Do you empower or restrict others?

It is late here and I am starting this at near 3 am and who knows what time I will press the publish button. While occasionally I plan posts ahead, in general write and post on the fly based on thoughts that have ruminated in the neural soup that is my mind. Writing on the fly gives me more control over the feel of the post whilst planning tends to leave it feeling engineered and forced. Someone commented the other day about how they liked the flow of my writing and as I have mentioned before, in writing is where I am also most likely of late to be in flow myself.

I went for a drive before and grabbed a coffee at a 24h service station and replied to a few comments on my last post. I find that commenting from my phone tends to lead me to limiting the character count and not putting all I want or could say into the reply. Normally though, I am writing from a full keyboard, which works better for me.

While I was sitting there having a coffee surrounded by teens who are too old to stay home on a Saturday night, but too young to go to a nightclub, I was thinking about how our behaviors tend to lean toward empowerment or restriction of those with which we interact. While I think that a personality might generally be more toward one than the other, I think it also depends on who one is interacting with and for example, those who I feel do not deserve my time, I do not put a great deal of time into the empowerment - if any.

For some, this might seem unfair as it is not treating everyone equally, but when it comes to who we choose to spend our time and effort on, there is no such thing as paying equal attention. We all have preferences and how we spend the moments of our life is largely up to us and when this comes to online interaction, it is almost completely up to us. No one is forced to interact with anyone online, it is all a choice - even if it doesn't feel it at times.

How we interact is also our own choice and the way we write, talk, respond, listen and of course, the topics we choose to talk about, is up to us. What I have found is that I prefer to enable others and hopefully empower them to improve their lives by taking the responsibility to better themselves. I prefer this because I believe that much like a person trying to lose weight, the work of diet and exercise has to be done by the person themselves and a healthy, mind, body and emotional state requires effort applied in the right areas.

Not everyone looks to empower others though and especially online, many look to restrict health by undermining efforts of those making the attempt. Whether they are successful or not is up to the audience, but many are successful because many people aren't well equipped to deal with this kind of behavior and are emotionally affected, which then drives physical response and potentially builds self-defeating habits. Whenever there is hardship, some complain - while others act toward improvement.

What I have found on Steem is that those who are constantly negative or erratic in their emotional positions lose my interest as while there is nothing wrong with taking a negative view, if it isn't empowering toward change for improvement, it holds very little value for me. I am guessing I am not alone in this and I assume that no one likes to consistently have coffee with a person who is always depressed and defeated by life as they tend to be energy sinks, emotional black holes.

Everyone has bad days and weeks, but month after month of negativity or mood swings will lead to a weakening of attention paid, a desensitization to the position and a loss of support. I would predict that in a social species such as ourselves, it is the ones who can consistently empower others to feel that they can improve and help them to do so, who will be successful in context, to be liked.

It is funny how on Steem some expect to get support on their content without consideration about who they are as people or how they make those around them feel. Online, the complaints and guilt trips only work for so long before they get old, tired and ignored - this is especially true when they aren't backed up by action that looks to change circumstances for the self.

It is easy to forget that just like the trolls having no personal repercussions for their trolling behavior due to the privacy and distance the screen affords, the same conditions means one can tune out from content largely unseen. I know many authors on Steem who have lost attention because they continually take negative positions with many not actually looking at the ecosystem as a whole, just their personal experience of it. The same authors then blame their outcomes on the community and platform, with no self-reflection at all on what they themselves offer or the atmosphere they create with the audience.

I have been a trainer of some kind for nearly 25 years now and most of that has been dealing with people personally and directly to enable them to improve themselves in some way, to learn a skill or shift their attitude to affect their results. They have come to me for this, paid me for this and that is the job I have performed, to enable them to better themselves. And it is them doing the work always, I am just there to support their decisions and perhaps offer some points of reflection before decisions are made, or after to reformulate new decisions.

This is empowerment of people to take responsibility and make their own decisions to improve their life and while sometimes they need some guidance on technique or movement, the heavy lifting has to be done by them. Sometimes, what they need help with is to investigate the self-imposed restrictions they have built, and remove what stands in their way.

I find that in general there are two types of people, those who build walls and those who build paths. Build enough walls and movement is no longer possible and when something stops moving, it stops learning and evolving, and will eventually wither and die. With the right paths, there is no obstacle that can't be overcome.

Empower me and we can walk together, attempt to restrict me and I will build a path around you.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]