Why Most Empowerment Advice Actually Keeps You Powerless

Ever since I can remember, I've struggled with feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt and turned to self-help books and audios for help. I would spend entire lunch hours reading the backs of self-help books at the bookstore around the corner from my job.

You could say I was a self-help junkie, on a mission to "fix" what was wrong with me. I was driven by a deep belief that something was wrong with me. And by God, I was going to find it and fix it so I could stop feeling this way.

As a result, the shelves in my living room were filled with books promising transformation and empowerment.

I would devour one book after another looking for strategies for overcoming strong negative feelings that felt out of my control. I've attended countless seminars, watched and listened to hundreds of hours of DVDs and audios, and followed all the popular personal development advice.

"Think positive," they said. "Follow these ten steps to success," they promised. And I believed them. I believed that if I just found the right formula, I would finally be able to fix myself, believe in myself, and overcome my insecurities.

But guess what?

The more I consumed, the more powerless I felt. It was having the opposite of the intended effect. It was as if I was chasing an elusive shadow of who I "should" be and growing farther and farther apart from the joyful mental health I was looking for. I was feeling more lost than ever, more different and more "other" than ever.

I wondered what was so wrong with me that the advice and strategies the experts worked for other people but wasn't quite hitting the mark for me. And that just made me feel like a big failure. It made things worse, not better.

The Bookstore Moment

I remember the day it all clicked.

I was at my favorite bookstore, a beautiful 3-story Barnes & Noble in the heart of the downtown business district in Washington, DC, staring at yet another "life-changing" book. That's when I realized, most of this advice was keeping me stuck. It was making me feel like a failure and I just wasn't sure my self-esteem could take another failure.

The "positive vibes only" mantra made me feel guilty for having natural human emotions like grief, sadness, and anger. On top of that, the one-size-fits-all steps didn't consider my background, my personal trauma, and resulting challenges.

How can I possibly love and accept myself, all of me, while being encouraged to resist and reject my negative thoughts and feelings? How is that even possible? I really don't think it is.

From that moment, I realized that I needed to be on my own side no matter what.

Getting Neutral

I started looking inward, to understand my unique journey, my fears, my dreams. I began to appreciate the power of authentically embracing all of my emotions, and not labeling them as good or bad. Instead, I started labeling all of my thoughts and emotions the same way. I labeled them as "interesting."

Yes, it was from a book that I learned that using the word "interesting" was more neutral than using "good" or "bad." If I remember correctly, it was actually more of a self-realization book than a self-help book.

By that point, the bombardment of negative thoughts and emotions had escalated, mostly from feeling like I kept failing to change them. Telling myself I was a failure was truly painful, and it was exactly the kind of thinking I was hoping this new approach might finally settle. I was amazed at how using the neutral word "interesting" was so neutralizing, who knew, especially for the less desirable thoughts and feelings.

This was working. It was actually providing me with some level of relief.

Neutralizing them got me to a more neutral state of mind, and once there, I began asking myself, what if my "negative" thoughts and emotions are trying to tell me something helpful instead of something harmful.

With that in mind, I began asking myself, if they are indeed trying to be helpful, what are some ways this could be true, what help could come from them.

As I asked myself these questions, I began to get glimmers of insight. I began to realize that true empowerment isn't about following someone else's advice verbatim, it's about taking what resonates and being okay with leaving the rest on the table. Not only leaving it on the table, but doing so without any attachment, without making it mean something negative or disheartening about myself, without guilt or shame or feeling like I had failed. Being thoroughly and completely neutral about it.

This journey hasn't been easy.

It has involved deep introspection, and facing the fact that I shouldn't and don't have to, one, follow advice if it doesn't resonate with me on a deep level, and two, believe everything I think. That, along with accepting that I'm doing the best I can.

I can now say, it has been worth it, 100 percent.

Today, I feel more empowered than ever, because through this process I've learned how to be my own biggest advocate and supporter, my own best friend. Don't get me wrong, I can still have disparaging thoughts. But now, with lots of practice under my belt, I'm much better at neutralizing them or pushing back and saying no.

Talk to the Hand

Do you remember the saying, "talk to the hand," and you put your hand up to let the other person know you're not interested in what's coming out of their mouth right now? I do that mentally. I put a me to my own thoughts sometimes. I put up mental hand up. LOL. Because sometimes I'm in no mood to try to figure out how the thought or feeling is trying to be helpful to me.

Sometimes I am in the mood and sometimes I'm not, like after a long day. When I'm not in the mood, I tell my inner critic, "no, talk to the hand," and I put a mental hand up to let my thoughts and feelings know that I don't want to hear it right now. It sounds funny and it felt funny at first, and yet, it has come to work very well for me.

All this to say, you don't have to let a failure to get all of the "positive vibes only" empowerment advice working for you make you feel worse. That's not empowering at all. It could very well be the right message at the wrong time, or the wrong message for what you've been through and what you're trying to overcome. Honor that. Simply be okay with it.

Most importantly, learn to be on your own side and focus on what does work for you.