The Power of Empowerment With Jewel Ray Chaudhuri

Power doesn’t come from outside of ourselves, as we often thought it would. Rather, it comes from the inside, our uniqueness, our soul, and our passion to become better. In this world full of negativity, what we need is a ray of light. For us to move forward in the right direction, all of us should feel empowered. No matter where we are in our journey, it is our job to break down barriers that can hinder us from becoming stronger and more confident. Today's guest is here to help us with this subject. Jewel Ray Chaudhuri is an executive leadership and women's empowerment coach. She's on the show to give us some insights into what it takes to be empowered. --- Listen to the podcast here: The Power of Empowerment With Jewel Ray Chaudhuri Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We talk about empowerment quite a bit on this podcast, because empowerment is part of the core reason for this podcast edition. It's part of the core motivation for this show. In order to do what we really want to do, we need to be empowered. Lack of empowerment is something that prevents a lot of people from achieving your best life, from going after what it is you really want. Our world is full of disempowering scenarios, disempowering talk, and disempowering messages, whether it'd be from a really old school, traditional, hierarchical work environment, whether it'd be from the media, the news, or whether it'd be from some of your well-meaning friends that have adopted a victimhood- or doomsday-disempowered mentality. We actually need to, no matter where you are on your journey, be consistently looking into what we can do to counteract a lot of those messages that we're going to find in that ambient world. My guest today is here to help talk about some of these subjects, Jewel Ray Chaudhuri, who is an executive leadership and women's empowerment coach. --- Jewel, welcome to the program. Thank you, Stephen. It's great to be here. Really enjoying this. Thank you. The first thing I want to ask you is about what I was mentioning in the introduction, which is what disempowering messages are in the ambient environment where most people are going. I don't think that many people are not subjected regularly to messages of disempowerment. I identified a few sources, but I'm just curious, from your perspective, what I may have missed, are there other places where people are hearing a lot of things that are disempowering to them? First of all, a lot of it is what we're telling ourselves. We have these – I'm going to call them – little parrots, most Laras, who sit on our shoulder. They're our inner critic, our judge, and they come up with all these messages. A lot of the message, especially for women, is around, "I'm not enough. I'm not good enough. I'm not pretty enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not competent enough." You fill in the blank, and that's what it is. Those judges help us to tell those disempowering stories. You mentioned being in victim mode. A lot of times, we don't even start because we're hearing the message, "No. You can't go after that job. You have no experience there", or, "Wait till you get this degree or that degree, and then you can have whatever you want." Would you say that, as far as anyone who needs more empowerment, which I would say is almost everybody -- but you can correct me on that -- the number one thing is the messages we tell ourselves every single day? Yes, because we're told those messages. When I was about 16 years old in high school, and I can remember what somebody said to me, I've carried that message for a very long time. Sometimes, you don't even realize that the message is there. It comes from your past, but now, there are things that bring it forward. My message was about speaking and talking. I carried that into college where my throat would tighten if I raised my hand and things like that. Since then, I've learned to deal with it, obviously, because I was in training and development. I did have to speak, and I'm speaking now. We have to become aware of it. That's what's holding us back. It sounds like that first step is awareness, as you're saying, because it's hard to really stop these disempowering messages that we tell ourselves if we're not even aware that we're doing it. If you were to think about the average person or even the average woman, because you work with women, the scenario tends to be a little bit different. How often do these disempowering messages being said within each woman's mind? Also, how often are the women you work with when you start out even aware of how often these disempowering messages are being processed through the mind or brought up through the mind? Those are interesting questions. For some people, every time you get on a call, or you're on a networking group, you say, "This is really tough," walking into a networking situation, "What am I going to say? How am I going to behave? Nobody will talk to me." Those are all disempowering messages. If we decide, "Hey, I'm going to get into this room. I'm going to have some fun with it. I'm going to see how many people I can meet," that's a different message to tell ourselves. A lot of times the messages are just going either positive or negative, but they're going off in our heads all the time. Now, awareness is key. As you know, I told you I'm an ontological coach. Let me just bring that in for a second. An ontological coach works with body, emotion, and language. Example: one of the things we would look at is what are the assessments or the judgment that you're making. A lot of times, what we do is, we say, "I'm not good at that," and that's a judgment or an assessment. It's a story also, "I'm not good at that." In identifying the assessment, we could start to look at reframing it and saying, "Okay. What's the evidence?” We have a tendency to hold the negative rather than the positive. If you got 15 evaluations, and one was negative, that's the one we'd be worrying about instead of the other 14. Taking that assessment, we would look at how can we reframe it. The same story when you're talking about that one message you received when you were 16 years old and carrying that through. You're going to receive these messages. It's your choice as to which messages you carry through. Is it safe to say what you're trying to do is achieve this balance where you receive the negative, you see the positive? A lot of people focus so much on the negative, but there is a situation where you really aren't good at something. Earlier in my life, participating in karaoke nights, I am not a good singer, and there's not really anything I can do about that. Also knowing that when you receive that 14:1 positive or even 4:1 positive, that probably means that you actually are good at something and that you're just telling yourself the story that you're not based on one person who may have happened to be having a bad day that day or something like that. Your karaoke, your bad singing, there's other things that karaoke may give you. You are able to get up in front of a room and just do it. The message to you might be, "Hey. I'm really good at getting up in front of people showing that I can do that. If you choose to, you can learn." My question is, as far as these terrible stories we tell ourselves, what is the key first step that someone should do to get out of this bad pattern? Let's say someone is really deep into that pattern. Look at what story you're telling yourself and then look for places where you could reframe the story.Share on X "Hey, if I'm not good enough with this, I'm okay with it. I'm learning to be better." Anything that's going to stop us from moving forward is limiting. It's a limiting belief or disempowering story, a negative assessment, all those things. Is there anything about certain times of day or certain specific situations? Do you have a lot of clients that realize that every time I'm around this type of person, or every time I'm in this kind of an office, it tends to be associated with my mid-afternoon energy crash or something like that, where people need to be more mindful of that negative story seeping into their minds? If you're conscious that it's going to happen at 3:00 P.M., at 3:00 PM, somebody is going to walk into your office, and you're going to be so upset by them. There's some things you could possibly do before 3:00 P.M. Get up and walk around. Instead of having them in your office, take them for a walk outside or change the environment a little, change what you're talking about. Start in a different way and center yourself, deep breathing, before that 3:00 P.M. You can really handle it. When we're centered, we have more choice.Share on X Somebody comes into our office, then we could usually handle that situation a little better. A lot of times, what happens is, during the day, we forget to breathe. We're not aware, especially in the corporate world. I often say that we're talking heads without a body. One of the questions I have is whether or not beyond the awareness of what the negative story it is you're telling about yourself, are there general daily habits that people can do? I think of certain word choices. A lot of people who are less confident will tend to, into their emails, texts, say things like, "Well, I could be wrong," or, "You could always change my mind," put these things in there. Is stopping some of those word choices or picking more confident word choices another part of the equation that people can employ to try to get into that more empowered state of mind? Women especially have a tendency to say, "I think this is the way it is," or "I guess so." We apologize a lot. In your view,...