Firewalk - Road To Empowerment

“Empowered individuals and teams have an increased capacity for self-help, as opposed to being passive, helpless victims to be rescued…”

Empowerment can best be defined as a quality of spirit – a mental or emotional state that acts, in that it exerts influence and makes things happen. This fearless, proactive mindset lies at the heart of confidence and success in any endeavor. Note the qualities of empowered vs disempowered individuals and teams.

Empowered:

• Overcome their sense of powerlessness and lack of influence, and recognize and use their resources and chances

• Exercise personal responsibility

• Move away from a deficit-oriented towards a more strength-oriented perception

• Show increased capacity to take control of their circumstances, exercise power and achieve their goals

• Help themselves and others gain mastery over and maximize the quality of their lives

• Gain the skills and knowledge that will allow them to overcome obstacles in life or work environment

• Increase their capacity for self-help as opposed to being passive, helpless ‘victims’ to be rescued

• Become respectable contributors to ‘the economy’

• Strengthen their motivation and skills – thus Employee Empowerment is one of the most important and popular management concepts of our time

• Save control costs, that become redundant when employees act independently and in a self-motivated fashion

Disempowered:

• Behave primarily regressive in acute crisis situations and tend to leave the responsibility to professionals

• Lack self-sufficiency, becoming, at a minimum, dependent

• This in turn leads to psychological, social and mental health problems

Learned helplessness is attitudes and behaviors typical of people or groups that have endured repeated painful or otherwise negative experiences which they were unable to escape or avoid. After such experiences, the person or team often fails to learn offensive strategies in new situations where such proactive thinking and behaviors would be effective. In other words, they have learned that they are helpless in adverse situations, and have lost power and control, and so they give up trying. Such have acquired a feeling of helplessness. Depression and related mental illnesses in time result from such a disempowered state – a real or perceived absence of control over the outcome of a physical condition or external situation.

The Firewalk is designed by its very nature to restore what was taken, turning the hunted into the hunter, and replacing a threat oriented perspective with an opportunity orientated perspective! Such emotional content is more than valuable to any person or team wishing to survive and succeed in todays increasingly challenging modern world…