It's impossible for you to stop influencing the people and things around you.
The only choice your influence gives you is whether you’ll use that power for good, or for ill. In fact, every moment, you are either empowering those around you, or oppressing them, even if only to the smallest degree. That’s an inescapable opportunity and challenge that comes with being human.
Empowerment of those in your care happens through explanation, motivation or liberation—whichever they most need right now.
If you’re not carefully using your power to meet that greatest need in a given moment, you will be oppressing those people in one way or another.
But it doesn’t need to be that way...
The Empowerment Test will affirm the ways in which you already empower others. And it’ll also show you the most important thing you need to get better at in order to raise up those in your care, giving them the power to overcome the challenges of daily life and to thrive.
The Empowerment Test involves asking a number of people to provide online responses to a series of questions about your influence in their lives. It might be as few as two people that you have simply tried to help through life in some way, or right through to a larger team for whom you are responsible.
Each person is sent a unique link with instructions about how to complete the survey and information about the confidentiality of their individual answers. The responses of these people will affirm the ways in which your power has empowered them. It will also challenge you about the simple things you could regularly do to strengthen their lives, and therefore, your own.