Reflections

Know your Power

• By fannieb
• October 1, 2015
• No Comments

When you don’t have confidence in your true self and you trust blindly the things that others tell you you need to do in order to be successful, get ahead, or be happy then you give away your power. I experienced this when I was a Mary Kay consultant under my first director. I was at a job I was unhappy at and was grabbing at something, the nearest thing I could find, as a life raft. I’d been a hobbyist with Mary Kay for several years but had recently gone to their annual conference in Dallas. There I had seen women who had very successfully transitioned from careers that were less flexible and financially lucrative to top sales directors earning large monthly commission checks and driving “free” cars. And suddenly, after six years in Mary Kay, the opportunity to promote myself in that business caught my attention.

Because I was unhappy at my job and I was not in touch with my own intuition, my mind was ripe for the seeds my director wanted to plant. I remember mentioning to her that although I wanted to be self-employed I did not have the desire to manage people directly again. She told me that having a team of independent consultants would be different and that I should try it. I remember feeling a gnawing in the pit of my stomach, an uneasiness about building a team, but the idea of not having to deal with the politics and the competition at work and being my own boss crowded out this feeling and I didn’t give it a second thought. I put my head down and did what my director said I should do in order to become a sales director.

I recruited personal recruits (people who had no interest in selling the product) to amass the number of team members that I needed. I stockpiled product that I would never sell and would wind up throwing out because it sat on my shelf and expired. But I became a director, for a year, and I left my job for all of six months, until my dream of self-employment crumbled as I was unable to sustain my sham and had to step down as a director.

I had put my faith in a woman who on her surface seemed sweet and like she cared about my well-being but who, herself, was not in touch with her true nature. I found myself in debt and back working for someone else, but very grateful that I would be able to pay my mortgage.

It wasn’t until years later when I started to value myself more and understand that my thinking mind had a more capable partner (my feeling mind) that I saw the folly in that misadventure and that I realized I had given away my power and deferred to someone else’s whose power was filled with neediness and ulterior motives.