20. What Disempowerment Is Costing You
- Keri Martinez
- Aug 27
- 13 min read
ABOUT THE PODCAST:
Empowerment is like a magic pill that makes it easier for you to handle challenges and stress, find solutions to problems, push harder on your goals, advocate for what you want, strengthen your relationships, and positively impact all areas of your life. But what happens when you don’t use it?
In this episode of the Empowered Educator Mom podcast, Keri Martinez unpacks the hidden costs of disempowerment. It’s not just a matter of “feeling stuck.” From decreased problem-solving and peace to financial instability and difficulty making friends, the costs of disempowerment run deeper than most of us realize.
This isn’t about guilt or shame—it’s about awareness. When you can recognize signs of disempowerment, you can begin shifting toward empowerment. And even small shifts can make a big difference. Recognizing it is the first step toward reclaiming your power at school and at home.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
How disempowerment shuts down your ability to problem-solve and take action
Why disempowerment keeps you stuck in victim mode
What disempowerment costs you in your finances, health, relationships, career, and spirituality
How recognizing disempowerment is a useful step toward empowerment
LINKS AND RESOURCES:
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
How to leave a podcast rating and review – Apple Podcasts | Spotify
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SEE FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
What if there was a magic pill you could take that would make it easier for you to handle challenges and stress, find solutions to problems, push harder and longer on your goals, stand up for what you want and believe, inject joy and fun in your life, strengthen your relationships, and positively impact your family, classroom, finances, and health? Would you take it?
What if I told you such a pill already exists and you already have access to it?
OK, so it’s not really a pill, but you do already have access to something that can give you all those amazing benefits I just listed. That “something” is empowerment.
In last week’s episode – episode 19 – I talked about what empowerment is, I talked about a crucial principle you need to understand to experience empowerment, and I talked about a formula you can use to feel more of it. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, I recommend you do that before continuing with this one, because episode 19 gives a great foundation for what we’re going to talk about here.
In this episode, we’re going to talk about what happens when you don’t use the magic pill, when you don’t actively grow and use your empowerment. We’re going to talk about what happens when you’re in a disempowered state, or to put it another way, what disempowerment is costing you.
Ready? Let’s get into it.
Are you ready to feel more empowered and less overwhelmed at home and in the classroom? I’m Keri Martinez, and I’m a wife, mother, and educator- turned-life coach with more than 25 years experience. I’m here to offer you strategies, tips, and tools to help you increase your personal power so you can stop stressing and obsessing, and start enjoying your work and family more. I know that when you feel better, you do better. But it can seem darn near impossible to feel better when you’re handling two of the most demanding jobs on the planet – teacher and mom. Typical PD sessions, conference workshops, and self-help books on work-life balance aren’t cutting it, so It’s time for a different approach. Welcome to the Empowered Educator Mom Podcast.
Hello everybody. Welcome and thanks for tuning in to the podcast. As I said in the intro, today I want to talk about what disempowerment is costing you – which can be kind of a bummer to think about. This is not meant to trigger any kind of guilt or shame, so please don’t use any of what I’m going to talk about to beat yourself up. My intent is to give you things to look for, signs that you may be disempowered in one or more areas of your life, so that you can take steps to change that … if you want. I am not here to tell you how you should be living your life. You are in charge of you, and you get to choose that. But I do think that in general, the more educator moms we have living in empowerment the better, because empowerment fuels us to be our best selves at home and at work, it helps grow and evolve, and it increases our capacity to live the lives we want to live.
In the last episode, I said empowerment is a huge deal and it’s worth your time to figure out how to have more of it because it makes a real difference in how you approach your life, the different roles you play, and your relationships. It makes a difference in how you feel about and how you treat yourself and others. And it makes a difference in how you show up in the world. That’s why I think it’s kind of magic because it impacts so many areas of your life.
Now empowerment and disempowerment are two sides of the same coin. It’s worth your time to figure out how to have more empowerment, AND it’s worth your time to figure out how to have less disempowerment. Or maybe it’s more helpful to think of empowerment and disempowerment as being opposite ends of a sliding scale. As you move away from one end, you automatically move toward the other, so moving away from disempowerment gets you closer and helps you feel more empowerment, and vice versa.
If you think of yourself as being closer to the disempowerment end of this sliding scale, what does that cost you, in general? I want to start with a broad brush and look at what disempowerment can cost you across all areas of your life, and then after that, we’ll look at some ways disempowerment can cost you in the specific areas of finances, relationships, career, health, and spirituality.
When you are in a disempowered state, meaning when you don’t recognize where you have agency or you don’t think you have power to influence or impact your life, you lose access to a lot. Disempowerment costs you a lot. It costs you problem solving and creativity, for one thing. If you can, think back to a time when you felt disempowered. Or maybe you’re feeling disempowered about something right now. How easy was it or is it to figure out solutions when you’re in this disempowered state? To think outside of the box? To approach the problem from a different angle or perspective? It’s pretty tough because when you’re in a disempowered state, you don’t think you have the power to influence or impact your life, and that literally shuts down the problem solving and creativity parts of your brain. It’s not that potential solutions aren’t there and available to you – you just can’t see them.
When I worked in the ed tech department in my former school district, I was assigned to coach at a few different schools that were participating in a special program coordinated by my department. While I’d been training teachers and administrators for years on using technology in the classroom, I was new to coaching, and very unsure of myself in that role. I’d never been coached myself let alone coach other people, and I really resisted this change in responsibilities when my boss laid out this new plan. I immediately thought, “I have no idea how to do this – I can’t possibly be a coach!” I was terrified, though, of looking completely incompetent to my boss, my co-workers, and the teachers I’d be coaching.
Now, thankfully my boss did have me go through a coach training program, and that helped my confidence a little, but the thought, “I really don’t know how to do this – I’m going to be a complete failure,” that thought stayed with me for quite a while. After working with the schools for a year, I felt like I hadn’t made much progress, and I was pretty discouraged. I kept going, but all the while I was thinking, “I just want to go back to the way things were before. I just want to go back to training. That’s what I’m good at.”
Looking back now, I can see I was in a completely disempowered state, and that really hindered my progress. It blocked my creativity and problem solving, my ability to get unstuck and to see that other things were possible. I didn’t think I could improve as a coach; therefore, I couldn’t see any ways to improve as a coach.
What else can disempowerment cost you? Well, this overlaps the last cost a bit, but it can also cost you your ability to take action. Beyond seeing other options, it can cost you your ability to do anything with those options. It can also cost your ability to learn and grow from your experiences.
Going back to my previous story, it’s been about six or seven years since that happened, but it wasn’t until a few months back when I was being coached around that situation that I was finally able to shift my perspective and see how I’d disempowered myself with my thinking. Honestly, I was a little deflated when I realized what I’d done, and I told my coach, “Man, I wish I could’ve seen that back then.” But she then responded, “No, you weren’t supposed to see that back then. It doesn’t matter. We’re talking about going forward.” And that offered me another perspective shift that took me further away from disempowerment and allowed me to learn even more from that prior experience.
Disempowerment can cost you your ability to change your thoughts and feelings, your perspective, which means it can cost you your ability to change your life. It can also cost you the ability to be the hero in your story – it can keep you stuck in victim mode.
One of my favorite books is Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Frankl was a Holocaust survivor and in the book, he described his and other prisoners’ experiences in Nazi concentration camps. He said, “The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.”
Now I cannot even fathom how difficult that must’ve been for Frankl and the other prisoners to go through what they did, and I am in awe that some of them stepped out of victimhood and responded to their situation with courage, grace, and caring. I’m not sure I would’ve been able to do that in the same situation. I do know that they could not have done what they did had they been in a state of complete disempowerment. They couldn’t have done it without some recognition of their ability to choose their response, without some belief in their power to impact their own lives.
Disempowerment can also cost you your voice. You can lose the ability to speak up, to stand up for yourself and what you want and believe in. And lastly it can cost you your dreams because when you’re in a disempowered state, you don’t believe you have the power to achieve your dreams or to keep going long enough to make them reality.
OK, so that was a general look at what disempowerment can cost you across the board. Let’s now look at how it can cost you in a few specific areas. First off, let’s talk about finances. What is disempowerment costing you in your finances? The main things that come to mind are your ability to budget, to manage your finances, and to have peace around your finances. If you feel disempowered about your finances, meaning you don’t recognize where you have agency with your money or you don’t think you have power to influence or impact your finances, you’re not going to take steps to manage your finances, right? In fact, when you feel disempowered about money, you tend to do one of two things – avoid it or obsess over it.
If you’re in a disempowered state because you’re thinking you don’t have enough money, for example, you’re probably avoiding looking at your bank balance or you’re looking at it all the time – neither of which is particularly useful.
If you’re feeling disempowered because you’re thinking, “Why bother doing a budget? It won’t do any good or we’re just going to blow it anyway,” you’re probably not going to make and try to stick to a budget. And then failing to do that will block access to anything you might learn from it. It will also block the peace that can come from knowing you have a plan.
After the financial crisis of 2008, my husband got furloughed at work, which meant we lost a sizable chunk of his income. Just prior to that happening, I had requested to reduce my hours at work so I could spend more time at home with the kids. We had planned for my reduction in salary, but not his, so when the furlough happened, I freaked out (to put it mildly). I started couponing, started making bread, and did whatever I could to cut our household expenses. We also sold some things and collected recycling to earn a little more money. My mom even mailed me coupons to help out.
I look back on that now and feel like I was kind of a crazy person for a while. Anyway, I was so disempowered about our finances and our financial future that I completely obsessed over every purchase and every bill. I was checking our bank and credit card balances every day and sometimes multiple times a day. Did any of that help? Well, some. With the blessing of more than 15 years of hindsight, I know that being very careful about our spending and budgeting helped us survive and pay our bills, and I’m very grateful to my past self for doing that. I can also see how much my disempowerment cost me peace during that time, so it’s a mixed bag.
Now, you might say, “How could you have felt empowered back then? You didn’t know if you were going to be okay. You didn’t know that everything would work out fine and you’d be in a much better place today. You couldn’t see the future so how could you possibly feel empowered back then?” If you’re in a tight financial spot right now, maybe those are the kinds of things running through your mind about your own situation. And to that I would respond, yes, we can’t see the future. We can’t predict how things are going to turn out. But empowerment doesn’t require us to do so. Empowerment, remember, comes from recognizing where we have agency and believing we have the power to impact or influence our life. We have agency over how we respond to the situation. We have agency about how we choose to see the situation, how we choose to think and feel about it.
Back then, my thoughts were focused primarily on how much we were missing and how much trouble that was causing. We were missing a big chunk of income and we were missing experiences and material items because we couldn’t afford them. That wasn’t how our life was supposed to be, and I worried all the time about what that meant for our future. My focus on things outside my control (my husband’s furloughed salary and the unknown future, for example) left me in a very disempowered state. Had I shifted my focus just slightly to what we did have control over (meaning our spending, our budgeting, the things we were doing to cut costs and bring in a little extra money), that would have similarly shifted me away from disempowerment and toward more empowerment and more peace.
Let’s move on to relationships. What is disempowerment costing you in relationships? Remember, feeling disempowered about relationships means you don’t recognize where you have agency in them or you don’t think you have power to influence or impact them. So if you’re in a disempowered state about relationships, that can cost you the ability to make and keep friends. It can also cost you the ability to be the kind of parent or partner you want to be and to handle challenges in those relationships. It can cost you the ability to make requests of others and to set boundaries when needed. And it can even cost you the ability to recognize when a relationship needs to end.
Next, career or work. Disempowerment about your career or job comes from not recognizing where you have agency in your career or not thinking you have the power to influence or impact your job. So disempowerment around your career can cost you growth opportunities. It can cost you the ability to handle challenges and difficult co-workers or bosses. It can cost you the ability to manage a work-life balance, and it can limit your ability to positively impact the environment and people around you – be they students, teachers, admin, parents, or community members.
For health, disempowerment means you don’t recognize where you have agency regarding your health or you don’t think you have the power to influence or impact your health. Now I know I keep repeating myself saying this means you don’t recognize where you have agency or you don’t think you have the power to influence or impact your life, but I really want to drive home this framework for what disempowerment is so you can use it when you’re thinking about your own life circumstances. In the area of health, disempowerment can cost you your actual physical health and longevity. If you don’t think what you do to or with your body is going to make a difference (for example if you don’t think changing your diet or exercise routine will work), you’re not going to make the changes or you won’t stick with them long enough to be effective. Disempowerment can cost you emotional health and stability. It can cost you the ability to handle chronic illness for you or someone else. It can cost you the ability to advocate for yourself or others with medical professionals or caregivers. And lastly, it can cost you the ability to feel better.
In the last area, spirituality, disempowerment means you don’t recognize where you have agency over your spirituality or you don’t think your choices around spirituality will influence or impact your life. Disempowerment in spirituality can cost you the ability to have faith, to operate from faith, or to “walk by faith” as Paul says in 2 Corinthians. It can cost you the ability to decide what you believe and then to act on that. It can cost you the ability to see this life from a broader, more eternal perspective. It can cost you the ability to experience awe and reverence for the miracle of human life, the majesty of the Earth we live on, and the incredible variety of life we inhabit the planet with.
OK. That is what I’ve got for you in this episode. Before I sign off, I’d like to invite you to reflect on what you heard today. As educators, we know reflection is a critical aspect of the learning process, right? Yet it’s easy to forget to do it ourselves. So consider just one thing from this episode. What’s one thing that shifted your perspective? Or one thing that inspired or challenged you? Or one thing you want to share with another educator mom? And if you feel so inspired, please reach out, share your one thing with me. You can use the link in the show notes to text me or DM me on Instagram @kerimartinezcoaching.
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Empowered Educator Mom podcast! To see show notes and a transcript, go to kerimartinez.com/podcast. That’s k-e-r-i-m-a-r-t-i-n-e-z dot com forward slash podcast. If you have a comment or a question you’d like to share, you can text me through the link in the show notes, and if you loved the episode, please share it with another educator mom. Grab the link and text it, email it, or post it on social media.
Have an amazing week everyone. I’ll talk to you soon.
