What Does Empowerment Really Mean? | Women of HubSpot

What does empowerment mean to you?

I definitely feel like it all means to like giving others confidence to move forward and complete their job and feel like it's valued and they're helping and they're doing something that makes them proud.

To me, empowerment means taking ownership of what you do on a daily basis, enabling an individual to have a soft or hard skill to be able to navigate any situation. I think for women, empowerment means listening to women. I think it means believing women when they share their experiences. You have to be self empowered. No one can empower you for you. You can't sit there and just be like, yep, let me take all the lessons. Like it has to come from within and people can create something space for you to be empowered. And I think that's a really important distinction. I think empowerment to me means knowing your worth and knowing your strengths. Taking ownership, it's taking up space. It's feeling like you are allowed to take up that space. I feel like empowerment is giving people the tools they need to take whatever next step they're looking for and also being the champion that they need to get there. Hyping people in my circle up, supporting their ideas, connecting them with resources, helping them stay motivated to bring that idea to life, whatever it happens to be. For me, empowerment is about being able to achieve what it is you want to achieve. It's choosing to trust and to believe in someone.

I think empowerment is different for everybody. When you think about it from a learning and development lens, right, how you empower anybody is going to be totally different from the last person that you worked with.