"Well, I thought I had it a minute ago....maybe I put it down around here somewhere?"

 I was talking with someone the other day about the whole idea of personal power. And in particular about how this impacts on our day to day lives, and other things such as our mood, our self-esteem, and our satisfaction with life. What exactly is our personal power? It can probably mean a whole bunch of different things to different people. For instance you can, for example, feel quite powerful in a job that you may not like. Or you can still feel personally powerful without having buckets of money.  You might feel powerful because you really work out at the gym and you are really toned and feel physically strong. These examples are important, but I believe personal power is likely to be more subtle than this. It is more likely to be concerned with whether or not you feel in charge of you (and in particular how you respond or react in certain situations), regardless of who you might be with, what you might be doing or where you might be. A key thing is though, that people who are depressed or quite anxious, are likely to also describe having low levels of personal power.

If you have personal power, you are in charge of yourself, you are responsible for yourself and also your responses and reactions. Your mood, and your sense of personal competency, your self-esteem will be determined by you, and not by the actions or words of others.  Of course, we are going to get pissed off from time to time, with someone else. And of course other people can seemingly make us feel quite happy. We are social beings who usually live in close proximity to others who we will respond or react to.

But above all this, we need to remind ourselves that our thoughts are ours, our moods are ours, our emotions are ours. No one else puts these into our heads,  And when we have let them into our heads, we can choose as to how long we are going to let them rattle around for....we all have the power. No one  or no thing (though it is usually a person/people, rather than a thing, that is likely to make us feel lousy) can actually make us feel anything if we don't want to.

Alert readers will notice that these ideas are not new, and are described in some depth in the field of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. My own thoughts  (yup- I chose them) about CBT as a therapy have varied over the years, though there is no denying that it works, and it has a huge role to play in the therapy world-  And I certainly believe  that our thoughts can often seem to take away our sense of personal power. And if something can help us develop strategies for staying in control, for keeping crappy, limiting thoughts at bay, then it is worth a shot. If you are interested in checking this out further, click over to good old  amazon (no, I'm not getting commission, the finer details of affiliate marketing elude me currently- so not a cent will come my way, damn it..) and  key in CBT. There is a whole raft of material on CBT, and something will grab your fancy.