Answer This Single Question to Uncover the Most Powerful Version of Yourself

Could you become the most powerful version of yourself through a single question? In today’s episode, I ask, "What would you do if you were the richest and most powerful person in the world?"

Join me on a profound exploration of self-worth, where I unearth the role of self-reflection in fertilizing the seeds of true self-esteem. 🌱 It's not about wealth or status but about piercing through the ordinary to reveal your extraordinary desires and the values that shape them.

"Imagine unlimited resources at your disposal; it's in this scenario where your true aspirations shine brightest."

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I'll arm you with insights on aligning your actions with your inner compass, navigating by the stars of your deepest convictions—a guaranteed way to solidify your self-worth and beam out into the world with indomitable grace.

By the end of our chat, you'll have the tools to frame your vision for the life you're destined to lead. A life where you don't just exist but truly live, authentically and powerfully, creating ripples of change around you.

Remember, you are the author of your story; when you write it with intention, the narrative gains a momentum of its own.

Don’t just listen; leap into the heart of these conversations and emerge transformed. Your most potent self is only a question away. 

#RealizeYourPotential #Empowerment #PersonalGrowth #SelfEsteemJourney

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the Practical Growth podcast with me, ebi Johnson, author, nlpmp and cognitive reappraisal coach. This is the podcast created for people like you, people looking for more, more health, more peace, more happiness. Each week, I explore new topic in pop psychology and help you build a better life and better relationships. Join me for special guests, exciting ideas and practical advice that you can use to improve your life from the inside out. Let's get into it. Hello, hello, hello, my lovelies, and welcome back to another episode of the Practical Growth podcast. It is me, ebi, your favorite writer on mediumcom and sub-stack, your favorite coach on TikTok and Instagram and your favorite podcast host, and we are back back, back for another good episode this week. That, I think, is really going to make you kind of take another look at yourself. Take another look at the way you've been moving through life, the way you kind of relate to yourself and, most importantly, what you believe about yourself. Okay, and we're going to do that all today by asking one single question. I'm going to ask you one question. I want you to visualize the answer and that is going to tell us a world of truths about you, but let's see if you have what it takes to dig deep and get that answer. Just a little housekeeping. Before we get into the nitty gritty of today's episode. I have an exciting announcement I'm going to be opening subscriptions on TikTok. That's right. The wizards that be over at TikTok have now granted me access to a wonderful subscription tool which allows me to communicate and work one-on-one with all of my subscribers. So, basically, you sign up for a very small monthly fee and you get live sessions with me every week. You can come in just subscribers. You can pick what we talk about, you can ask me questions, you can get coaching, you can get advice and again, it's extremely cheap. It's extremely affordable and it's a great way to kind of get some clarity on the healing journey that you're on and get some help from me in the process. So if you're interested in that, head over to TikTok and click on my profile, the real EB Johnson. You'll see subscriptions right there at the top. Give that a tap and you'll find out everything you need to know about live subscriptions and what's going to be coming up in the next couple of weeks. And I do have to say thank you so, so, so, so much to all of you who have made this possible for me. I am forever grateful. There's almost 110,000 of you in our community now on TikTok and you really are so incredible, so supportive. So thank you so much for being a part of this and for making it all happen for me. You are as much a part of this as I am, so thank you, thank you, thank you. If you want to get involved with that again, head over to TikTok, click subscriptions and join me every week for live conversations, coaching, chat and just getting through life together.

Speaker 1: 3:01

Alright, let's jump right into it. What was I talking about? What was I going on about? What is this magical question that we're going to be going to be asking ourselves today? Well, it's all about self-esteem, folks. It's all about self-esteem.

Speaker 1: 3:13

See, there's this very odd problem in the world at the moment, especially if you're someone who's been doing a lot of healing and self-discovery on social media platforms like TikTok. There's kind of a superficial perception of what self-esteem is. People think self-esteem is being able to stand in front of a camera and say things right. They think it's being able to confront someone and put their finger in their face and call them out for all the wrong they've did. But in truth, some of these things are not actually necessarily representations of self-esteem. Yes, they can be, but they're very superficial, they're very surface-deep and they don't really reflect a true, deep trust in self.

Speaker 1: 3:51

Because, when it comes down to having high self-esteem, people with high self-esteem are people who believe in themselves. Right, they trust themselves to make decisions, they trust themselves to be vulnerable with people, they trust themselves to go and take care of their bodies, to take care of their minds, to, you know, to recover, to go after opportunities. Even if things are hard. They know that they can overcome failures. Right, these are all what true self-esteem looks like, but so much of the stuff that we get told to do for self-esteem. It's like I love my body, I love my mind, I love myself, and it's very, very superficial.

Speaker 1: 4:26

And I'll tell you what most of my clients, when they come to me to work with me one-on-one, a lot of them think they've got the self-esteem thing in the bag and they absolutely have this mask of being a confident person. But then I break it down for them and we actually start looking beneath the hood and things are a little bit different. Right, the car is real shiny on the outside, but the engine's rotten. And I find that out by asking this one single question. Okay, and it has two parts, and I want you to really sit with this question and think about it. I'll come home tonight and journal about it, whatever, because this is a very important question.

Speaker 1: 4:59

Okay, if you were the richest and the most powerful person in the world richest and the most powerful person in the world what would you do? What would that look like? Now? When I ask this question, initially the mind goes fast, right, Because these are two concepts we all understand money and power. We all want more money because it would make our lives easier. We all understand power because we want to make decisions for ourselves. We long to be free, we long to be autonomous and make our own decisions. So we understand these concepts. So usually when I ask this question, there's an initial rush of excitement, right, because people go oh, rich, I'd pay off all my bills, I'd buy a big house, I'd buy my mama a big house, I'd put all my kids through school. Yeah, I can spend money. And then I look at them and I go, oh, yeah, okay, that's great. Those are all really great goals to have. Those are amazing. You should actually keep those in mind.

Speaker 1: 5:56

Now, what would you do if you were the most powerful person in the world? You had all the power and what you said went and you had to decide for the well-being of a lot of other people. And this is usually when the conversation breaks down. There's a pause. There's a pause. They're suddenly not as excited as they were when we were talking about money and what they would do if they were the richest person in the world, and that is because there's a hesitation in trust. There's a hesitation in trust Nine out of ten times. When I ask the second part of the question oh LL, what would you do if you were the most powerful person in the world? How would you use that power? What would you do with it? How would you wield it? How would you help people?

Speaker 1: 6:42

There's a pause and a hesitation because the person who I've just asked the question to my client doesn't trust themselves. They don't trust themselves Not truly, not truly. They have no idea where they begin, because they've never thought of themselves as a powerful person who literally has the power to change the lives of people around them. Nine out of ten times, and it's kind of like the shattering of a cloak of ice or something. They're like, oh snap, right, because here's the thing, it's just a fantasy, it's not going to happen.

Speaker 1: 7:19

But someone who had true beliefs in themselves, even if they didn't know a thing about the world and what was going on you don't need to be a polysine major to answer this question but someone who had some really confident beliefs in their power would be like, right, well, first thing I do is I go about feeding the homeless and I do this, and I do that because they know they trust themselves to wield that power, whatever answers they give, even if they're silly answers. But that's one way I immediately look and start seeing where are these kind of superficial layers of self-esteem and how can we get deeper, how can we build a deeper trust in this person's sense of self? But more than that, how can we convince this client that they are powerful, that they do have the power to heal from the childhood trauma, from the narcissistic abuse, from the divorce, from the custody battles, from all of these things? They are powerful enough not only to survive those things but to overcome them better than they went into them as. And that is true self-esteem, and that is what you need to navigate the hardships of life. Now. I don't think I necessarily need to remind you of the importance of self-esteem, right of like, genuine self-esteem, not this superficial I can get on tech talk and shout at people's self-esteem kind of self-confidence but genuine, inherent belief in self, belief in your worth, belief in your abilities, trust in yourself to make decisions. So you need all of those things for good relationships, because how are you going to trust a partner if you can't trust yourself? If you don't trust yourself, then you're going to doubt all your relationships because you're going to go oh well, if I'm not good, then how can I pick good people? And if they're not good people, then they're probably going to betray me. And there is the spiral right, you have to be able to trust yourself in order to trust others. It's the same thing as like enriching the love you have for self will enrich the love that you have for others. It's very, very, very basic, but we need to understand how this real self-esteem manifests in real life. Okay, that's top and number one. True self-esteem is more than just liking and valuing yourself as a person. It's being able to make decisions for yourself. It's being comfortable making decisions for yourself. It's being comfortable with your strengths and your weaknesses, being able to embrace both of those and say, yeah, I suck at handwriting, but I'm really good at knitting, and being totally okay with that.

Speaker 1: 9:57

Someone with high self-esteem, with a lot of self-confidence. They can try new and difficult things, and you know why? Because they know they're strong enough to fail. They know that failure is not death, it's not doom, it's not the end of the road, and they know that, even if it were, they'd survive it. Okay, they can move past mistakes without blaming themselves unfairly, without blaming the world, without turning it into this huge, decades-long shadow that haunts them. More importantly, self-esteem is doing things like taking care of your body right, taking medication, going to the doctor and that's a big conversation that's been happening. Some people need medication. Okay, if this is not some hippie-dippy like no medication, holistic, heal yourself. No, sometimes people need medication and someone who has high self-esteem goes yeah, okay, maybe my brain needs medicine. That's okay, doesn't make me any better or worse than anyone else. They believe that they matter. People with high self-esteem. They believe that they matter, they believe in their skills, they believe in their ability to survive, and that is huge.

Speaker 1: 11:07

If you were someone who when asked that question with well, what would you do if you were the most powerful person, if you were someone who hesitated, if you were someone who can't tolerate the thought of being put on a throne and like allowed to have power and to make decisions? And again, we're not getting crazy here. This is a narcissism. I want you to just sit with that. I want you to imagine being the center of attention because you deserve to be, because you have the ability to be, and sit with that. How does that feel? If that's uncomfortable, then you need to work on embracing yourself, on embracing your self-esteem and being more confident in what you have to offer everyone around you, the world at large.

Speaker 1: 11:52

So how do we do that? How do we build on self-esteem? How do we find that genuine self-esteem, not just the superficial I can show out on social media type of self-esteem or this kind of confrontational, aggressive, fake self-esteem that we see people fighting in supermarkets with? How do we get ourselves to that place of genuine confidence, the self-esteem to walk away from a conflict Because we know it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter what they say, it doesn't matter if we win? How do we get to real self-esteem, real trust in who we are? Well, there are some pretty obvious answers up top right.

Speaker 1: 12:29

A lot of it depends on what caused your ruptured self-esteem. Most self-esteem is built in childhood and people are always shocked when I say this because they think that, like, our self-esteem is built when we are adults. And, yeah, your self-esteem can be affected as an adult. But the core components of your self-esteem, the foundations of your self-esteem and your trust in self, are built in childhood and like two or three different key developmental stages between, basically, birth and 18. Now if these milestones are missed, if you are subjected to a lot of trauma, abuse, neglect, that equals low self-esteem, because kids internalize a bunch of stuff and it's a whole. We could have a whole other podcast on how that happens with development theory.

Speaker 1: 13:10

But essentially the root of your self-esteem issues has to be addressed for you to get to like the actionable part of correcting and boosting your self-esteem. So if you are someone who's had a lot of trauma, who's had a lot of abuse, that fundamentally has to be addressed before your self-esteem changes. Because you can sit down and write in a journal all day long, you can go out and do things you can find hobbies, do things you're good at. But if you don't resolve that emotional trauma, the physical trauma, whatever it is that is going to linger, it is going to distort, it is going to warp and you are not going to be successful in changing the patterns that are making you unhappy. So, first and foremost, you have to figure out what the root cause of your self esteem issues is, whether that's relationship trauma, childhood trauma, whatever it is. Whatever that hang-up is, resolve it. That's step number one. Now for steps two and three. They're basically one in the same and these this is my shortcut for self-esteem, for true self-esteem.

Speaker 1: 14:09

Okay, because the core of that is loving yourself, all of yourself, even the bad parts, the parts you don't like, the parts that you're ashamed of. It's being able to incorporate all that and make yourself a fully rounded human being. Right, and the quickest way to do that and the simplest way to do that is to do two things. Okay, write this down if you need to, but you shouldn't. But if you need to write this down, the two things that will get you to hire self-esteem faster than anything else is doing things that you're good at or that you enjoy. That's number one. And number two being around good people, people who build you up, who support you, and that doesn't always look like just blow and smoke up your bum. Okay, it can be tough love sometimes, but in general they make you feel good, they energize you with the love that they have for you, with the support that they show for you. Those are the two fastest ways to get to some real solid self-esteem. And I don't mean doing it on social media, not going out for drinks with the girls and posting on Instagram 37 times. I mean getting in there, getting into life offline.

Speaker 1: 15:22

Okay, do things that you're really good at and do them as much as possible. If you're good at sewing, sew until your fingers fall off. Okay, if you're good at horseback riding, do that. If you're good at running, do that. Paint, pottery, make tea Doesn't matter. Do it as much as you can and as often as you can. Any of those things that allow you to get into a state of hyper focus.

Speaker 1: 15:45

For those with, like ADHD and neurodivergence, you know what I'm talking about any of those little hobbies and interests. The more you do that, the more confident you are going to feel about yourself. The more confident you feel about yourself, the more you can do your shadow work, the more you'll be able to do your therapy and that love you have for self will grow, not just for the things that you're good at, but the things that you're bad at as well. And the same applies to those people when you're around, people who build you up, who fill you up with love, who make sure that you know that they think you're capable of anything. That's where the magic happens.

Speaker 1: 16:21

Okay, so if you really focus on resolving whatever the issue was that caused that big break with your self-esteem in the first place, and then spend your time doing things that you love, things that you're good at, with people that you love and that see that you're good man, I'll tell you what your self-esteem game is going to change, but I don't just want to leave you there. Right, we've explored a lot of stuff today. We've talked about a lot of stuff self-esteem. We've had you think about some things and how to build, and I want you to build as a daily practice, okay, those tips I gave you doing things that you're good at, being with good people, resolving that trauma. I want you to make that a daily practice and, again, as small as possible. What is the smallest, easiest way that you can incorporate those things into your daily life so that you make sure you get a dose of feeling better every day. And sometimes that's just sleeping, that's just napping, that's just resting and doing nothing. That's okay too. But how are you going to do it? How are you going to do it every day? Outside of that, I want you to ask yourself one more question, and we won't have an answer for this today. I want you to go away and think about this and then come and come and see me. Come and check me out on TikTok. Let me know in the comments what you think, because we'll be talking about this on TikTok.

Speaker 1: 17:39

But who are you in the quiet when everyone's gone and the world is kind of snuggled down for the day and there's no one but just you and your thoughts? Who are you? Are you someone strong? Are you someone confident? Are you someone uncertain of yourself? Are you someone who feels anxious, uneasy in your own skin? It's a question as old as time, but it's a major starting point in figuring out your self-esteem, where you're at in that process and where you need to go, and you should ask yourself that question until you are confident of the answer.

Speaker 1: 18:22

Who are you in the quiet? Remember the greatest project that you will ever have to work on. Your masterpiece is you, and it's your life and it's your future, and it's all the trappings and bobbles of that life that you collect for yourself, whether that's family or career or, you know, literal material goods. Whatever it is, you are the greatest project that you will ever work on and you deserve to be happy and healthy and whole, and if you want that to be a masterpiece, that's what you have to be Right. So you need that self-esteem, you need that true essence of what it means to trust yourself, your abilities and the vision that you have for your future. Thank you all, so so much for being here. It really, I tell you what. It's just really been an incredible climb, and I am just will forever be grateful to each and every one of you.

Speaker 1: 19:18

I want to continue this conversation. I want to know where this hit, how this fell. I want to know what answers you guys came up with in these self-esteem questions. Where are you at in that journey? Are you as confident as you thought you were in yourself? Do you trust yourself as much as you thought you did, or did you maybe see some cracks that you didn't see before? Come and let me know, come out on medium, jump into the comment section or send me a message on TikTok. Let me know what you thought about this episode. Let me know what you thought about self-esteem and share your scenarios with me, share your revelations, share your questions.

Speaker 1: 19:51

It doesn't just help me, it helps everyone around you, everyone around you in this community who's doing the same work that you're doing now, right, that hard work of digging deep, digging down and getting it, making it happen. So get out there and do it. Do the work every day. Do something that improves your life, because you deserve that. You don't have to be miserable. You don't have to be miserable, right?

Speaker 1: 20:17

And if you're ready to deeply commit to the self-journey of trust and confidence and belief and better behaviors and a nervous system that doesn't make you feel like you want to crawl out of your own skin, then you should head over to therealebjohnsoncom and apply to work with me one-on-one.

Speaker 1: 20:34

I've got a new three-phase program that focuses all on the somatic nervous system, getting it online, getting your brain and your rest of your nervous system into the healthiest state possible, so that you can then change your beliefs, change your behaviors and actually take steps to improve your life. So if that sounds like something that you're ready to do, if you're serious about finding that peace in your body, being comfortable in your own skin, being able to navigate relationships with skill and with confidence, then again head over to therealebjohnsoncom and apply to work with me. One-on-one Spots will be going very fast. In my next one there is a wait list, so make sure you get over there. I only work with a handful of people at a time, so get over there and apply to work with me one-on-one. And for everyone else again, thank you for being here. Keep following me on TikTok, keep following me on Medium and until next week, keep your heads up, keep your eyes on the stars, keep moving forward. Bye-bye.