Empowerment: Definition, Theory, & Examples

By Justine Saavedra, M.S.
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
Learn how empowerment can help you reach your goals. Discover empowering phrases and affirmations.
*This page may include affiliate links; that means we earn from qualifying purchases of products.
Feeling confident, powerful, and capable are all essential pieces to growing and learning as a person. You are much more likely to be successful at something if you believe you can do it. The opposite is true as well. Doubt and insecurity can be detrimental to your ability to learn new things and grow if you allow them to overshadow everything else. 
While it may often feel like everything is out of your control that is not the case. Stepping into the power you have over your own life is possible and it is called empowerment. Keep reading to learn what empowerment is, how you can use it to fuel your motivation, and how to build it within yourself.

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What Is Empowerment? (A Definition)

Do you ever feel like you are on top of the world and can take on any challenge? These feelings of self-confidence, assuredness, and self-determination mean you are feeling empowered. Empowerment can be described as a “process that fosters power in people for use in their own lives, their communities, and their society, by acting on issues they define as important” (Page & Czuba, 1999). When you feel empowered, you feel “in power”. Empowerment allows you to feel confident that you possess the power necessary to create the life you want and develop the belief that you are capable of accomplishing anything you set your mind to. 

Video: What is Empowerment? [Explained]

Opposite of Empowerment

When you feel empowered, you feel confident and in control of your life. You stand tall, ready to take on whatever the world throws at you. The opposite of this feeling is powerlessness or defeat. This mindset may cause you to have a victim mentality and believe that your life is out of your control. While it isn’t possible to feel fully empowered one hundred percent of the time, having a defeated attitude may have negative consequences for your health. 

A lack of empowerment (high powerlessness scores) are associated with:
  • More limits on physical activity with age
  • More negative psychosocial symptoms with age
  • More health problems five and ten years post-survey 
  • Deterioration of health in general (Seeman & Lewis, 1995)

Try not to worry if you often feel powerless. Empowerment is a trait that we can cultivate within ourselves with time and practice.

Benefits of Empowerment

Feeling empowered allows you to pursue your goals and dreams with enthusiasm. If you feel you lack motivation or confidence, working on empowering yourself may help your self-esteem and quality of life. One study used an online psycho-educational program to help treat people with depression and measured changes in empowerment. Immediately following the program, participants noted an increase in self-esteem and empowerment. Improvements in their quality of life were noted even six months after the completion of the program (Crisp et al., 2014). This means that improving your self-esteem and feeling more empowered can have a positive effect on your overall quality of life. 

Video: Learning About the Power of Empowerment ​

Examples of Empowerment

It’s okay if feeling empowered doesn't come naturally to you. Consider the following examples of empowering situations and see if you can apply them to any areas of your life.

  • Tina worked extremely hard in high school and receives a full-ride academic scholarship to the college of her dreams. She is proud that her hard work has paid off and feels confident and ready to take on this new chapter in her life.
  • Alejandro has never been a runner but starts training for a 5K race three months in the future by consistently showing up for his practice runs. He ends up winning first place in his age division and he feels encouraged to keep running and training for another race. 
  • Alex has been stuck in the same dead-end position at her company for ten years. She hears about a new leadership position that has just opened up and decides to apply. Her ten years of experience land her a new management role and she feels empowered by her actions. ​

Empowering Yourself

Now that you have a better understanding of empowerment, how can you start to build it within yourself? For some people, feeling empowered and confident may already be a part of their personality. Building a sense of empowerment may take a bit more work for others. The following are suggestions of behaviors you can develop within yourself and actions you can take to increase your feelings of empowerment.

Develop positive self-talk​
Negative self-talk can be detrimental to your state of mind. This is something that I struggle with. To develop more positive self-talk, I replace negative thoughts with positive ones. For example, instead of thinking “I can’t do that”, I think “I can do hard things”. This simple switch has made a world of difference for me. Positive self-affirmations can also be a helpful tool in replacing negative thoughts.

Create an action list for your goals
Ideas and goals are great but they are essentially useless without taking action. Empowered people recognize the need to put in the work to reach their goals. Start by identifying your large goals and then break them down until there are actions you can complete today, this week, this month, this year, and so on. 

Practice confidence and assertiveness
Feeling confident and powerful in your abilities is a key component of feeling empowered. It’s okay if this isn’t naturally a part of your personality. With practice, you can learn to speak up and make your voice heard. As Robin Sharma said, “Speak your truth even if your voice shakes.” Try practicing what you are going to say in your head before you say it out loud if you feel extra nervous.

Video: Empowered Me: A Guided Meditation for Self-Empowerment from Deepak Chopra

Video: Empowerment: It’s an Inside Out Process

Empowerment Theory

Empowerment theory is a framework to help motivate people to take charge of their own life. It has been used in various settings to assist people from all walks of life in taking back power over what happens to them. Empowerment theory encourages “purposefully participating in a process of changing oneself and one’s environment, recognizing patterns, and engaging inner resources for well-being.” (Crawford Shearer & Reed, 2016). 

Empowerment theory gives people the tools to recognize their ability to participate in their own life. This framework encourages people to use their personal and social resources to play an active, rather than passive, role in working toward their goals. You may feel like you don’t have any control over your life but that is simply not the case. While we don’t have control over what happens to us, we do have control over how we react and the actions we take.

Empowering vs Enabling

Empowering others can be beneficial for everyone involved but it is important to recognize when it has slipped into enabling behavior. Enabling occurs when you try to help someone but end up supporting their bad behavior or habits. Unfortunately, sometimes kindness can be taken advantage of which is why it is important to be aware of the help you are giving someone and how it is being received. Empowerment means you build them up to do the work themselves; enabling means you are doing the work for them. 

Empowering Employees

As a leader, it is important to model empowerment as well as to build it within your employees. Employees who feel empowered at work will likely feel more motivated to work toward the goals of the company because they feel capable and appreciated. It has been found that increased employee empowerment is associated with increased job and customer satisfaction (Ugboro & Obeng, 2000). Building your employees up will help keep both them and your customers/clients happy.

Empowering Communities

Empowerment in communities can be one of the key drivers for social and political change. Communities that can band together to identify an issue–and then are empowered enough to follow through with finding solutions–can be successful in their campaigns. This can include smaller initiatives, such as organizing neighborhood cleanups or building a safer playground. It is also possible to garner bigger change when a large group of people band together. It is within your abilities to make a difference in your community if you feel there is an issue that needs to be addressed. Try starting a conversation with others by getting to know your neighbors, possibly using a platform such as NextDoor to connect.

Empowering Learners & Students

School and learning may come easily to some children but others might find it more difficult. Some children might have learning differences that mean they need to take in information in other ways than traditional methods. Educators need to be encouraging and build empowerment within their students as it can have many benefits down the road.

Benefits of student empowerment:
  • Better grades 
  • Fewer behavioral incidents 
  • Increased extracurricular participation
  • Higher educational aspirations (Kirk et al., 2016)

Empowering Affirmations

Affirmations are phrases that you repeat to yourself to help increase your self-confidence. Try choosing three affirmations from the list below–or create your own–and say them in the mirror to yourself once a day. It may feel uncomfortable or strange at first but with practice, you can use affirmations to empower yourself.

  • I am powerful, capable, strong, and smart.
  • I step into the power I have to create the life I want.
  • I believe I am capable of achieving my biggest dreams.
  • I have the power to respond–not react–to triggering people or situations.
  • I am confident in my ability to accomplish whatever I set my mind to.

Empowering Phrases

Building other people up can also be a way for you to increase your feelings of empowerment. Consider using the following empowering phrases for your kids, friends, co-workers, or anyone else you want to encourage to be their best. 

  • It’s okay that didn’t work the first time. Let’s try another way.
  • It’s alright to make mistakes. What can you learn from the experience?
  • You did a great job figuring that out. I would never have had that idea.

Quotes on Empowerment

  • “I choose to make the rest of my life the best of my life.” – Louise Hay
  • “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.” – Nora Ephron
  • “Just don’t give up trying to do what you want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.” – Ella Fitzgerald
  • “We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all of the power we need inside ourselves already.” – J. K. Rowling
  • “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.” – Charlotte Brontë
  • “Believe in your infinite potential. Your only limitations are those you set upon yourself.” – Roy T. Bennett
  • “Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don't.” – Steve Maraboli
  • “I always did something I was a little not ready to do. I think that’s how you grow. When there’s that moment of ‘Wow, I’m not really sure I can do this,’ and you push through those moments, that’s when you have a breakthrough.” – Marissa Mayer

Articles Related to Empowerment

Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Empowerment​

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Empowerment

Empowerment is a wonderful tool to drive you toward your goals and dreams. This feeling happens when you feel confident, assured, and powerful in your capabilities. Feeling empowered is important for personal development as well as other areas of life, such as school and work. People who are empowered engage in positive self-talk, take action to reach their goals, and act assertively and confidently. Feeling empowered can be difficult for people who struggle with self-worth and confidence. Use positive affirmations and practice being self-assured to build a feeling of empowerment within yourself. Once you start believing in yourself, you will find you are capable of much more than you realize. 

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