What Are Empowerment Tools?
What are Empowerment Tools? What does empowerment mean when it comes to empowering our kids (and ourselves)? At Our Kids Empowered, our definition of empowerment is to give kids the confidence, courage, and power to meet their full potential. We want kids to feel comfortable in their own skin, to know and see their own worth, and to understand the power they have to make decisions. To do this, it is important that kids' bodies and minds are in sync with each other. They need to be equipped with the tools they can use to help them manage emotions, calm down, and get their minds in order so they can feel good and make good decisions.
Empowerment tools are any tools you can use to be empowered as defined above. The empowerment tools that we focus on at Our Kids Empowered fall into 2 categories: physical and mental. Empowerment tools for both of these categories go hand in hand. If you are doing something to strengthen one, the other will benefit in some way. You can't separate your body and mind, and you can't firmly separate techniques into these 2 categories. Here we will loosely separate them for better understanding.
Physical Empowerment Tools
Physical empowerment tools are anything you do to empower yourself using your body. Some examples of physical empowerment tools are:
- Breathing exercises
- Deep breathing is a simple and quick empowerment technique.
- Deep breathing improves your cognitive function, improves your mood, and increases relaxation and/or helps you to relax and calm down.
- Our free resource library has a free printable on an awesome breathing technique called Four Square Breathing. Check it out!
- Exercise
- This includes any kind of exercise. As long as you are exercising wisely, exercise is an empowerment tool. Exercise improves your overall health, has cardiovascular benefits, can improve your mood, and can help your brain and memory.
- Yoga would be included in both breathing and exercise.
- Sensory activities like swinging, jumping, pushing, compression, and tactile play
- Using the senses in play is very powerful, and helpful for anyone.
- Sensory play helps brain function, emotional regulation, problem solving skills, and much more. We will go into greater detail about sensory activities and senses in future blog posts.
- Kinesthetics
- Kinesthetics is moving your body in different ways to stimulate different parts of your mind.
- It is a way to connect your brain and your body to help you function better.
- Kinesthetics has been shown to help manage stress, improve decision making, improve organization, improve focus and concentration, improve reading, writing and memory, and help you feel better overall.
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Plus access to all other resources in our free resource library.
Mental Empowerment Tools
Mental empowerment tools include anything you do to think positively, and anything that helps your brain work better. You will notice that all of the physical empowerment techniques listed above have mental benefits as well. All of the tools listed below include a physical element as well.
- Pull The Weeds
- Pull The Weeds is an empowerment tool taught in the Our Thoughts are Like Seeds Program. It is an activity that involves being aware of your thoughts and switching the negative ones to positive thoughts.
- Journaling and writing
- Writing has so many benefits.
- Journaling can be used as a way to release negative emotions.
- Writing with your hand (as opposed to typing) stimulates neurons in your brain.
- New awareness of yourself and your thoughts can be achieved when you put pen to paper.
- Writing can improve memory and overall brain function.
- Affirmations
- Affirmations are positive things we say to ourselves. If you have an affirmation, it is very beneficial to say it over and over.
- When your subconscious brain hears your say these positive things, it eventually starts to believe them.
- Affirmations can be powerful and life changing.
- Check out this post for 25 positive affirmations for kids.
Summary
Empowerment tools are simple things you can do to strengthen your mind and body, and in the end help you reach your full potential. As you use empowerment tools and teach them to your kids, you will find that they help you start to think more positively, regulate your emotions better, be more relaxed, be physically healthy, and the list goes on and on.
Check out our free resource library to download a free printable on Four Square Breathing. Four Square Breathing is a simple and effective physical empowerment tool that has mental benefits as well.
