Ten years ago I embarked on a journey. Trained in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) at the Oxford Mindfulness Centre I began working with elite athletes to help them deal with the pressures of performance. I was also training as a sport psychologist and beginning to understand the psychological approaches to help people perform at their best. Hence, my client work and research since then has involved an integration of performance psychology and mindfulness psychology. My research, at two major UK universities in the UK (Loughborough and Staffordshire), has shown that skills training through this uniquely designed program can help people feel more psychologically empowered.
What is psychological empowerment and what does it offer me?
Take a moment to think whether you feel your life has purpose and meaning.
- Does what you do, in work, sport, or life, align with your values and things that are important to you?
- Do you have a strong belief in your skills, abilities and strengths, your inner qualities and resources, to the extent that you feel confident using these to accomplish things in work, sport and/or life?
- Do you trust in these abilities to where they will have a beneficial impact your work, sport and/or life?
- Do you feel that you have a perception of control, that the choices you make in work, sport and/or life are self-determined?
- Do you feel equipped to deal with challenges that your performance domain offers in work, sport and/or life?
- Do you feel that you can perform as well as you want to be?
If not, you may be lacking in psychological empowerment and it may be beneficial to consider mental skills training that offers a way to improve your sense of empowerment.
What research shows us is that psychological empowerment has four elements; meaning, competence, impact and self-determination.
Meaning refers to the alignment between what you are doing, your actions and behaviours, and your values, beliefs, attitudes and standards (e.g. Jujumaya, 2022; Llorente-Alonso et al., 2023). When you understand what is important to you and feel you are living life in alignment with these, you feel more empowered, leading to better performance and sense of wellbeing.
Competence refers to your level of belief in your personal resources, your skills, abilities and strengths, and your capacity to action these to achieve a certain level of accomplishment.. This is also known as self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997) and is strongly shown in research that higher levels of self-efficacy have many beneficial outcomes related to performance, mental health, emotional regulation and wellbeing.
Impact refers to your belief that you can use your abilities to affect performance outcomes. That you an use your abilities in even difficult circumstances to exhibit the performance you want.
Self-determination refers to the perception or feeling that you have control or autonomy over your actions and behaviours, as opposed to feeling you have little control. Research demonstrates strong associations that self-determined individuals can generate improved performance and wellbeing (e.g. Manganelli et al., 2018).
How do I build my psychological empowerment?
What my research has shown is that you can train to feel more psychologically empowered through develop 4 key skills, termed as the 4A’s: Awareness, managing Attention, helpful Attitude response and skilful Action.
Awareness training helps you to develop a better understanding and ability to know what is going on outside of you, as well as inside of you. For example, you know how your environment or people in that environment is influencing you. You are able to notice thoughts, emotions and sensations in the body that may strike up immediate, habitual reactions and then be able to offer yourself an opportunity to respond in a way that may be more helpful for your performance.
The skill of managing Attention offers the ability of being able to notice your mind has wandered from task or performance and bring it back to focus on what will aid performance. Together with Awareness, you are able to notice if your mind has wandered to thought content that may be building dysfunctional mental, emotional and physical reactions and then bring your attention to more beneficial thought content.
Helpful Attitude response is the key factor to making beneficial change and building psychological empowerment. Consider having Awareness and Attention to your thought content and then berating yourself, or being harshly critical, or hugely self-depreciating. This wouldn’t lead to a sense of empowerment. Therefore, by building the skill of responding to yourself and your experience with helpful Attitudes, even if that is unpleasant or difficult, has the ability to changes that experience and your Self.
‘When you change how you relate to experience and your Self – it changes your experience and Self’ – Stuart Munro
Skilful Action comes from the three aforementioned skills of Awareness, Attention and helpful Attitudes and refers to you being more empowered to choose responses. Awareness, Attention and your Attitude response offer you a space to respond in ways that may be more beneficial for your performance and serves to make you feel more psychologically empowered.
The program has been crafted for you to develop these skills so that you can activate powerful mechanisms of change. These mechanisms of change offer beneficial outcomes that have been shown through research with elite athletes and corporate executives.
In my next article I’ll describe how the mechanisms of change offer these beneficial outcomes.
Stuart Munro is a performance psychologist and founder of the Munro Performance Empowerment Program, which is an evidence-based skills training program offering benefits for performance and wellbeing. With research at two major UK universities (Loughborough and Staffordshire) the program has been able to show that elite athletes and corporate executives can train to develop mental skills hat leads to beneficial outcomes of psychological empowerment, self-awareness, self-regulation, resilience and emotional intelligence. For more details, please contact Stuart Munro directly.
References:
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The exercise of control. New York, NY: W. H. Freeman.
Juyumaya J. (2022). How psychological empowerment impacts task performance: The mediation role of work engagement and moderating role of age. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 889936. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.889936
Llorente-Alonso, M., Garcia-Ael, C., & Topa, G. (2024). A meta-analysis of psychological empowerment: Antecedents, organizational outcomes, and moderating variables. Current Psychology, 43(2), 1759-1784.