4 Ways You May Be Giving Away Your Personal Power

My coworker Alayna prides herself on having hard boundaries — she says no to working weekends, refuses to lend money to family, and never, ever has sex with someone before the third date.

You would think that Alayna would be someone who has a peaceful mind, one that is impermeable to the outside world. You could also be forgiven for thinking that Alayna has her act together and is in total control of her world.

And you would be dead wrong on both counts.

In fact, Alayna is quite possibly the most emotionally volatile person I know. An emoji from her crush can send her sky-high while a negative comment from a stranger on Instagram can bring her crashing down.

The problem is that Alayna sets hard physical boundaries but has almost no emotional boundaries. She may not do things she doesn’t want to do but she very frequently feels things she doesn’t want to feel. Her heart is like a giant sponge soaking up anything and everything around her. Like a sponge, she can also hold on to those feelings for days.

“I’m having the worst morning. Some idiot cut me off in traffic and made me late for my presentation. Then I got that doomsday email from Dan telling our entire department that numbers were way down and now I’m worried about my job. Luke still hasn’t called so I don’t know if I should make weekend plans and to top it off, my sister just got engaged. They’ve only been dating a year! I really didn’t want to be the last one to get married!”

She had allowed four people who hadn’t spoken to her, hadn’t thought about her and weren’t even there to affect her emotional state. All before 10 am.

Alayna is aware of how people affect her. She often tells me, “God, these people drive me nuts. They just make me lose control!”

I’ve often found Alayna’s choice of words interesting. They make me do this. They drive me nuts. She describes it as though things are happening to her and she has no control over the matter. Here’s the twist — Alayna and I know a lot of the same people. The people in her life that are doing these things to Alayna don’t do the same to me. Why is that?

It’s because they aren’t doing anything to her, she is always allowing people to affect her. By letting everyone and anyone into her emotional space, she is basically giving away her personal power.

Perhaps you are not as extreme as Alayna. Sure, you let your fearful friend dump her anxieties on you all the time and maybe you do feel a twinge of envy when you hear that your friend has launched a successful side hustle during the pandemic while you binged on Netflix. That’s not so bad, right?

It isn’t. Perhaps a different way to think about it is to imagine your emotional space as a safe filled with the most precious treasure — your energy. If you owned a trove of diamonds, you wouldn’t allow anyone to just come in and take a piece, so don’t allow people to do that with your energy. Remember, they can’t come in if you don’t let them. Make it the most exclusive club ever and only let people who have earned their key in.

If you’ve never thought about it this way before, here are some ways you might be giving your personal power away that you may not even realize.

1. You care too much about what people who don’t matter think

Alayna is a talented artist and had often been encouraged to sell her art online. After months of effort, she finally set up a website to promote her work but was extremely distraught by some of the negative comments she received. Despite receiving far more positive comments than negative ones, she decided to shut her website down. By caring what strangers thought of her, she had given people she had never even met the power not only to upset her but to tear her dreams down and build a wall of perceived limitations around her.

The biggest problem with making decisions based on what others think is that Alayna was likely overestimating how bad those judgments were. Four studies on actors who had committed public and embarrassing blunders found that the actors often imagined that strangers think worse of them than they actually do. Researchers discovered that people tended to fixate on the negative comments they received while ignoring positive ones. They concluded that the actors could avoid unnecessary social anxiety by not ruminating over what onlookers thought.

How to stop doing this

The next time someone you don’t care about leaves a nasty comment on your social media or is rude to you in real life, just remind yourself that they don’t have a key to your energy bank. Even if you are unable to stop the initial reaction of anger, don’t hold on to it — this person who doesn’t matter to you has already taken more energy than they deserve.

“Every time you allow someone to make you feel less than, you give a bit of your personal power away. Unfortunately, some will not stop until they possess all of your power because they have none of their own.”― Christine E. Szymanski

2. You compare yourself to others

Alayna has two sisters whom she constantly compares herself to. During the pandemic, Alayna and her sisters signed on to an at-home fitness routine together. Alayna was feeling great about the 10lbs she has lost until both her sisters posted on Instagram that they lost more weight than her. Although she still looked fabulous in her new dress, her euphoria was gone and replaced by envy and self-judgment. If she had signed up without her sisters, she would have stayed euphoric but her act of comparison stripped her of her joy and gave her nothing back in return.

Social scientists have known for a long time that social comparison can rob people of their joy. In fact, studies have shown that people who identify as generally unhappy were highly affected by people who did better than them. Contrastingly, people who identified as happy people were either unaffected by people who performed better or even inspired by them.

How to stop doing this

Remember that someone else’s success has zero impact on your life. You are no less successful or no worse off because someone else is successful. There will always be someone who has done more than you, being envious is a waste of energy as it makes you feel bad while not improving your situation one bit. Allowing comparison to upset you would be the equivalent of taking diamonds from your energy bank and throwing them into the sea. Instead, scientists advise that we would be far happier if we compared ourselves against our personal bests or used the success of others as inspiration.

“A flower does not think of competing to the flower next to it. It just blooms.” — Zen Shin

3. You obsess about why people behave a certain way

Alayna has been seeing Luke casually for a few months. She wants a relationship but doesn’t know how he feels about it. Instead of expressing what she wants directly to Luke, Alayna often tries to decipher his intentions through his actions. Here’s an example:

“He mentioned that his mom will be in town for the holidays and said that we would like each other. Do you think he wants me to meet his mom? Does that mean he’s maybe wanting something more serious?”

She often expresses how frustrated she is that Luke is just so confusing and that she wishes he was more direct. She spends hours of emotional energy creating “what if” scenarios she will never have answers to. Luke isn’t making her lose control — she is giving away her power every time her phone rings (or doesn’t ring) and every time she puts her life on hold waiting for him to make plans with her.

Beyond the fact that Alayna is creating unnecessary suffering for herself, she is also being unfair to Luke. As renowned researcher, Brené Brown says,

“Talking about people rather than to them is unkind. Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”

How to stop doing this

In her book Dare to Lead, Brené Brown says that you cannot hold people accountable or blame them for affecting you if you do not make your expectations clear.

You will never know why people are behaving a certain way at any given point in time. How people behave could be determined by how they are feeling at that moment, what else happened to them that day, or even how they slept the night before. Take the energy you would spend wondering why they did something and use it to have the hard conversation of asking them instead.

4. You allow anyone to spill their negative energy on to you

Alayna’s best friend is someone who seems to perpetually create drama for herself. Whether it’s dating chaos or an existentialist dilemma, she has Alayna on speed dial. She frequently interrupts Alayna’s day and expects hours of her undivided attention. In her misguided attempt to be a good friend, Alayna indulges her.

“But she needs me, she doesn’t have anyone else who will listen to her. Besides, we’ve been friends for a long time.” Alayna says when I ask her why she does it. But by constantly absorbing her best friend’s energy, Alayna is doing all the emotional labor and enabling her friend to never do it for herself.

We often think that there is no cost to listening to a distressed friend, even a chronically distressed friend. But this is not true. Studies on healthcare workers who have to constantly be empathetic have shown that compassion fatigue is very real and can have significant mental, physical, and emotional consequences on the listener. These include fatigue, difficulties making decisions, headaches, and insomnia.

How to stop doing this

Notice if you have someone in your life who always seems to be in a crisis and never tries to self-regulate their feelings. This is different from someone who is going through a period of depression or has just suffered trauma. It is someone who thrives on drama and never works on improving themselves. You should either choose to release them from your life or set clear boundaries on when you can and cannot talk. Psychologist Dana Gionta expands on these points in her excellent article here.

Takeaway

In case you haven’t noticed, here is the one thing all four scenarios above have in common — they allow anyone to completely derail your day at any time. A text, a comment, or even a stray thought from your own mind. This is the reason that emotional boundaries are far more important than physical boundaries. They are harder to notice and much more impactful.

The good news is that people can only affect you if you let them. This is the reason that a stranger telling you that you are a loser hurts less than your spouse telling you the same thing. We have full control over who has access to our personal power. As Eleanor Roosevelt once said,

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

So, choose the people you give your power to wisely. It will make all the difference.

I write to connect with people. Sign up to my mailing list.