How to Stop Feeling Powerless: 7 Steps to Break Free and Live Your Life on Your Terms

Are you interested in how to stop feeling powerless?

When you feel like you’re not in control of your life, it can be fairly easy to get into a rut where you feel hopeless and powerless over your situation, whether it be in relationships, employment or other areas in your life.

Once you’re stuck in this rut, it’s hard to get out. You don’t feel like there’s any solutions to your problems and that no matter what you do, you just don’t get anywhere.

If others suggest solutions, you may become defensive, assuming that you’ve already thought of everything.

You simply give up.

Giving up only makes matters worse. You become stagnant and unable to achieve your goals.

If this sounds familiar to you, you’re not alone. Additionally, there are steps that you can take to rise out of the victim mentality that you’ve let yourself fall into.

However, did you know that powerlessness is a choice? Once you’ve chosen to give up, you’re bound to stay in that rut until something changes.

If you’re at the point where you’re waiting for external circumstances to change so that you can finally reach those dreams you’ve been waiting for, it’s time to think again.

Nobody is going to rescue you from your situation. It’s time to become your own hero and live up to your potential. It’s not going to be easy. In fact, overcoming pessimism will seem like an uphill battle, but you can do it.

1. Accept Your Feelings

This first step might sound like any 12-step program you’ve ever heard of, but you need to accept that you feel powerless. Feeling powerless and being powerless are two different things.

You can make a mental or written list of areas in your life where you feel powerless. Try to determine what exactly it is that makes you feel like you’re powerless about each of these circumstances.

Whether or not you can pinpoint an exact cause to your feelings or not, this exercise is an important first step to acknowledging that you’ve been feeling hopeless in your current situation, but you don’t have to be powerless any longer.

Decide on Self-Empowerment

You may not have control over every external situation that happens to you, but you have total power over how you respond to those situations.

Instead of just sitting there and letting life happen to you, it’s time for you to stand up for yourself and what you believe in. If you need to, now is the time to decide what you want to do and who you want to be.

If your dreams and goals have been on the shelf for whatever reason, now you need to brush them off and take a good look at them. If there’s something that you really want to achieve, you can. It’s going to take some effort on your part.

This is where you start making your stand.

2. Determine What Is in Your Control

You can’t always control circumstances and how others act toward you. You’re going to have to figure out what things you can control and what you can’t.

Let’s say, for example, that you have a difficult boss at work. You dread going in to the office every morning, but you feel that you’re stuck there with nowhere else to go.

You fear standing up for yourself because you need your job. What can you do? What do you have control over?

You know that you can’t control your boss. However, you can control how you respond to comments and actions. You may have to begin a hunt for a new job.

If you’re not qualified to do much else, you may have to study outside of work hours to learn new skills. You may have to take a lesser job somewhere else until you can get where you want.

These actions may seem extreme if not impossible, when you’ve been living powerlessly in pessimism for so long. You’re only stuck if you let yourself stay that way.

Change is possible. You have it in you, but it’s going to take a lot of time and effort.

3. Learn How to Empower Yourself

You’ve probably spent a long time thinking that you’re going to be stuck in your situation forever, so this is going to be new territory for you to explore.

What you need is motivation.

Do you have friends or family members who can give you the push you need? It’s time to rely on them to hold you accountable for your actions or inactions.

Additionally, you’ll need to learn self-motivational skills.

This may seem lame and even like a waste of time, but you need to take time to read motivational books or articles or listen to motivational podcasts. Find some of your favorite motivational quotes and tack them up all over your home.

Learn how to change your mindset to see the potential in everything around you.

4. Be Aware of Your Choices and Actions

No matter what situation you’re in, there’s always at least one other choice besides just sitting there and doing nothing to change.

Think about what your choices are. List your options if necessary. Decide what steps you’ll need to take for each option. Remember, everything’s not always impossible. It might simply be difficult, but you can get through it.

Keep an Open Mind

Whether or not you’ve tried something in the past and it’s failed, it doesn’t mean that it won’t work now. If someone close to you gives you advice, don’t simply brush it off.

Take a look at your situation from various perspectives. Changing your outlook won’t be easy, but you’ll learn quickly that just by changing your viewpoint, you may come up with a solution that you’d never even though of before.

Don’t assume change won’t work until you actually put the effort in that’s needed to try. Setbacks may happen. It doesn’t mean that trying is useless. Learn from your mistakes and do better the next try.

5. Take Baby Steps

Although the first step in making lasting change can be the hardest, it’s also the most important.

The best thing that you can do to prove to yourself that you can do this is to find an activity or chore that you’ve been putting off and get it done. Choose something small, and work your way up.

Just like Rome wasn’t built in a day, you’re new life can’t be created overnight. Whenever a goal seems too large to handle, try breaking it down into smaller, more reachable steps so that you can relish in each new conquest.

6. Learn New Skills

Nothing says confidence like accomplishing a new task. Take stock of the skills that you already have and decide what you’d like to learn to improve your life.

Take some of the time that you use in your day feeling sorry for yourself and wondering how you got to such a low place in your life to learn something new.

Most libraries offer free online classes for a wide range of skills and activities from learning a new language to playing guitar and more.

7. Take Your Leap of Faith

Determine what’s been preventing you from moving forward, and tackle that roadblock. You don’t have to live your life based on what others want from you. You have your own hope and dreams, and it’s time that you realize them.

Things can change, but you have to be the one to change them. Don’t you think it’s time?