Empowerment (right vs wrong ways)
- kmccoy240
- Sep 22, 2025
- 3 min read
Empowerment Isn't One-Size-Fits-All: A Guide for Optimists and Pessimists
We all talk about empowerment, but we often treat it like a blunt hammer—something you either have or you don't. The reality is far more nuanced. True empowerment is a skill, and it's most critical when we feel its opposite: helplessness.
Helplessness is the internal state of feeling unable to influence outcomes. It’s the belief that you’re a passenger, not the driver. Empowerment, then, is the earned ability to take action and shape your reality, especially under stress.
But how you earn it depends heavily on your default mindset. Before we go on, ask yourself: are you fundamentally an optimist or a pessimist? Not a "realist" or "perfectly balanced"—which side do you lean on, especially when you're tired, hungry, or stressed? Your answer determines the right strategy for you.
The Empowerment Framework for Optimists: The Stockdale Paradox
Optimists are the kids on the monkey bars who keep going until their hands are raw, convinced they’ll make it across. Their strength is their belief in a positive outcome. Their weakness, however, is a tendency to ignore, suppress, or run from negative feelings and potential bad outcomes.
For an optimist, negative thoughts feel like poison. Their coping mechanism is often to replay past heroic stories, distorting them over time to get a jolt of confidence—like popping a Motrin to dull a headache. But this short-term fix is detrimental. Suppressing the negative doesn't make it disappear; it makes it grow in your subconscious, draining your mental energy.
The path to empowerment for an optimist follows the Stockdale Paradox: confront the brutal facts of your reality while maintaining unwavering faith that you will prevail in the end.
The Strategy:
Drop the Past & Confront the Future Downside: Stop replaying your distorted greatest hits. Instead, channel your energy into creating a detailed, realistic "Plan Z." What is the worst-case scenario? Visualize it, explain it to someone, and sit with the discomfort until it loses its emotional power. If you get laid off, what does the plan look like if it takes a year to find a new job? By knowing the rock bottom, you gain the power to kick off from it.
Act Powerfully in the Present: Once you have a concrete plan for the worst-case scenario, you can park it. With the secret fear of the unknown addressed, your mind becomes lighter. You can now unleash your natural optimism and focus 100% of your energy on winning in the present, taking bold, creative shots to achieve the best possible outcome.
The Empowerment Framework for Pessimists: The Hero's Journey
Pessimists have a different challenge. Their default is an addiction to making negative predictions about the future. It’s a self-protective mechanism, but like the optimist’s habit, it’s a form of "Motrin" that provides short-term relief while causing long-term damage. They are so focused on what could go wrong that they become paralyzed.
For a pessimist, celebrating past success feels like tempting fate or jinxing the future. They cringe at the idea of declaring their own strength. Therefore, their path to empowerment isn't about looking forward, but looking back.
The Strategy:
Drop the Future & Confront the Past: Stop the addiction to making negative future predictions. Instead, dedicate that mental energy to a detailed audit of your past. In excruciating detail, recall the doomsday predictions you made six months ago, two years ago, five years ago. The job you were sure you’d lose, the relationship you thought would end, the failure you believed you wouldn't survive.
Observe Your Strength in the Present: The crucial reflection is this: you made it through. Those terrible things you predicted didn't happen, or if they did, you survived. The simple act of getting through pain and difficulty builds mental muscle. By narrating this Hero’s Journey—the story of the challenges you’ve overcome—you start to observe and feel your own strength. This isn't about jinxing the future; it's about building a case file of your own resilience, which empowers you to act now.
The Goal: Action, Not Wallowing
Whether you’re an optimist confronting a potential failure or a pessimist cataloging past survival, the goal is the same: to free up your mind so you can take effective action in the present.
Empowerment is earned, not given. It’s built through the consistent, daily reps of managing your mind in the way that works for you, so you can stop wallowing in worry and start acting to get things right.
Empowerment (right vs wrong ways)-- (Leadership in Practice #252)
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