David Gershon - Empowerment: The Art of Creating Your Life as You Want It

At last! An approach to personal growth that vguides us beyond mere understanding of how our lives are not working. This book is innovative and courageous, on the cutting edge of self development. It is for people who are ready to manifest their visions in the everyday world.

Joseph Jastrab, therapist, workshop leader, and author of Sacred
Manhood, Sacred Earth

This book is powerful, practical, and clear. It will heal and empower those of us who are solving our yesterdays and creating our todays and tomorrows.

Gerald G. Jampolsky, M.D., author, Love Is Letting Go of Fear

Personal Empowerment may well be the key to our collective survival. The authors, creators of the massive global initiative, the First Earth Run, have addressed the issue of personal empowerment not just theoretically but practically.

Marilyn Ferguson, author, The Aquarian Conspiracy

I have experienced real change in my life since reading and doing the exercises in your Empowerment book. I dont know if other people notice it as well, but I feel stronger, and more capable. I can recognize my fears now as they arise in me, and then question their validity. For the first time in my working life, I raised my voice at an insubordinate employee; it felt great. I have just completed writing a long letter to my parents discussing subjects I never dared discuss. I feel more empowered than I ever have.

Richard Brown, Columbus, Ohio

Its time to inform you, which I do with great pleasure, about what has happened since I finished my research on the relationship between quality development and empowerment. I used your book Empowerment to develop a model for organizations in which the process of permanent improvement and keeping on the growing edge go hand in hand. In my training programs for organizations, I am finding excellent results using your Empowerment book and tools.

Connie Schijf, Leiden, The Netherlands

EMPOWERMENT

The Art of Creating Your Life as You Want It
SECOND EDITION

David Gershon & Gail Straub

STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gershon, David.
Empowerment : the art of creating your life as you want it / David Gershon and Gail Straub. -- 2nd ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-4027-6455-4
1. Self-realization. 2. Visualization. I. Straub, Gail. II. Title.
BF637.S4G47 2011
158--dc22

2010034606

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Published by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016
This edition is based on material found in Empowerment 1989 by David Gershon and Gail Straub
2011 by David Gershon and Gail Straub
Distributed in Canada by Sterling Publishing
c/o Canadian Manda Group, 165 Dufferin Street
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6K 3H6
Distributed in the United Kingdom by GMC Distribution Services
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Distributed in Australia by Capricorn Link (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
P.O. Box 704, Windsor, NSW 2756, Australia

Manufactured in the United States of America
All rights reserved

Sterling ISBN 978-1-4027-6455-4

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Contents

Prologue

Chapter 4: Core Beliefs

Chapter 11: Spirituality

Chapter 12: Always Growing! Making Your Passion Happen

Three decades ago, the idea of empowerment was fresh and daring. As young as the word itself, we both felt that empowerment would be at the heart of our lifes work. In our earliest days together, sitting with yellow legal pads at our kitchen table overlooking the Ashokan reservoir and the Catskill mountains, we planned our wedding ceremony and then seamlessly turned to designing our fledgling Empowerment Workshop. So intertwined was our love with our passion for this work, that ten days after we were married, we launched our first workshop. As we celebrate our thirtieth wedding anniversary, our bond of love is stronger than ever and our passion for empowerment more compelling than ever.

All those years ago, neither we, nor the world, knew what empowerment really meant. We knew it was about helping people to grow and realize their full potential. We also knew that it was about more than just healing and fixing problems. But what exactly was its purpose? Why was this idea entering the lexicon of change strategies with such force? Over these three decades, an extraordinarily diverse, visionary, and committed community of people was attracted to our training programs to help us discover the answers to these questions.

They came to learn for themselves, their families, their communities, their organizations, and their causes. They came from all over North America, Europe, and Latin America, but also from Afghanistan, Darfur, Rwanda, South Africa, China, Russia, and India. They included social entrepreneurs, community organizers, and environmentalists; Fortune 500 corporate leaders, organizational change consultants, and business school professors; life coaches, health-care professionals, therapists, educators, and clergy; nonprofit managers, government executives, and politicians; young and old, male and female, and embodying every race and ethnicity. In short, they represented the full diversity of our planet.

They became a global empowerment laboratory, helping us both refine our empowerment methodology and showing us the breadth for its application in society. The heart of our learning was distilled into one line: Personal empowerment is the foundation of societal transformation. If we wish to change our community, our organization, or the world, we must begin by changing ourselves. And the key to changing ourselves is being willing to dream a different possibility for our lives, and learning how to bring that dream to fruition. That is the essence of this book and the empowerment journey upon which you are embarking.

As you take this journey and dare to dream new possibilities for your life, know that you are also participating in a global empowerment movementa movement that aspires to nothing less than changing the world one person and one dream at a time. And as you receive the torch passed from the many who have helped light the way before you, we hope you will do the same for others. We pass you the torch and wish you well.

David Gershon
Gail Straub

One January evening in 1981, we went to Arnolds Turtle, one of our favorite Manhattan restaurants to eat, enjoy each others company, and have one of our marathon talks about our future life together. We had met, fallen in love, and decided to get married in the autumn of 1980.

As we discussed our work, we realized that our individual workshops shared the common goal of helping people become more empowered. While empowerment was not a word bandied about much at the time, we were both struck by the fact that it was the principal idea that underlay both our teaching philosophies. Thats when it dawned on us: One of the reasons we had come together was to combine what we each had learned about empowerment to create a new and coherent body of knowledge that we could present in the form of an intensive personal growth workshopthe Empowerment Workshopthe program upon which this book is based.