I am sick and tired of seeing so many good, hard working people that are sick and tired. In case you haven’t noticed, times have changed. If you work for a large employer the chances are you’re working very, very hard.

According to Gallup, American workers, on average, are now logging 47 hours of work every week. If you compare that to the old eight-hours-a day-five-days-a-week work schedule, we are working almost 6 days a week. And 40% of us work more than 50 hours a week!

That may seem like a lot but experts say the amount of time we’re working or thinking about work is only going in one direction…up. As you think about your own work consider how much time you spend checking your e-mail or responding to it when you’re away from your workplace…in the evenings and on weekends. I know some of you are able to shutdown. When you leave work you really leave it. But that’s not the trend. The trend is called ‘work-life integration’ which means you really never completely turn work off. Work-life integration sounds almost high-techie. Something cool. But it’s not.

The trend is called ‘work-life integration’ which means you really never completely turn work off.

The Human Performance Institute’s research is very clear that if you resist taking a complete strategic break from your work you will get less and less productive. In fact, two university studies proved that if you give one work team 40 hours to do their work and mandate that another work team, who does the same kind of work, spend 50 hours working, the 50-hour team will be producing no more than the 40-hour team within six weeks.

Americans pride themselves on being productive. But, according to the OCED, we are less productive in output per hour than eight other major nations including France! It turns out we only have so many productive hours each day so working more doesn’t produce more.

It turns out we only have so many productive hours each day so working more doesn’t produce more.

You’ve may have read that Americans are vacationing less than they did in the 1970s. In fact, according to Google Consumer Surveys 42% of Americans didn’t take any vacation last year. We are the only ‘advanced’ nation in the world that doesn’t provide for mandated paid time off. (After all you know how regulations can get in the way of making money.)

The primary reason reported by people who don’t take vacations or who do work while on vacation is that they simply have too much work to do and they don’t want it to pile up. The second reason is that they’re afraid that they may be viewed as uncommitted or disposable employees to be put on the list to be terminated during the next reorganization. (Why would you willingly work for an organization that created a culture steeped in that kind of fear?)

The reasons people are working so hard and afraid to take vacations are very rational. Two decades of business process reengineering culminating in the great recession has led to chronic understaffing, less training, fewer resources and more pressure to get more done in less time. The reason is simple. Getting more work done without having to pay for it is the easiest way to increase earnings. It’s not that businesses don’t have the money to hire more people and let people go home at night or take a vacation.

According to his analysis there has been a 75% drop in the amount of profits reinvested in hiring to support growth and innovation since 1980.

According to research by an economist J.W. Mason it’s simply because businesses have learned they can make more money by making fewer employees do more. According to his analysis there has been a 75% drop in the amount of profits reinvested in hiring to support growth and innovation since 1980. That’s not a misprint. 75%!

The business reason we are working so hard is that capitalism has been ruined. Start-ups are virtually the only companies that are serious about investing in and hiring smart talent for every job. As soon as a company gets to be big enough to become a target of a private equity firm or investment banker’s dream IPO, management shifts it’s focus to squeezing profits out of the business. Instead of growing the topline, executives focus on building the bottom line by reducing costs, cutting staff and skimping on quality wherever they can get away it. And managing this way really pays off. Since 1980 the average CEO’s pay has jumped from 40 times to 342 times the average salary of the people they employee.

Since 1980 the average CEO’s pay has jumped from 40 times to 342 times the average salary of the people they employee.

One group that has noticed that hard work does not result in reliable rewards is Millennials. This group of 35-year-olds and younger have seen their parents work their guts out only to be outsourced, downsized, marginalized or laid off. They realize that there is no payoff in ‘working for the man.’ So mentally they’re working for themselves.

They want flexibility, interesting work, a stimulating work environment and lots of autonomy. Gray-haired leaders shake their heads at this generation of “indulged slackers.” Personally I don’t. I think they are smart. Asking to be empowered to do meaningful work is a sign of intelligence not laziness. And my personal experience is that younger workers will work ferociously hard when they understand why their work is important and what is clearly expected of them. That’s just good management practice which is far too uncommon.

Asking to be empowered to do meaningful work is a sign of intelligence not laziness.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Millennial’s is that they put such a high-value on having a fulfilling lifestyle. This drives exploitative employers crazy. I know several very smart young professionals that have asked for three months off or even quit their jobs to pursue exotic travel while they are young enough to enjoy it. As a group I find them to be savers. It’s true that many of them are already hampered by student debt so they are nervous about digging that hole deeper. They often live together in small tribes to minimize rent. Many don’t own cars. They may have expensive smart phones and ear buds but they don’t pay for cable TV.

They carefully build their consumption around the lifestyle they value so they don’t get hung in the same bloated mortgage and debt noose that stressed out their parents for 30 years.

If you think Millennials’ values are just a copout to avoid hard work consider Dan Buettner’s famous Blue Zone research. He has spent years investigating the lifestyles and habits of people who live the longest, experience the most daily happiness, and maintain a zest for life. They have a lot more in common with the mindset of Millennials than Baby Boomers.

Here’s what I think we can learn from the millennial mindset.

Have a vision for your best life. Be clear on where you want to live and how you want to live. Then move there and start living. Every beautiful and amazing place I have ever travelled has residents living and working with every level of education and income. If you’re beating your brains out spending over an hour every day commuting consider that there are hundreds of thousands of people who commute to work by walking or biking.

When you invest the energy into your intrinsic values with your unique ability, every day will be purposeful.

Look at your life purpose as a gift you give to someone else each day. You have some unique ability. You have a hierarchy of values that matter deeply to you. When you invest the energy into your intrinsic values with your unique ability, every day will be purposeful. You don’t have to work for a nonprofit or become a scientist. You simply have to become aware of your giftedness and pay attention to the needs of others. Then you will see how to make your difference. If you use your daily work as a vehicle to express your purpose, your work will have great dignity. But always remember…DO NOT WORK FOR A JERK… it will wreck your life.
Form healthy and enjoyable habits that increase your mental, emotional and physical vitality. People who make gardening, cooking, forms of exercise and games, or art their hobbies are happier and more content than those who just watch TV.

Hope is optimism with a vision.

My final thought is this. Research studies conclude that hope is more powerful than plain vanilla optimism. Hope is optimism with a vision. It is more than simply having a sunny outlook on life. With hope you can ‘see’ the future you most want and believe you can create it. Please don’t be seduced into pursuing a life that others expect of you. Please don’t be trapped by the giant economic machine run by people who don’t care at all about you.

Instead, envision the best life you can imagine and do one thing today to bring it into reality. Repeat tomorrow.

I love to go surfing with my friend Jim. He is a great coach in the water. He always encourages me to ride the biggest and best waves even when the waves are a little scary big. He will frequently encourage me to paddle over to where he’s sitting and when his mystic vision spots a prime “outside” wave he points to where I should paddle and says “that’s your wave Will.” His encouragement literally en-courages me to take off on waves that I normally would be too chicken to paddle into. Jim has a greater confidence in my ability than I do and it makes all the difference. Jim is a superb informal surf coach.

Research on the effectiveness of coaching reveals several reasons it is proven to be the key to growth, stress resilience, performance, learning and mastery.

1. Having a coach increases your confidence and your calm. A great coach sees your real potential and motivates you to act from your highest and best ability.
2. Affirmation from a third person helps quash self-doubt and silences your inner critic.
3. A great coach heals you from failure by being supportive in helping you learn important lessons when you are not performing well.
4. A wise coach will increase your “grit”…the will to persist and keep trying when success is elusive.

Most parents are great coaches when it’s time to help their pre-toddlers to start toddling. It’s true. Learning to walk is a very difficult motor skill. We have to coordinate our eyesight, balance, agility and judgment simultaneously. It is common for new walkers to fall down 200 to 500 times before they become dependable performers. That’s pretty amazing. There are not too many things a human being will fail at hundreds of times and yet keep trying.

Developmental psychologists tell us that what helps children learn is highly supportive coaching from parents or other caring adults and a silent inner critic. Like most parents when my children learned to walk, a single step was met with a boisterous celebration declaring my child to be completely awesome.

What’s also helpful is that when most one-year-olds begin walking they don’t have a psychological voice doing a play-by-play of their life. Instead our brains are completely focused on the present moment without self-judgment. That enables us to notice that we are falling down without labeling ourselves as hopelessly clumsy. Just think about this…if we waited until we were teenagers before we tried to walk most of us would give up after falling down 10 or 20 times, label ourselves as a hopelessly uncoordinated loser and become permanently dependent on wheelchairs to get around.

Now the good news. Recent research from Dr. Ethan Kross at University of Michigan has uncovered the secret to self-coaching. It’s talking to yourself in the third person. I know we don’t like this when we hear it from others like LeBron James saying, “I’m moving back to Cleveland because that’s best for LeBron James.” It sounds a bit elitist. But actually Dr. Kross’s research reveals that that kind of third person self talk is much more likely to lead LeBron James to actually move back to Cleveland without regret. And that, I think you would agree, is a pretty big challenge.

Here is what the research says. When we use first person affirmations to encourage ourselves such as “I should go for it, I can ride this wave,” that message hit’s a power switch in our cerebral cortex which actually increases the emotional intensity of fear. This is a serious problem for most of us because it seems natural to encourage ourselves using the “I can do this” first person. But this is unwise. Brain scans reveal that addressing our inner doubts with “I” messages amplifies our stress and fears of failure. 

However making a simple change of calling yourself by your own name or using the pronoun ‘you’ switches you’re thinking like switching a train track. Your new ‘train of thought’ creates focus, clarity and confidence. So for me the difference between saying, “I should paddle into this wave” versus “you should take this wave” greatly increases my success. All I am doing is mimicking my friend Jim when he coaches me.

That’s simple enough. Just coach yourself as if you’re coaching advice was coming from someone else… “You can do this Will!”

As for your inner critic… you just have take charge of that fearful, whiny, judgmental voice. Here’s how. Harvard business school professor Alison Wood Brooks has conducted experiments with people who were told that they have to give a speech. This immediately creates anxiety. She told some members of the group to try self-relaxation and tell themselves “I am calm.” The problem was people who are effective at self-calming we’re judged by the audience as giving very boring speeches. So the stress reduction techniques had a negative impact on performance. She told others that it was natural to be “excited” before giving a speech. She simply re-labeled their stress as positive excitement. The result was performance excellence in terms of audience reaction. The speakers who saw themselves as excited we’re judged to be more persuasive, confident and competent. According to Dr. Kross’s research the best way to raise your positive excitement level would be to say to yourself, “you are excited” just like a good coach would say.

In another experiment with high stakes test-takers, people were told that feeling anxiety and stress can actually help test performance. They were coached that anytime they became aware of their anxiety it was an opportunity to remind themselves that their stress give them energy to excel.

Test results showed that students who embraced their stress as positive outperformed students who tried to calm themselves. Additional research confirmed that the test-takers who exceled maintained high levels of stress hormones throughout the testing but this did not negatively impact the results. This leads researchers to believe that it isn’t so much that stress kills performance as much as our story about our stress drives our results.

So here is how you become your own best coach.

1. Talk to yourself like a Coach using your name or the pronoun “you” (instead of “I”) when you’re telling yourself to go for it.
2. Tell yourself that stress is excitement. Turn the energy of stress into enthusiasm and focus (like my surf coach Jim) rather than let fear wipe you out.

The great thing about being your own best coach is that you are always available. So go for it. Go for the life you want and the work you want. Now, say it with me, “You can do it!”

What if there was something you could do that was absolutely free that was proven to:

• Give you a longer life
• Protect you against heart attack or stroke
• Ensure you are half as likely to get Alzheimer’s Disease
• Protect you against depression, anxiety, obesity and insomnia
• Cause you to be happier and healthier at all life stages
• Feel more life satisfaction
• Enjoy more satisfaction with work
• Improve your sex life
• Recover more quickly from serious setbacks
• Be more tolerant open-minded
• Handle pain better
• Have better repair of chromosomes to keep you youthful and cancer resistant
• Have more satisfying relationships with your family, loved ones, colleagues and neighbors.

So according to researcher Dr. Michael Steger there is one thing. It is indeed free. It is both simple and hard. It is to become conscious of your purpose in life and seek to fulfill it. As most of you know this is been a major theme of my life’s work… helping people uncover and express their purpose. Perhaps because I’ve been doing this for so long I figured out a few shortcuts that help people cut through the voices in their head, their early life-programming, their feelings of guilt and doubt to come up with a purpose so tangible that they can it express every day.

Human beings are designed to feel personally fulfilled by improving the quality of life for others.

First some principles: Your purpose does not have to be unique. In fact, it is unlikely that it is. Human beings are designed to feel personally fulfilled by improving the quality of life for others. While some people hold this as their conscious goal, most do not. Developmental psychologists tell us that most people do not consciously follow a purpose-driven path most of time. The reason is that life is very stressful. Our disappointments and our common fears of loneliness, poverty, illness and death drive us to be preoccupied by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. We need to decide to be bigger than our fears.

Achieving goals other people set will not make you feel fulfilled.

Achieving goals other people set will not make you feel fulfilled. Most of us are seduced into hyper-achievement by a common fallacy that if we achieve a difficult goal we will feel fulfilled. It is easy to make this mistake because achieving difficult goals make us feel more capable. But that’s not the same as feeling fulfilled. We also face the challenge of swimming in a world in which other people are constantly telling us what our goals must be. Yet, achieving goals that others set only results in feelings of relief, not personal fulfillment. Just think about the word fulfill. Its simple meaning is to fill up the empty space. The only thing that can fill up the empty space of our individual potential is the continual expression of our personal way of creating value. We can’t fill that space up with earning a bonus, awards, or even appreciation. Achievement may satisfy our needs for status and external validation but it won’t fill up that hole in our soul that only comes by making a positive difference for another human being.

Recent research confirms that GRIT is the single most important ingredient to the kind of success that fulfills us.

Pursuing your purpose is messy. Our most altruistic plans and noble efforts are often blown to smithereens by forces we cannot control and often seem unfair. I believe that is because our life’s ultimate purpose is to evolve into our best possible self and that can only happen in the face of nasty, undeserved adversity. Recent research confirms that GRIT is the single most important ingredient to the kind of success that fulfills us. If you are interested in fulfilling your purpose get serious about your creative persistence also known as grit. So are you still interested in pursuing your purpose? If you are, here is the way I help people think about it. First, get the idea that you have to change the world or the world will go to hell out of your thinking. The earth has been around for billions of years and human beings have survived for many thousands.

You don’t have to save the world. Instead turn your attention to the difference you can make right now, today, in the circumstances you’re in, with the people in your personal universe. As I said, I believe your purpose is to become the best person you can imagine. The means by which you achieve that is to create value for others. That doesn’t require you saving Western civilization. What it does require is that you become conscious of how you create extraordinary value and show up every day to do it.

You don’t have to save the world. Instead turn your attention to the difference you can make right now, today, in the circumstances you’re in, with the people in your personal universe.

The renowned psychologist Carl Jung laid the groundwork for a matrix of 12 principal ways people create value. He calls these common patterns archetypes. See if you relate to at least one or two of them. “I create value by…”

• Explorer: Helping people find new solutions and opportunities.
• Jester: Using fun and humor to create insights and enjoyment
• Sage: Creating clarity when people are confused
• Teammate: Inspiring groups and teams to achieve significant goals
• Idealist: Using values to help others make better decisions
• Magician: Reframing challenges into unique opportunities
• Lover: Making people feel special and included
• Caregiver: Providing exceptional levels of service
• Hero: Doing whatever it takes to make worthwhile things happen
• Ruler: Developing standards and processes that ensure safety and quality.
• Creator: Creating useful innovations that make life easier
• Revolutionary: Pushing beyond the status quo to create positive change.

Go ahead read this list over two or three times. Write down the statements that sound a lot like what you do that helps make life better for others. Test these statements out in your personal, family and friends and work life. Ask yourself…What do people compliment you on? What do they appreciate about you? Take some time and really reflect on these statements. Let your subconscious mind work with this list over and over this coming week and see if you get greater clarity.

Many people identify with two of these iconic archetypes.

Many people identify with two of these iconic archetypes. For instance, I am a Magician-Sage. The way I create value for individuals and organizations is by reframing challenges into opportunities by creating clarity in confusing circumstances. I do this all the time. I can’t help myself. I do it with my children’s friends who may be grappling with both simple and serious life decisions. I do it with CEOs and I do it at parties. The way this makes me a better person is that in order to do what I am intrinsically motivated to do, I have to listen carefully and be extremely empathetic so I don’t try to force my agenda on someone else’s life or business. It’s also made me deeply care about the success and happiness that other people are striving for.

Here are some more examples. My wife finally saw that her gift was to make people feel special and included. (Lover) She always goes out of her way to encourage anyone in her universe who’s discouraged. Let me tell you she is powerful at it. She can get any dog’s tail to wag and nearly any human to get up off the mat of temporary defeat and keep fighting for the things that matter to them. Once she understood her purpose is a personal gift she began to see a river of opportunities to give it every single day. She is a magnet of optimism for family and friends who find themselves struggling. She goes through every day offering sincere affirmations to anyone who she notices is just trying to do their best.

Her purposes made her a better person because she too has become much more empathetic, encouraging, and a fearless advocate for people who feel under appreciated or invisible. Not long ago I was helping a young artist, a painter, discovers she was a Creator–Magician. She began to see her gift as creating beauty every day in every way she could. Her personal identity expanded from just being a painter to creating beauty through order and cleanliness in her apartment. It positively impacted the way she presented meals, dressed, and affirms the beauty of others. She is becoming a better person by being more present so she can notice the beauty in every moment and help other people see the beauty that is already around them.

I believe the world needs everyone…even hard-asses if they invest their purpose to benefiting human beings.

I recently helped a hard-ass executive see that his purpose is as a Ruler-Sage. He has a ruthless and useful ability to create focus and efficiency on the few things that matter most to make businesses work. He literally rewrites the business rules so employees can succeed. His native instinct is to make strategy and priorities crystal-clear. People who work for him have no confusion about what’s important and what’s expected. If he sounds tough it’s because he is. Yet, I’ve seen him turn a huge organization around with such integrity that employees embraced and relied on his uncommon competence. I believe the world needs everyone…even hard-asses if they invest their purpose to benefiting human beings. This executive is evolving into a better person by learning to listen more deeply so that he can get to the root of problems and frustrations. He has become better at trusting others and thanking them for their efforts.

We don’t need to start a new business, found a nonprofit, or even change careers to start living a fulfilling and purposeful life.

This is my simple point. I believe each one of us is designed to improve humanity and in the process improve ourselves. We don’t need to start a new business, found a nonprofit, or even change careers to start living a fulfilling and purposeful life. Once you become aware of the difference you can make in the way you create value you will see opportunities every day to feel fulfilled. When you do, you will also begin to be flooded with the benefits stated at the beginning of this message. So go ahead and become the best person you can imagine.

We want to be empowered. Google’s internal research reveals that personal work empowerment is the second highest value that Google employees have. We want to be able to do our work when we want, where we want, and with whom we want. Psychologist Edward Deci confirmed that autonomy is one of the core motivators the drive us to do great work. This seems to be especially true in the U.S. where our culture values personal freedom above virtually anything else. This is not surprising when you consider the fact that our nation has been a magnet for people who want to live differently than they were being forced to live in the country of their birth. We relish our independence.

We work in an increasingly complicated, fast-changing, ambiguous world, which makes it difficult to know what you need to know to make good judgments and avoid causing unintended negative effects.

But making true working-autonomy effective is not easy. We work in an increasingly complicated, fast-changing, ambiguous world, which makes it difficult to know what you need to know to make good judgments and avoid causing unintended negative effects. In the workplaces where I train leaders I find that the tension between the desire for personal autonomy and the need for constant collaboration extremely problematic. On the one hand, if personal autonomy is strangled people quit taking initiative, and lose their imagination. If, on the other hand, personal autonomy is expressed recklessly, rivalries, blame and rework become the hallmarks of the culture.

The truth is today’s most successful organizations are ones in which leaders are masters of executive management.

Thankfully there is a way out of this dilemma. It is the lost art of management. Over the last 30 years management has gotten a bad name. Books have been written about the difference between leadership, which we are told is awesome, and management which we are told is boring. The truth is today’s most successful organizations are ones in which leaders are masters of executive management. The old idea that leaders can just paint a vision and hire smart people to find their own best way to success is the sure path to failure. It’s appealing because it’s easy. It’s a lot harder for leaders to stay engaged with the actual work being done but it’s absolutely necessary to avoid making stupid decisions and keeping organizations focused on what really matters every day.

The leadership secret for scaling success is to follow the disciplined process of empowerment.

I know…empowerment is a tired word that’s been so abused it causes eyes to roll and a gag response. But stay with me. If you want to experience the inner dignity of autonomy and avoid chaos caused by being in the dark as to what others are doing take a close look at the Seven Steps of Empowerment. One more thing before I start. It is very unlikely you will be led or managed in this way. You will have to manage yourself. You will need to seek the answers to these 7 questions and make yourself a pest if need be to get the answers. Otherwise you are being set up to fail. Work will be frustrating, draining and stressful. What you are seeking to become on the most important work you are doing is what Apple calls the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI).

This doesn’t mean you’re in charge or you can order people to follow your commands. Rather it means that you will take the responsibility to achieve the goals of your work no matter what. This will cause you to become more persuasive and influential. You will be motivated to engage more deeply in the work and your relationships with your colleagues. And it’s at the core of what makes work satisfying. Here are the Seven Steps to Empowerment. If you are the manager you are responsible for providing these.

If you are the person seeking empowerment it is up to you to make sure that you have each of these 7 elements clear. Clear goals: Your objectives should be strategic, specific and prioritized. Most of us feel bombarded with urgencies caused by internal failures or external threats. When everything is important nothing extraordinary gets done. To be empowered you must know what is most important every day. Clear reasons: Research from Zenger|Folkman (Extraordinary Leader) showed that most leaders and managers are very weak positive motivators.

This is sad. Many managers seem to use an authoritarian mindset that assumes that people just need to obey whatever commands are issued. This is fundamentally disrespectful. People work better, harder and smarter when they know how their work matters to the larger success of the enterprise. If you’re a manager, explain in detail how the work of your team helps important goals to be achieved that ultimately benefit your customer.If you’re a team member working in the dark, ask your manager why your work matters. (If they think you’re a dingbat for asking you probably need a new manager.)

Clear role: In order to be empowered you need to know what is specifically expected of you. Increasingly, roles have become very ambiguous leading to amazing levels of needless friction. Imagine an athletic team that was constantly being told that it was vital that they win while most of the players were confused about the position they were supposed to play. Pretty soon everyone would simply be at each other. Welcome to absolute chaos and guaranteed failure. Yet I see this all the time. Know your role and what is expected of you. Clear measures and milestones: Perhaps the most important element of being empowered is to know how to measure progress towards ultimate success.

I find this is relatively common for work team results. There are numerous software packages that track projects using green, yellow and red to show the state of the project. Yet I see virtually none of this for individuals. You cannot be truly empowered if you don’t know if you’re individual work is contributing to the success of your team or organization in the way that is needed. It may take some thoughtful analysis and imagination to come up with it personal dash board of success indicators.

It is worth it. Once you are clear on how to connect your daily effort with work success you will feel truly empowered to put as much effort, skill and energy as needed. Clear resources: We live in an age where the mantra “do more with less” has been forced on us by the Wall Street mindset that the surest way to productivity is to reduce payroll costs while insisting employees do more work. This dumbness has seeped into every part of our work-life. We are constantly asked to achieve “stretch” goals without clear agreement on how much time, money or talented people we need to make it happen. Too many organizations glorify heroes who make extraordinary sacrifices to achieve objectives of little strategic value.

To be empowered we really need to know what our resources are so they can be deployed in the most productive way. Clear Guidelines: Nearly all organizations work within constraints. Laws and regulations, company policies, business rules and processes are all important guidelines that should be spelled out so you don’t step in something you regret.

Clear feedback: There is a mountain of research that confirms that the fastest way to improve is to get clear and precise feedback, which is very rare in a business situation. If you want to be empowered you need to ask for feedback on an ongoing, even daily basis. The best teams and the best organizations produce a river of feedback that flows easily so that everyone can make corrections and improvements in real-time. It’s refreshing to work in environments where people are so committed to extraordinary success that they are willing to coach each other to make sure it happens.

So, as you look at this list of seven conditions of empowerment ask yourself… how often do I have clear goals, clear reasons, clear role, clear measures, clear resources, clear guidelines, and clear feedback? In my experience I simply don’t see this very often. Yet most of the problems that I get involved in trying to solve for business organizations would not arise if employees were truly empowered to achieve success. I don’t believe anyone wakes up in the morning with the goal to screw-up.

We want to be successful but few of us are well-managed. The answer, I believe, is to manage yourself by insisting that you know the answers to these seven conditions of empowerment. When you do you will be surprised by how competent you already are.