Welcome to today’s voice note - a tool to skip the struggle of searching for power outside of yourself and instead get to just put down the exhausting illusion that you’re not powerful.
Episode notes below, let me know how this lands in the comments!
Next Steps:
* If you’re interested in deep support and accelerated results, learn about working with me 1:1 here
* Find out about The Joy Studio community for international women making money and doing what the love right here! Founding members price ends this Sunday ✨
How to Actually Be Powerful (By Lowering the Bar) - TAKE 2
Opening: The Lesson Repeated
Welcome back to Voice Notes, Joy Ambition Voice Notes from me, Emma Lavelle.
And this is the second time that I’m recording this today—because life gives you the lessons you need to learn again and again.
So I can report that I’m looking out of my window from the top of the tiny house that I rented in Foix (F-O-I-X, in case you’re curious) in the Pyrenees in France. And it is basically the French dream. You know, when we think about moving to live in the countryside or a small town in France, you see shutters—that’s definitely a part of it—and wibbly wobbly rooftops going up into the sky.
It’s very beautiful and it’s sunny, compared to this morning when it was very cozy and cloudy.
The Meta-Lesson
And I think it’s really fun, actually, in connection to the topic of our voice note today—which is how to actually be powerful and the tool of actually being powerful by lowering the bar—it is so perfect that I got this lesson.
Because I came, I plugged in my microphone... although I now suspect I did not, when I’m evaluating what happened and why the sound quality was so bad on the podcast this morning. I do believe I did not plug the microphone in. I think that’s what happened.
But I thought I was plugging it in and connecting, and the intention with these voice notes was to create something much more raw and authentic and unpolished than the podcasts that are now arriving in my podcast player.
The Spotify Observation
When I was looking at some podcasts in Spotify this week—because as all of us with Apple phones know, there are periods where there’s just no storage, and so I deleted the podcast app off my phone and was like, “Oh, how can I listen to podcasts? Let’s have a look at Spotify”—every single episode had a beautifully slick studio-style video.
So what happened is I found myself watching videos of podcasts. And then I thought, “Wait a minute, now I’m back at TV. What’s going on?”
In my own experience, when there is a video, even though when I record a video to go with a podcast I’m kind of talking to myself, it changes how you interact because you lose that intimacy.
I think the original reason that I fell in love with podcasts and how they changed the way that I was living life was years ago when I was in the forest in Normandy—because life had happened—and there was that intimacy of it really feeling like you were connecting with another person and it was a very one-to-one conversation.
Realigning with Intention
Now podcasts seem to be going in a different direction and that’s okay, but that’s not what I want to do here.
So I set this intention for these voice notes to feel like you’ve picked up your phone and you’ve got a message from me and it’s got something that brings you joy, brings you motivation, maybe sometimes brings you the tough love that you need, that helps you to do what it is that you need to do.
And what happens, even though I have that intention—I plug my microphone in and it’s so easy—why not just record a video at the same time? It’s for Substack. And then because I’ve got the video, oh well, then my social media content is done already.
So I think that’s the first lesson, right?
Power is not doing things because they’re available and because other people are doing them.
Power is also pausing to check in with what is it that you want to do and want to create, and just realigning with that. Like noticing that, “Oh, I was doing things for a different reason,” and then just realigning. That doesn’t need to be a problem.
The Core Message: You Are Powerful
So my intention today is that you have a tangible tool that you can use to reconnect with the fact that you are powerful.
You are powerful.
And I would love for you to just pause and even say that—you know, say it out loud if you want to: “I am powerful.”
And just see how that resonates. How does it feel in your body? Are there any words that appear after you say it in your head?
Why I Know You’re Powerful
I want to share with you that I know you’re powerful because you’re a human being and you have a brain.
And if you are listening to this (not watching it because there’s no video), but if you’re listening to this, you’re in the top 3-7%—I don’t know what the data is exactly, but I remember reading in terms of how much money do you have to live on a day: if you’ve even got more than a dollar, you’re in the top 10% of the world.
So you do have more influence, a higher starting point than you may realize.
And that’s not to say in a “oh, you’re lucky and you don’t even know that you’re lucky” way. It’s not about that. It’s just like: Okay, wait, what tools do I possibly have at my disposal that I didn’t realize?
The main one being your brain—that’s what I’m here to do, is to show you how to activate that.
When Your Brain Fights Back
And if your brain is fighting with that and saying, “Well, that’s not true. I failed at this, I’ve messed this up, I can’t do this, all of these things. Other people are able to do this, but not me”—what I want you to think about is the example that I always give my clients:
My dog Rita and her nose.
Just because it’s a dog’s nose—not because she’s a special... She’s got her face buried in the quilt next to me. But not because she’s a special magical dog, but just because she’s a dog—her dog nose is really powerful. That’s it.
Now, is it trained? Not really. Does it need to be? I mean, not really. I organize her food, she has everything she needs in many ways around her. But if she was suddenly without me and she was in a forest and she needed to find food, that nose would activate very quickly. She would learn how to use it and it would become powerful.
So your brain is just the same—it’s the human version of the dog’s nose. Just by being a human brain, it has that.
Signs You’re Disconnected From Your Power
Let’s start by looking at where might you not be in awareness or consciousness of that power that you have. And that’s the first step—recognizing that.
Now, I wanted to bring this to you because it’s a lesson that I had last week and it’s a tool that I’ve been using to just remind myself that I am powerful. And even when it feels like things are scary and they’re out of my control and I feel trapped, that doesn’t mean I am trapped. It doesn’t mean that I can’t change things. It just means I’ve forgotten that I’m powerful. I haven’t been able to stay connected to that because that’s life.
Sign #1: Urgency
Some signs that you might be feeling disconnected and unconscious of that power that you have are when there is urgency.
Listen to the language that you’re using. Do you feel that stuff has to happen today? There’s a deadline—the deadline is this or this. Or if it doesn’t happen by tomorrow then there’s no point doing it. Is that what’s happening?
Is it happening in conversations that you’re having? Is it happening in your head? Are you feeling triggered by things and then immediately needing to solve them, instead of being able to pause and give them space and be curious and return to yourself and check in with: “Hang on, am I getting all of the information here? Am I checking in with myself?”
Why Reconnecting With Power Matters
Now we want to be able to access this power—or not even access it because it’s always there—but like, stop blocking it and distracting ourselves from it, because it affects everything that we do in life.
It affects:
* The decisions that we take
* The actions that we have
* Our relationships
* How we set our goals
* How we experience life
If you are someone that always feels that you don’t have enough time and things will be better in the future, then that’s a really good sign to pause and ask: “How can I create that feeling right now? How can I see what it is I have in my current life and who I am and just really delight in being you in this moment?”
From Urgency to Trust
It creates this incredible trust in place of urgency.
And it means that when we do achieve our goals, we’re really able to enjoy them and connect with them and be with them.
And I think about this as savoring. You know, like having a delicious meal and you savor the meal and you can think back and you’re like, “Oh, that was such a good meal.”
I still remember one of my favorite questions to ask people is: “What’s the best meal that you’ve had?”
And I still remember when I was 18—so it’s more than 20 years ago now—having a chili. It wasn’t vegan and I’m vegan now. It was a very meaty chili. And it was one that my friend’s parents had been cooking up in Inverness.
We’d gone on this walk with the dogs through the hills. There was a wooden bridge—maybe I’m making it more dramatic in my head—but it went over this gorge, this really deep crevice. And I was terrified of heights at the time and I did it. And the dogs ran ahead of me and we just had such a good day. And I was so hungry when I got back and the fire was on and we had this food and it was just... it was so good.
And I still think about that meal. It still comes up 20 years later.
And we want our experiences—to have a moment like that each day, I think. Even if it’s just for a few seconds, just something that anchors us.
And that’s how we start to create spaciousness and having time and being present and knowing that we’re powerful.
The Problem With Traditional Belief Work
So this is where I would invite you to think about this concept of lowering the bar so that you can actually be powerful.
Now, I want to focus on this “being powerful” because what I see happen a lot in the coaching space or the personal development space is this idea of affirmations or what they call in a lot of coaching “belief work, belief work.”
The 20 Pages Story
And I worked with a coach who—now I can laugh about it, but at the time I was really like, “Oh, am I missing something? Am I getting this wrong?”
And that’s actually one of my signals. When I hear myself saying “Am I missing something?” or “I must be missing something,” it usually tells me that I’ve forgotten I’m powerful, I’m in fight-or-flight, and I’m searching. I’m searching outside of myself.
And so at that point, I stop and I use the tool that I’m going to teach you to return to myself.
So when people teach belief work or affirmations where you’re repeating like “I am powerful” but you don’t really believe you’re powerful, what it does is create almost like a... I don’t know, the image I have in my head is of a little kid trying to walk in their parents’ high heels.
And it’s like they’re doing it, but it’s not comfortable. It costs a lot of energy to be like... well, any of you that have worn a pair of shoes or a pair of heels that are half a size too big—which I did in a five-star restaurant before Christmas with tissues stuffed into the toe (which was the trick my friend shared with me who has a corporate background)...
It was like I looked super glamorous and, you know, the very image of woman, French style, living life, powerful. And every time I went to the bathroom I was like, “Oh God, how do I focus on keeping these bloody shoes on?”
The Shoes Metaphor
And I think that’s what a lot of us are doing, where we’re like, “I’m powerful, I’ve got this.”
And this coach that I was working with, she kind of told us that we weren’t doing the mindset work, which was like: “You need to get into the mental space that the thing that you’re doing has already worked, it’s happening.”
And she said, “I used to feel like I could fill 20 pages of belief work.”
And I thought, “What? Okay, if that’s the way...”
Anyway, there’s another way, friends, and I’m going to share it with you.
The Rosary Comparison
The other way that’s much easier than doing the endless pages—which for me reminded me of having to go and do rosary beads when I was at a Catholic primary school (and I wasn’t particularly Catholic and it was very like “I have to go sit in a church with this string of beads and say these things”)... like, okay, if I have to do it, okay. But it never really made sense to me.
The Tool: Connecting With Gravity
Now, what does make sense to me is connecting with yourself and making that observation, as I shared with you, that all dogs have a magical dog nose, which is just a dog nose. All humans have a brain. We are all powerful.
Now, how do we remember that?
Anna’s Workshop
So what I love to do and that I have been using is something I learned in a workshop that my friend Anna did at the Joy Studio, which is the community that I have for women entrepreneurs. Some of you might be in it as well.
She was teaching us how to unlock the magic of our nervous system—not to see it as something that needs to be updated and managed (which is really how I had been teaching it before, but it didn’t quite align)—and instead to really unlock the magic of it, to open dialogue, to ask: “What if we’re already perfect? What if your entire body and mind is already perfect?”
The Rewilding Analogy
Just as nature is. And we see rewilding sites when humans stop throwing chemicals on it and trying to control it—nature just does her thing. And sometimes it’s brutal. Often it’s brutal. And there’s pain. But there’s also astonishing beauty and power.
And so what if for you, it’s not about doing things differently, but as Anna said: not doing the wrong things so that the right thing can just naturally happen.
Beyond the Five Senses
So she helped us to connect with our senses beyond the five that you usually think of—taste, touch, sound, hearing, sight—but also our internal balance.
Our sense of gravity. How do we stay upright when we walk? How do we not float up in the air? We don’t need to consciously think about it. It’s just there. Gravity is holding us.
The Exercise
And so she got us doing an exercise that I’d love for you to do now with me, which is to just close your eyes and ask yourself: How do you feel gravity? How do you know gravity is acting on you?
And you can feel where your body touches the earth. If you’ve got your feet on the floor, you can feel that. I don’t—I’m cross-legged, sitting on top of a very tall bed. But what I did was, and what I’ll do now, is I hugged myself.
And I really just felt: Gravity is holding me. That’s my power. Right there.
I feel the gravity and I feel the power.
Building the Practice
Okay, now when you can do that and you can just pause and breathe into that space and become aware of your power, now a mantra or an affirmation can be useful—almost to extend or ground into that sensation, because it’s a practice.
We’re all at different phases. You know, for me, this is my work. This is what I teach. I’ve been working on my coaching tools for five years now. So I would say that I feel powerful—I mean, I’m not aware of it, it’s just I just know, I just am—maybe 80% of the time.
But then life happens and I’m still a human. And the important thing is I have the tools to get back to it.
Meeting Yourself Where You Are
So if you’re in that period and you may listen to this and say, “I’m at 1% power”—that’s okay. It’s just building that muscle.
So you might do that exercise to connect to gravity and your power and then create a mantra to help you practice staying in that feeling and building capacity to have that feeling.
And what I like to do here, for example, is to say:
* “I slow down to speed up.”
* “I lower the bar now so I can raise the bar later.”
And that can look like really checking in with where you are now and lowering your standards for a little bit so that you can build that capacity to be powerful, so that you don’t have to spend so much energy on trying to be powerful.
Letting your body catch up with the fact that you are powerful.
The Dog Walking Story
A very practical example is that this week I moved to this new city and there are an awful lot of dogs off lead—or that’s what I was telling myself.
The first few days, it was very sunny, people were outside everywhere, and the story I was telling myself is: “My God, there are thousands... I didn’t say thousands, but I said, ‘This city is full of off-lead dogs, it’s full of them, oh my God, I don’t know what to do, how am I going to handle this?’”
And I was so disconnected from the fact that I had power and decisions and freedom and choices to make that I just tried to continue my usual routine: The dog gets two walks a day outside and these have to happen. Yes or yes.
The Bench Incident
And there was one afternoon—I think it was the second day or the third day, maybe the second day. I took Rita for her walk. I got back and there’s a park directly in front of the beautiful house that I’m in. And there was a gentleman asleep on the bench with his extremely large dog also on the bench.
And I didn’t know if the dog had a lead, didn’t have a lead, if it was friendly, if it wasn’t friendly.
And quite honestly, when I am in a moment of forgetting that I’m powerful, it doesn’t really matter if the dogs are on a lead or not and they’re calm, because they sense my panic.
So I’ve already, as our trainer says, I’ve already pulled the trigger in that context.
And I felt just so powerless because I couldn’t—in my head I couldn’t get into my house and I was exposed and therefore I couldn’t create safety for me and for Rita.
Finding Help
So I went for another walk. I came back—still there. Beautiful sunny day, sleeping very happily, very comfortably.
And I thought: “Okay, gravity. I’m held. I’m powerful. I know what to do. I always solve these situations. I’m going to go find someone.”
So I took Rita around the corner, I cornered the first person that looked friendly, and I asked her to help me with this situation.
Option A was give the gentleman a little nudge and ask if he wouldn’t mind moving just for a few minutes so we could get into the house. And this amazing girl went over and then came back and she said, “He says no.”
And I said, “Okay, he says no. Perfect.”
The Solution
But then what she did was she said to me, “Look, let’s go together and I’ll stand between you and the dog. How does that feel?”
And I was like, “Okay, let’s do this. Thank you.”
So it’s that connection and that support when you don’t feel powerful—and this is where coaching comes in as well and community—so that when you have these moments, there’s someone else to hold you like gravity, because they can still see that you can do this even though you can’t see it, just long enough for you to breathe and remember that you can do it.
Processing and Compassion
And we got to the house. I got in. I sat on the floor. I felt my heartbeat. I felt Rita looking at me like, “What happened? It was bad, right? What happened?”
And I used self-compassion and I said: “That was really hard. We’re doing a really good job, baby. We’re doing it.”
And that self-compassion let me return to the power to then give myself space to regulate and to ask: “Okay, what does lowering the bar look like while I can build up my resilience?”
Lowering the Bar in Practice
And it looks like:
* 10-minute walks
* Not going out at night because I feel safer when I can see things
And so we lowered the bar for a few days. And within a week, I felt safe enough to start living normal life. And Rita felt safe enough to start living normal life.
The Practice for This Week
So, for you to remember this week:
When you don’t feel powerful, find the words that indicate to you (I just paused then because Rita let out a very big breath) that you’re not connected to the fact that you’re powerful, you’re not conscious of it.
Create that consciousness. Remember: “I’m held, I’m powerful.”
And then use a mantra or an affirmation so that you can really deepen your connection to it and just practice—just practice being there.
Closing
Okay, amazing humans, I would love to hear how this landed for you.
If you have any questions about it, you’ll be able to comment on Substack.
And if you are thinking about working together and exploring these kinds of concepts, these kinds of tools more deeply:
* You can message me about one-to-one coaching
* Or you can come over to the Joy Studio if you are looking to work on the community side of things and the business side of things as well—that’s more of a group container
Have a beautiful Wednesday!
