One of the most overused and misused buzzwords in the English language is empowerment. The
word implies that somebody other than you can give you power. If someone else can give you power, they can also take it away – and loaned empowerment is not real power.

In truth, no one
can empower you but you. The only genuine empowerment is self-empowerment. Once you
empower yourself, though, nobody can take that power away.

Empowerment is a state of mind –
not part of a job description, a set of delegated tasks, or the latest management program brought
in by the boss. The Self-Empowerment Pledge includes seven simple promises that will change
your life, if you are willing to invest one minute a day for a year.

Monday's Promise: Responsibility

I will take complete responsibility for my health, my happiness, my success, and my life, and will not blame others for my problems or predicaments.

We begin with Responsibility because accepting complete responsibility for your health, happiness, success, and life is the essential and non-negotiable step toward being a mature and
self-empowered adult.

As long as you are waiting for someone else to solve your problems for you, making excuses for
not having effectively dealt with those problems, and blaming other people (or God or fate) for the
fact that you have problems, you are sinking into the victim role – practicing what psychologists
call “learned helplessness.”

When you accept complete and total responsibility for your health, your happiness, your success,
and your life you stop blaming others and buckle down to do the work that must be done to improve your health and your financial prosperity.

Tuesday's Promise: Accountability

I will not allow low self-esteem, self-limiting beliefs, or the negativity of others to prevent me from achieving my authentic goals and from becoming the person I am meant to be.

The echo of the primordial no lies at the root of low self-esteem and self-limiting beliefs.
Tuesday’s Promise is a promise to say no to no – to not allow that malignant echo of words heard so long ago to prevent you from achieving your authentic goals and from becoming the person you are truly meant to be.

I will tell you this: while I try hard to live each day’s Promise – with more or less success – I find
Tuesday’s Promise to be the most difficult (and chances are that you will too). But to the extent I
am able to keep this promise made to myself by myself it is easier to keep all the other promises, and to the extent that I fail to keep this promise it makes all the others that much tougher to live.

Keep this promise for long enough and it will change everything: How you see yourself, how you
face challenges and pursue opportunities, and the confidence level you have in building
relationships with others.

Wednesday's Promise: Determination

I will do the things I'm afraid to do, but which I know should be done. Sometimes this will mean asking for help to do that which I cannot do by myself.

I man came up to congratulate me. When I asked him why, he simply replied “Wednesday’s Promise.” He went on to say that for him, it wasn’t just Wednesday’s Promise, it was 7-day-a-week promise. He said he had printed that promise out and posted it everywhere as a constant reminder of what he could do with determination.

Whatever your goal it’s a certainty that one of the barriers standing between you and its
achievement is fear. The only way to break through that barrier is to do the things you’re afraid to do, and to ask for help when you need it.

Thursday's Promise: Contribution

I will earn the help I need in advance by helping other people now, and repay the help I receive by serving others later.

One of the best ways to keep Thursday’s Promise is to develop a practice of what I call “Extravagant Generosity in Small Ways.”

You have no doubt heard that it is more blessed than it is to receive, and that as you give so shall you receive. In fact, you might have heard words to the effect that the surest way to receive is to first give.

Become an extravagant tipper. Not a generous tipper – an extravagant tipper. For you, this will be a minor expense; for a single mom working two jobs to support her family, it might well be the highlight of her entire day.

Friday's Promise: Resilience

I will face rejection and failure with courage, awareness, and perseverance, making these experiences the platform for future acceptance and success.

The greatest test of leadership is not the ability to build a team or grow a business, as important as these are. The greatest test is the ability to keep the team inspired and motivated when to all outside appearances seem to indicate that the war has been lost.

One of the greatest tests of leadership in our recent history was the Great Depression. I believe the most
important sentence uttered during the 20th century was FDR’s statement that we have nothing to fear but
fear itself, because that speech brought an immediate end to bank runs that threatened the very fabric of
our society. Six of the eight companies profiled in my book All Hands on Deck: Eight Essential Lessons for Building a Culture of Ownership lived through the Great Depression. Not one of them executed a layoff
during those darkest of days; quite to the contrary, because of their resilient leadership they each emerged from that cauldron stronger, bigger, and poised for even greater achievements.

Saturday's Promise: Perspective

Though I might not understand why adversity happens, by my conscious choice I will find strength, compassion, and grace through my trials.

Is it the best of times or the worst of times? The answer is always yes.

What do you choose to see? On Saturday you promise yourself to make the conscious choice to always (to quote the famous song) accentuate the positive and minimize the negative. Because attitude really is everything. I’ll share with your four strategies that can help you always see the best of things in
every situation – and in every person.

Strategy #1 – Be a Dionarap: Don’t look up the word in a dictionary because you won’t find it – I made it up. Dionarap is the word paranoid spelled backwards. If you can be a backwards
paranoid and assume that everyone likes you and that the world wants you to succeed you will be much more likely to take risks that might end up in failure, and much more likely to ask for the help you need even though you might be rejected. Rejection and failure are the red badge of
courage in today’s world: cowards don’t get rejected very often because they don’t have the courage to ask, and they don’t fail very often because they don’t have the courage to try.

Strategy #2 – Turn adversity into opportunity: When United broke Dave Carroll’s Taylor guitar he did not allow it to turn him into a victim. Rather, he wrote the song “United Breaks
Guitars” and posted it on YouTube. More than 20 million views later he has not only launched his music career, he’s also written a book and launched a career as a speaker on customer
service (and how not to do it).

Strategy #3 – Turn grief into a gift: When Mark and Bonnie Barnes lost the son Patrick to a
rare disease at the age of 33, they were determined to not allow this tragedy – which in itself of barren of inherent meaning – to be a meaningless tragedy. They launched The Daisy Foundation
to recognize and honor nursing excellence. To date, more than 400,000 nurses in more than
1,600 hospitals around the country have been nominated for Daisy Awards. Mark and Bonnie
have turned the tragic loss of their son into a gift to nurses everywhere.

Strategy #4 – TGAoT: My good friend Father Michael Crosby wrote the book Thank God Ahead
of Time, a biography of Brother Solanus Casey. Casey’s philosophy was that nothing bad can
happen to you if you accept it with a spirit of gratitude. As you know, almost everyone who has
ever lost a job will eventually say that it was the best thing that could have happened. Why do
we put ourselves through the misery of playing the victim role instead of immediately saying
“thank you” and then getting to work on uncovering the blessing?

Sunday's Promise: Faith

Though I might not understand why adversity happens, by my conscious choice I will find strength, compassion, and grace through my trials.

I think of faith as being the marriage of two things – fidelity and trust. Fidelity is being faithful to
something or someone – a cause, a partnership, an employer, a spouse or a friend. Trust is having faith in someone or something – a spouse or a friend, a business or an employer, the future, a higher power. If you’re a long-time reader you know that part of our mission at Values Coach is to help eradicate toxic emotional negativity – as reflected in bitching, moaning, whining, and complaining – the other BMW Club! – from the workplace, and hopefully from families and the broader community.

You see, complaining is the anti-prayer. Any time you complain, instead of expressing gratitude
for the blessings in your life (and if you live in America as opposed to Haiti or Somalia or
Afghanistan those blessings are many indeed), you are whining about not having been given enough.

Sunday’s Promise is the capstone of The Self-Empowerment Pledge because it predisposes you to being more open to the many blessings and gifts that a spirit of self-empowerment will bring into your life, and to appreciating those many blessings rather than complaining that –however manifold those blessings are – they just are not enough.