Have you ever found yourself driving up a one way street going in the wrong direction? It can be a dreadful feeling even if there are no cars coming towards you. You are racing against time, yourself and other just to get to the safety of the other end. Then when you get there, you are exhausted, disorientated and wondering why you keep doing that. Behaviour is like that one way street. When your behaviour is heading in the wrong direction it is disempowering you: it does not feel right; you seem to be pushing against what other want; it makes you sick; you lose your confidence; and have a feeling of being lost. Disempowering behaviour is where you:

• Make poor decisions which do not provide you with what you want
• Create a lack confidence in yourself
• Have negative thinking on your ability to succeed
• Lose your personal power
• Increasing one's positive self-image and overcoming stigma

There is always a cost with having disempowering behaviours. You may be affected by a low self-image; depression; lack of energy; feel angry, frustrated or annoyed; or not be achieving what you want in your life. Why does disempowering behaviour occur? It is often due to your focus. Focus is where you are looking, usually subconsciously. Imagine you are riding a bike and you see a hole in the road in front of you. If you focus on the hole, even if you say I must not hit it, you will land in the hole. Your focus is based on your values and beliefs. If you were achieving the same outcomes as those around you then you would all have a similar focus. If those results are not what you want, then you need to break away and change your focus.

To find out whether your behaviour is empowering or disempowering, think for a moment about the results you are getting in a specific area of your life. It could be relationships, finance, career, personal development or health. When you examine your results are they what you want? Are they good for you, for the environment and for the world? If they are, then the behaviour that is producing the results is empowering. If on the other hand, the results are not what you want, or are not beneficial to you, then the behaviour is a disempowering.

Take Smoking as an example. Is it beneficial to you and give you what you want? It can cause you to be unhealthy, find breathing difficult, and gain a feeling of being anti-social. So this behaviour does not empower you. While exercising is empowering as it is a social event, keeps you healthy, controls your weight and helps you to feel energetic. Which type of behaviour do you want? Empowering behaviour comprises:

• Having decision-making power of your own
• Having access to information and resources for making proper decision
• Having a range of options from which you can make choices
• Ability to exercise assertiveness in collective decision making
• Having positive thinking on the ability to make change
• Ability to learn skills for improving one's personal or group power
• Ability to change others' perceptions by democratic means
• Involving in the growth process and changes that is never ending and self-initiated

If your focus affects your behaviour then how do you change it so you can change your behaviour? First you need to take into account that you will not always be aware of the direction of your focus, you may think you are looking in one direction when you are actually looking in a different direction. From what we already said, you first look at your results to determine whether they are what you want or not. Next, you need to begin to focus on what you do want. When I ask some of my clients what they want, they cannot tell me. Often these are the people who have lost hope, are angry or depressed, or they have never thought about it. They can often say what they want is to not be angry, depressed for example. Instead of focusing on what you do not want, you need to focus on what you do want. Do you know what you want or only what you do want? To have empowering behaviour you need to know what you want. That does not mean you need to know how to get it. That will come after you decide what you do want. Now that you know what you want, you begin to refocus. To do this you:

• Think about what you want. You write it down, say it to yourself as an affirmation, and you imagine having what you want
• You write out what you believe about what you want. Are your beliefs in alignment with what you want? For example, if you say you want to earn $1 million. But your beliefs do not allow you to earn that sort of money, you are out of alignment. To correct this you need to change your beliefs about money.
• Finally you look at what you value in life. This is usually where you are spending all your energy. To understand your values, look at where you spend most of your energy. If you say that family and relationships are important to you, and when you look at where your spend all your energy and it is on working long hours to make ends meet, then relationships will be missing out. Unless you change your working habits you cannot achieve the relationships you want.

It is important to be focused and heading in the right direction. This encourages empowering behaviour, which results in increases in: confident; positive action; income; health and relationships. From this you can be satisfied with yourself and achieve more in your life.