EMPOWERMENT: growth towards success

Awareness of oneself and one’s capabilities is the winning weapon for achieving one’s goals and personal well-being. Yes, because feeling good and capable at something is the first step to success. Knowing how to recognise and exploit one’s abilities triggers a virtuous circle, which nurtures a positive self-image and proactivity. Positive feedback from our actions leads us to become more aware of our strengths and gain more self-confidence, thereby increasing our propensity to act.

We often hear the cliché that in companies, people, especially managers, tend to overestimate themselves, resulting in appearing conceited and arrogant.

In reality, statistically the exact opposite emerges, i.e. people in general, whatever role they hold, tend to underestimate their own capabilities. Often, therefore, presenting themselves as confident, determined and direct is nothing more than a way of hiding fears and insecurities.

Is there congruence between how we perceive ourselves and how we actually position ourselves? And is other people’s perception of our behaviour the same as ours? These questions and their answers are fundamental to trying to understand how well we know ourselves.

The term empowerment denotes a process of growth and development, of the individual and/or the group, based on increasing self-esteem, self-efficacy, reflection and self-determination, with the aim of enhancing known resources and bringing out latent ones, leading the individual to become aware of his or her potential.

This process triggers the mobilisation of new energy and motivation, leading to a reversal of the perception of one’s limits, with a view to achieving results beyond one’s expectations.

This approach calls for resourcefulness, courage and promotes the concrete transferability of learning about oneself to the real context.

The empowerment oriented Assessment Centre is an effective tool for learning about oneself, identifying one’s strengths and weaknesses and proactively working on these to improve oneself. The aim is to trigger a path of new possibilities, leading people to be protagonists in the here and now, in order to foster their leap forward, development and growth in work organisations and in life in general. This facilitates overcoming historical limitations and a sense of inadequacy, learning to recognise fears, process them and overcome them.

We believe that each person is endowed with his or her own specific potential that can best be developed through the construction of a new vision, new ways of thinking and thinking about oneself; in this sense, in order to achieve a significant qualitative leap, it is necessary for the person to put himself or herself entirely at stake, drawing on all his or her resources and possibilities.

Modifying behaviour, in fact, is a goal that can be achieved by addressing the ‘whole’ person, leveraging their internal capacities such as energy, motivation, identity, self-image, transversal experiences between work and non-work, thus mobilising their best resources.

The direction is to try to connect the objectives and the specific theme of the training intervention with man’s natural propensity to learn and generate. This means that it is fundamental to help each individual to be ‘present’, i.e. connected with all their resources (professional and otherwise), labours, desires, successes and failures.

Reasoning from a systemic perspective, the growth of people and organisations are, interconnected, as are the different areas of everyone’s life. This is why focusing on personal well-being and satisfaction has a global positive influence that impacts on relationships, work, family and all areas that involve us.

In the words of the great Indian politician and philosopher Gandhi: ‘We must become the change we want to see’.