(For Athletes, Coaches, and High Performers)

When you hear the term ‘harnessing your inner power’, does it make you want to roll your eyes just a little bit? Don’t worry! I’m not about to gaze into a crystal ball, read tea leaves, or teach from an old scroll. I’m not that woo woo. As always, I’m teaching about this abstract topic from the perspective of what I know. And what I know is how to train your mindset.

Because at the end of the day, when your outward success is stripped away and life shakes you to your core, all that you have left is the strength you’ve built inside.

Begin With Your Inner Beliefs

Harnessing your inner power begins with cultivating your deeply rooted beliefs; about yourself, others, and the world around you. Take a good hard look at your inner beliefs because action always follows belief. Consciously and subconsciously your actions will always try to prove that the beliefs that you hold are true. So you have to start there.

As an entrepreneur, mindset coach, and athlete, I know firsthand that action always follows belief; here are two examples:

• As an athlete, when I didn’t believe I could make the shot, *surprise!* I didn’t make the damn shot.
• As an entrepreneur, when I didn’t believe my services were worth paying for, I didn’t make a profit.

I could list a zillion more examples, but you get the idea.

(Quick food for thought: What are some ways this manifests in your life?)

The good news is, when you start working on your inner beliefs, you’ll start to see the world around you shift for the better. You’ll feel more aligned, you’ll start to notice opportunities and feel flow in your work and your life.

Some ways you can work on your inner beliefs are by examining how you’re holding yourself back, training your subconscious to be aligned with what you want, and practicing positive self-talk. Spending time on all of these will help to deeply instill the belief that you are worthy of success and happiness, help you become clear about what you want, and teach you that something greater, bigger, and better is possible.

While working on your inner beliefs is about inner work and self-reflection, harnessing your inner power is about taking action. The two concepts are inseparably intertwined and work together to strengthen you from the inside out. 

8 Ways to Harness Your Inner Power

In the same way you follow a program from theory to practice to be physically strong, the same is true for building your inner power. Like physical programs, harnessing your inner power is an ongoing practice that takes time and intention. 

1. Own Your Stories

It’s so easy to hide stories of failure, thinking that they’ll undermine our ability to teach others, but in reality, they make us stronger leaders.

The things we F up on make us qualified. Period.

Your arsenal of stories remind you that you’ve put yourself out there, made mistakes, and not let your failures define you. When you start telling your stories about when you’ve overcome, you begin to see yourself for who you really are: Strong, powerful, unrelenting, badass.

When you don’t feel powerful, your stories bring your toughness to light and remind you that you not only were powerful, you still are.

Note: Know your safe people, not everyone will be able to hold space for you.

2. Do Something That Makes You Feel Powerful

In the first month of the Mindset Coach Academy, I challenge my coaches to do one thing that's brave. ⁠⁠

People have played an open mic night, joined a dating app, taken cold showers, I took an improv class. Many people made the choice to finally have a hard conversation they had been putting off. ⁠⁠

Why put yourself through this?

Because doing something you’re scared of ON PURPOSE reminds you that you are BRAVE and it breaks the cycle of feeling powerless.

You adopt the mindset of a warrior as you face your fears and remember that you’re capable of hard things. You are a brave person and THAT is worth reminding yourself of, even at the cost of bruising your ego.

3. Use Powerful Body Language

Mental training 101 tells us that not only does the mind impact the body, the body impacts the mind. The mind/body relationship is symbiotic.

This may sound like a riddle, but here’s the truth: Fake it ‘til you make it is REAL. When you shift your body into a confident position, your body tells your brain that everything is ok. That you’ve GOT this.

So relax your shoulders, widen your stance, uncross your arms and put them on your hips (or in superhero position), hold your head high, and make eye contact with a smile. Just try it and you’ll see for yourself.

4. Know Your Superpowers

Speaking of superheroes, if Wonder Woman spent all her time trying to spin webs like Spiderman, she’d have no time to kick booty and take names! 

Own your strengths, and maximize them. Stop spending all your energy trying to be good at everything, and instead, focus on what you’re really really good at and do more of it. 

5. Spend Time with High Vibration People

We talked a lot about this in our previous blog, but it bears repeating. Spending time with the wrong people will deplete your energy. When you leave a social setting, you either feel a ‘high’ or a ‘low’, ‘full’ or ‘drained’. Pay attention to that! Hang out with people who believe in you, inspire you, make you feel good, remind you of your power, and celebrate your journey. 

6. Spend Time Alone in Silence

Quiet is absolutely vital to growth, it's something many of us have to actively work to create more of in our lives. Meditate, go on a solo walk in nature, or simply sit in silence with a notepad to:

1. Get to know your inner voice ⁠
2. Have the mental energy to take on new challenges ⁠
3. Be brave enough to make big, scary choices?
4. Get acquainted with my goals enough to be inspired by them ⁠

Sitting with yourself strips all distractions away so you can reflect honestly on your life. It carves out quietness for your inner voices to be heard, and it reminds you that you are enough and you have everything you need. 

7. Start Your Day In Control

When you’re irregular about your life, you are inefficient, and your energy suffers. It’s so much easier to do something every day than it is to do it every once in a while. That’s why creating healthy habits (that are as automatic as brushing your teeth) will free you up to focus your very valuable energy on what really matters.  

Doing daily reflection and mindset work helps you build a strong framework so that you’ll never stray too far from your power. 

Do you need daily mindset routine? 

• Listening to our daily, 5-10 minute mindset podcast, The Inner Game - for daily education and encouragement to keep you learning.

Do The Daily Beast - For a 15 minute mindset exercise that will help you prioritize and delegate, and align your goals with your belief system.

8. Take Care of Your Body and Space

The athlete in me sometimes forgets that taking care of your body doesn’t have to mean spending hours at the gym. Drink water, take a shower, put on clean clothes, and move your body. It’s that simple. 

And cultivate a home that you feel good in. Listen, I get it, more often than not, there’s crayon on my wall, crackers in my couch, and Tupperware getting dumped out of my kitchen drawers by a toddler. I know it isn’t easy or even realistic to keep a clean house, but at the very least, carve out a space - whether it’s your bedroom, office, or a spot in your backyard - where everything is clean, calm, and you feel simply amazing. 

If you can’t relax in your body and your space, you start every day at a deficit. 

How do you feel after reading these tips? Which of them can you start doing today to harness your inner power?  

A common misconception about inner power is that it comes from external factors; like positive parenting, success, or others’ belief in you. But I hope this blog showed you that... 

Being powerful is about taking action; it’s about doing the things that powerful people do.

You don’t have to feel powerless, it’s entirely within your control. 

So go out there and do things that show love to yourself, your time, and your goals. Set an example for yourself and for the people around you of what it looks like to harness your inner power.