How to Attain Real Personal Empowerment

by Guy Winch, Ph.D. in The Squeaky Wheel

Cattaneo & Chapman lay out 6 steps in the process of attaining personal empowerment. Let's illustrate these steps by applying them to the pursuit of a consumer complaint.

1. Identify a power oriented goal: The idea is to increase our level of influence at any level of social interaction, either with another person, a group or a system. When pursuing a consumer complaint we in essence are doing battle with a business, a company or a corporation. Winning the battle by attaining the result we want is a significant demonstration of our social influence. When we address a complaint to a friend or loved one and resolve it successfully, we are having an impact on a relationship that is both meaningful and highly significant to our lives.

2. Knowledge: To attain our goal we need an understanding of the system involved, the power dynamics we might encounter, the resources we will require and a plan of action. My book The Squeaky Wheel has all the information one needs to pursue complaints effectively both with loved ones and as consumers. It lays out clear guidleines for complaining effectively to spouses, friends, and teenagers. It specifies what to know when calling customer service hotlines, how to manage our emotions in such situations and how to construct effective complaints that will elicit best efforts from the service representative. It also discusses how to escalate complaints to company executives.

3. Self-efficacy: To take action we must first believe we can accomplish our goal. Acquiring the knowledge and skill set necessary to pursue our complaints and having a variety of effective complaining tools at our disposal can make all the difference in the world to our confidence and feelings of self-efficacy.

4. Competence: The better our skills the greater our competence. Putting our newly acquired complaining skill set into action will quickly give us information about where we are strongest and which skills or competencies need work. Pursuing complaints with loved ones requires delicacy and the right techniques, both of which can be improved through practice. Complaining to companies and business can take persistence and here too, the more efforts we make, the more we learn, the higher our level of competence becomes.

5. Action: The process of empowerment is a dynamic one where we act, reflect, assess, and act again. When complaining to a loved one, we should try out our skill set by addressing small and less meaningful complaints first (for example, a complaint about an incomplete house chore, or a specific episode of lateness). We might have an exchange with a customer service representative that does not resolve our problem but gives us important information we can use when speaking to a supervisor later on or when escalating a complaint to company executives.

6. Impact: Personal empowerment can be hard earned and in a sense, it should be if we wish to change how we feel deep within. Not all our efforts will yield results right away. The process of empowerment is just that, a process and not an overnight metamorphosis. The more meaningful our social influence, the more empowered we will feel.

The process of empowerment is not a linear drive toward stronger internal feelings of efficacy, but rather a dynamic process in which we acquire knowledge, take action, assess our impact and refine our efforts. Because of their abundance, complaints provide us with excellent opportunities to embark on the process of personal empowerment and change how we feel about ourselves and our place in the world. It is best to build slowly by pursuing simpler complaints before tackling more meaningful dissatisfactions. Each small complaint we resolve along the way will create another building block upon which we can build a stable and lasting sense of personal empowerment, self-esteem and self-efficacy.

Feeling more confident, competent and empowered might be only a complaint away.

Via: PsychologyToday