Marys' Story: Proving your future doesn’t have to live in your past
EmPower: for people like Mary (*)
* Name changed to protect identity.
We are launching EmPower Growth after a two-year period of research, testing, and piloting. We help people strengthen mental health and wellbeing. Please arrange to speak with Emma Gannon to learn more.
We cover the whole spectrum –
1. People who are in an OK space but who want to learn the skills and techniques to move them into an awesome space – for personal reasons or for career advancement.
2. People who have been in rather fragile places and who wish to take power over their own ability to recover and strengthen.
3. Everybody in between.
Mary: a Story
Mary is a high-flyer. She is a strong, independent, gregarious, and likeable woman and she knows it. She has a job she loves, with great responsibility. She holds a director-level post and leads a team of dozens of people. Her team is successful and so is she.
Mary also knows she needs to constantly develop her mental health and well-being. This has been an active part of her life for many years. There is a back story to over 50 years ago where the vulnerability was seeded. Mary knows her back story but has found that revisiting it over and over again has proven to be little use in building her resilience for the present and the future. She is very open in talking to trusted people about her fragility. She knows how well she deals with it and has great empathy with people who can’t source the root of, or solutions to, their own emotional histories, anxieties, or lack of self-belief. She spends a lot of time and energy supporting other people.
Mary was in a good place when she decided to come to EmPower. Life was good, career was good. What Mary wanted to move beyond was the inner doubts, worries, anxieties, and fears that she spent so much energy managing. In self-reflective moments, she was fearful of relationship breakdowns or burnout. She knows full well that, unless dealt with, these fears can become self-fulfilling, so she wanted to be proactive in building her own future, professionally and personally.
It was surprising when Mary revealed she had been nervous in the build up to her EmPower seminar. She was anticipating discomfort in joining the group and being made to delve into the past in an uncomfortable way. She joined the group and was connected immediately, but it was only on day two of the seminar that the penny dropped with Mary that you can systematically build a future without reliving the past over and over again. It was her first ‘lightbulb moment’ and she expressed it volubly. It was very funny because she swore.
There was a second lightbulb moment. When it arrived it was even more profound, poignant, and eventually very funny. It was about feeling safe and where unconscious feelings of safety and confidence come from. For Mary, this was not to be found inside herself or in her workplace. One critical person could provide what Mary needs to free herself – her husband. Over the course of a joyful few hours, Mary figured out some very simple things she needed to do to create the new memories and new experiences she needed to make her feel safe, trusting and confident. She supplemented these with simple, easy actions to increase her serenity, energy, and focus as she continued to build her purposeful life.
You can imagine the change this has made to Mary. Outwardly little has changed. But yesterday she posted this Brene Brown quotation to her EmPower group;
‘If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy, shame can’t survive.’
Please help us spread the word about EmPower: strengthening mental health and wellbeing, for people like Mary.
Thank you.
Alan
Founder, EmPower Growth Ltd
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