Battling Addiction With Personal Empowerment

People in the grips of addiction often suffer from poor self-esteem and have a strong feeling of shame. Oftentimes the need to numb these destructive feelings is a driving force behind their addiction, and when they make the decision to enter treatment, addressing the low self-worth and shame is key to a successful recovery journey. There are many ways to help individuals cope with these issues. Personal Empowerment Coaching is an effective and powerful one.

Personal Empowerment Coaching is life coaching with a concentration on positive thought, core desired feelings, and mind, body, spirit awareness. Rather than delving into and trying to understand the past, it focuses on the present and leverages one’s knowledge and strength to create a more positive future.

Through Personal Empowerment Coaching, many people find that they actually experience a breakthrough in focusing on specific goals and creating an action plan to achieve growth and change. In recovery, there are so many benefits to receiving Personal Empowerment Coaching: a sense of connection, clarity, inspiration, and direction. It encourages people to live life “on purpose.”

Through the Personal Empowerment Coaching process, clients begin to align their lives with their core desired feelings, become more authentic, trust their inner selves, and enhance self-appreciation. This is how the grip of addiction is weakened – by a new perspective on life and the development of inner strength. Personal Empowerment Coaching also teaches individuals to trust themselves, express gratitude, and identify whether their energy levels are positive or negative. This increased sense of contentment will spill over into various aspects of their life, making for a better work attitude, stronger relationships, and a more positive perspective in life.

Understanding Core Desired Feelings

Transcript

As human beings, we are always chasing feelings. We think it’s connected to the thing we want, like the house or the car or the partner or the money, whatever it is we think we want, but really we’re chasing what we think that thing would feel like. [Danielle LaPorte, author of The Desire Map] is about coaching around the feelings, allowing people to feel those feelings first if only just to feel them and feel happier, but also to attract those things that they desire. Just a couple quotes from that book: “You’re not chasing the goal itself — you’re chasing the feelings that you hope attaining those goals will give you.” “Knowing how you actually want to feel is the most potent form of clarity that you can have. Generating those feelings is the most powerfully creative thing you can do with your life.”

So I want you to just take a moment: can everyone just rip a page out of their notebooks and grab a pen? What I want you to do is just for a moment think of something that you truly desire. Think of something that you really, really want to either have or experience — it doesn’t matter what it is. Imagine that page is a direct message to your higher power saying “I want this” and write that same experience on that piece of paper. So what you’re going to do now is you’re going to honestly think of the three feelings that would describe how it would feel to actually experience that. And take your time with this because sometimes there’s a feeling under a feeling, right? Let’s think about what it would truly be for you to have that.

So earlier when I asked “how’s your spirit today?” and I asked if it needs more of something, are the two feelings related? With every client that I meet at Mountainside, when I have those one-on-one sessions all I’m listening for is their values, which to me are their core desired feelings. There’s no difference between what they value and what they want to feel, so I’m constantly listening to see what they want to feel more of. And they’re saying it all the time; they’re saying it clearly. Every time they leave that session, they’re leaving with their top core desired feelings. I’m really helping them clarify what they are. When they leave, [that clarification] is like a little GPS for where they need to go, for what they need for their way back to healing. So I think that having those clarifying words can be really empowering and it always comes back to: how can we begin to feel those today? What can we do in the next month to help you embody that value more? We’re always creating momentum towards feeling the way they want to feel because there’s nothing more self-loving than allowing ourselves to feel the way that we want to feel.