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Your personal power is your ability to make choices for yourself. When the power is strong, life becomes much easier. You have the definite sense that you are in charge, and that the choices are yours to make.
Enjoy the Benefit
With a healthily developed sense of personal power, you will find you can manage your emotions, so you don’t do things in the heat of the moment that you later regret. You do things because you want to, not just to please other people. You act more compassionately, because you are not feeling sorry for yourself. Your mind is calm and clear, yet alert. Whatever challenges you face, you are able to respond appropriately. Other people are attracted to you, because you are comfortable with yourself.
Use Your Power to Act
Some people find themselves uncomfortable with the idea of “personal power”, because for them it has connotations of dominance over other people, of ordering them about and telling them what to do. But this is a misconception of what is meant by the term. Personal power is about increasing your inner, personal strength – your reliance on yourself, and your ability to achieve your goals. You will find that as you build up reference experiences of achieving your goals, starting small at first and gradually increasing your level of challenge as you gain confidence, your “self efficacy” (as psychologists call your sense of personal power) will grow, too. Once you have it, it is up to you to use that power wisely. If you are the sort of person who tends to feel martyred or put upon by other people, you will find that this feeling gradually diminishes, and your sense of effectiveness grows, as you start to increase your personal power.
NLP Techniques and Brain Hacks to Increase Your Personal Power
The most important factor in developing your personal power is actually mindset, rather than techniques. Start with taking responsibility and putting yourself ‘at cause’.
Once you’ve done that, there are many NLP techniques you can use to widen the range of choices available to you.
- To feel more resourceful in situations where you need to, use resource anchoring.
- To change the intensity of emotional responses to thoughts or memories (e.g. to weaken the emotional charge of bad memories, or to increase your motivation towards images of your goals), use submodalities.
- To disarm your ‘inner critic’, play around with its auditory submodalities.
- To ‘defuse’ situations and events that ‘trigger’ unwanted responses, use the Swish Pattern.
The articles and podcast episodes on this site will help you get started using NLP techniques. But if you want to really go into depth, get some or all of the books in the acclaimed Practical NLP series – they’re easy to read and designed to demystify NLP so that anyone can use it.
© 2026, Andy Smith. All rights reserved.