burden on others. And the truth is our friends are more than happy to support us and to, to help us. Sometimes they’re screaming out because they want to help us so badly. They want us to see the choices. So call a supportive friend,

 

supportive, being the key word there and just listen, don’t argue back. Don’t interrupt and tell them why something’s not a choice. Just write down all the options they’re sharing with you. They’re going to have a different way of looking at the opportunities in front of you, because really what’s important here is remembering you have a choice. Everything is a choice getting out of bed in the morning.

 

Yeah. That’s a choice choosing to smile at the lady who passes you on the streets. That’s a choice too. Life is a series of choices. So enjoy getting to choose choosing how you interact with the world. Choosing what opportunities are before you choosing is really the heart of reclaiming your power. And that’s what I want you to keep in mind. As we kick off the season on reclaiming your power,

 

this reclamation of your boundaries, of your inbox and your calendar reclamation of your limiting beliefs, stepping into who you are really being mindful of the things going on inside your head. You know, I talk about that word, mindfulness, a lot Intentional and mindfulness are kind of hand in hand. I liked the word mindfulness because at its heart, it’s about paying attention to yourself at the choices you are making.

 

You’ve probably heard me say before that productivity is 90% mindset. Life is 90% mindset about making the choices, choosing how you spend your time, choosing how to live your life, choosing what are your priorities. And that’s what I want you to think about. What are the things that you’re going to want to let go of as you reclaim your power, as you step fully into the life you dream about what is it you want more of?

 

What is it you want less of? What is it you need to let go of? What is it you need to grasp on even tighter to now next week, there is no podcast episode because we’re moving to every other week. But if you’re on my email list, I’m going to send you a little activity to do something, to help you dive into what you need to do to figure out what it is you need to let go of.

 

I want to share this activity with you because it was really powerful when someone else did this with me. So I’m going to be emailing that out to you because I want you to see the clear path of what you need to let go of and what it is you need to grab. Hold of. I want you to start to understand that you can achieve your goals and dreams.

 

So I’m sending out this activity only to my email list. So if you’re not on it, you’re going to want to get on it, go to Tanya dalton.com/email. This is not something I’m going to post anywhere. There’s no opt-in thing. This is just for people who are in that inner circle. In that email list. I send an email out every week.

 

And as you’ve heard me talk about now that I’m not on social media, I spent a lot of time and energy on really sending out meaningful emails that they’re going to help you out and are going to give you some ideas or some behind the scenes or some activities every now and then. So if you haven’t signed up, go ahead and pause the podcast right now,

 

go to Tanya dalton.com/email. Get on that list because I’m going to be sending out that activity next week. This is what I want you to leave this episode, knowing that you’re going to get some clarity with that activity without question, but I want you to remember you are powerful and you do have the ability to be a light for this world. You were designed for greatness.

 

And when we make the decision to reclaim our power to step into who we are fully wholly authentically ourselves, that is when we have the Intentional advantage. Thanks so much for joining me today. Quick question though, before you go, do you like prizes? When you leave a rating and review of the Intentional advantage podcast, you’ll be entered to win my life changing course,

 

multiplying your time. Simply leave the review and then send me an email@helloatTanyadalton.com with a screenshot. I choose one winner at the end of every month. So go ahead. Do it right now. Just a quick comment with what you loved about this episode or the show in general and a rating and send it our way. Not going to lie by stars is my favorite,

 

but I’d love to hear what you think of the show. And if that’s not enough of an incentive for you to win the multiplying your time course, I have to tell you the reviews are the number one thing that supports this podcast. And me, it’s the best way to spread the word and get business tips and strategies to all those other women out there who need it.

 

So there you go. Two great reasons for you to go and leave a review right now. So go ahead and do it, send that screenshot my way, because I want to give you a free course. And thanks again for listening today. I’ll be back next Tuesday and I’ll plan to see you then.

 

This transcript from one of the top female productivity podcasts for women is created using AI.

Tanya Dalton is a motivational and inspirational female keynote speaker. She is considered one of the top women productivity experts in the country. She speaks on topics like time management, finding balance, goal setting and finding meaning in your work.