Ep258. Personal Power Received: Why Authenticity, Self-Trust, and Self-Acceptance Upgrade Everything.

In this episode, Mike Kitko redefines personal power and explains why it has nothing to do with controlling others. Instead, personal power is built upon three foundational attributes: authenticity, self-trust, and self-acceptance. As these qualities grow, so does your ability to express the highest version of yourself. 

Mike also explores the three expressions of personal power—emotional sovereignty, emotional courage, and healthy boundaries—and explains why these internal states must first be chosen and received before they can be expressed. Discover how rewiring your nervous system and embracing healthy selfishness can transform both your inner and outer world.

Key Takeaways

1. Personal Power Begins with Three Internal Attributes
Authenticity, self-trust, and self-acceptance form the foundation of personal power. As these internal qualities grow stronger, your ability to express your highest self naturally expands. 

2. Personal Power Is Expressed Through Emotional Mastery
Emotional sovereignty, emotional courage, and healthy boundaries are the outward expressions of someone who has cultivated true personal power. These qualities allow you to remain grounded regardless of external circumstances. 

3. Healthy Selfishness Is Required for Personal Growth
Increasing your personal power requires putting your own growth, peace, and well-being first without intentionally harming others. Healthy selfishness allows you to protect your energy while becoming the highest version of yourself. 

4. Your Nervous System Must Learn to Receive New Internal States
Confidence, authenticity, self-worth, and personal power are not achieved through external success. They become your reality when you repeatedly choose, practice, and receive these elevated emotional states until your nervous system accepts them as your new normal. 

5. Your Inner World Always Creates Your Outer World
Lasting transformation doesn't happen by chasing external accomplishments. It happens by upgrading your beliefs, emotions, and internal quality of life first, allowing your external world to naturally evolve as a reflection of your inner state. 

Notable Quotes

• "Personal power has nothing to do with hurting other people in the world. Personal power has everything to do with who you become in the world. And who you become is really the greatest version of yourself if you continue to upgrade and level up in your personal power."
• "Someone who is increasing and experiencing higher levels of personal power becomes radically authentic. They have no issues expressing who they really are in this world. They're the same person behind closed doors as they are in public, and they allow the people who love that version of them to lean in."
• "Real emotional courage is the willingness to feel any and all emotions and still be okay. It doesn't mean you don't have fear—it means you're not a victim of your emotions, and your nervous system becomes your servant instead of your master."
• "You can't achieve this. You can't accumulate this. You can't accomplish this. No one can give it to you. No one can gift it to you. This is something you must receive in your mind and body. It's a proactive choice, not a consequence of something outside of you."
• "Most people keep moving the goalposts because they're trying to feel these things as the consequence of achievement instead of choosing and receiving them first. These internal states are the cause—not the effect—of creating a higher quality life."

Call to Action

If this episode challenged the way you've thought about personal power, spend a few moments reflecting on where you've been giving your power away. Where have you been hiding your authenticity? Where have you stopped trusting yourself? What internal state have you been waiting for the outside world to give you instead of choosing and receiving it for yourself?

If you're ready to strengthen your personal power from the inside out, join Mike for the Built to Give, Rebuilt to Receive Workshop on August 28–29, just outside of St. Louis, Missouri. Together, you'll learn how to strengthen authenticity, deepen self-trust, build genuine self-acceptance, and retrain your nervous system to receive the internal states that create a truly powerful life. Click here for details and to register.

Questions about the workshop or working with Mike one-on-one?

mike@innerwealthglobal.com

No assistant. No gatekeeper. Just a conversation about helping you become the most authentic, powerful, and fully expressed version of yourself.

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Music Credit: "What's Left of Me" by Wes Hoffman & Friends

Transcript

Welcome And The Core Mission

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Welcome to the Inner World Podcast, where we learn and truth to live inspired each and every day.

Losing Everything And Starting Over

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Back in 2016, March of 2016, I got terminated from my last uh corporate position as an executive leader in Fortune 500 in America. And that was after a long, like 20-year successful run. I'd I had some some, let's say, some challenges and obstacles that that showed up in my personal life and just in my ability to leave myself, my lead my family, and leave my organizations. And I was 300 pounds. I was suicidal. I was drinking at crazy, crazy levels. And everything went upside down in my life. And I got terminated from my first corporate position in uh in August of 2014. And then I got terminated a second time in August or uh April, no, March of 2016. And April is when I started my transformational journey. It was actually April Fool's Day of 2016. And I started working with a mentor. And that mentor really helped me understand a lot of different ways to live and to be in life. And the value of a good mentor, of a good coach, you know, a life coach. I don't want to love those terms, but the the value of a good guide is they're not, they don't live inside your body and they don't live inside your mind. So they can show you things and they can share things that might be brand new to you, but you're too, you're so used to living in your mind and in your body that you may not know other options, okay? And other perspectives and other ways of being. And by working with someone who's outside of our body and outside of our mind, then we can look at the world differently and we can develop different belief systems. And when we develop different belief systems, everything around us changes because life is a reflection of our beliefs. Okay. If you want to see what you believe, look in your bank account, look in the quality of your relationships, look in the quality of your health. You look in all these things and you'll see a product and a byproduct of your belief system. And as we elevate our beliefs, then we elevate everything in our life. As the inner world evolves, so does the outer world. And that's why my last book that I published in August of uh last year, August 2025, was called Inner World, Outer World. And the external world that you experience is just an in an a uh a byproduct and a picture of the inner world. And your inner world is a reflection of your beliefs and your perspectives and your approaches to life and everything, all that stuff, all that good stuff built in your nervous system and whatever. And that's that is the journey

Mentorship And Inner World Beliefs

SPEAKER_00 3:27

that I went on, that I embarked on. And it was fascinating because I grew really quickly. And I am uh, I guess one of my superpowers is when I find a nugget of truth in something that is new that I feel will be transformational, I go all in on it. And I do everything I can to learn as much about it, to investigate it, to study it, to embody it, and to live from it. Because we can read great books, but if it's not changing the way we behave, or if it's not changing the way we think and feel, then it's really not doing it, it's just entertainment and good personal development books and self-help books, good self-mastery books, they should be like if if they are effective and if we're utilizing them effectively, they should be reshaping who we are inside, how we behave, because that's ultimately going to change what we experience in our external world. All right. That's why we do all this stuff. That's what that's what the Interwealth Podcast is about. It's about sharing different perspectives. And I share my growth journey and I share my challenges and my obstacles, I share my wins, and I share all of it because we're all on a growth journey and we're all evolving together. And no one is without challenges and obstacles. All right. So I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're uh you are uh listening, and I'm glad you are uh sharing some time with me and allowing some of my learnings and teachings to wash over you. All right. Now I hope they get into your mind and your body and they start to reshape what's happening in there and you allow them to reshape what's happening in there. And I hope your entire life improves because of it. That's that's the selfish thing that I uh the selfish reason that I have I launched the Inner Wealth Podcast is I only want your body and your mind to upgrade so that your entire life can upgrade.

Self-Mastery Versus Victim Thinking

SPEAKER_00 5:24

Okay. Inner wealth podcast. That's the whole point. Now, I embarked on this journey, and you could call it a self-mastery journey, all right? And I didn't fully understand what that meant, the self-mastery journey. And what it means is to master what's happening in your mind and body, because that's where we experience life, right? That we experience we don't experience life in the external world. We experience life in our minds and our body. And if we don't master what's happening in our mind and body, then we're always going to be a victim and not really, but we're always gonna feel and believe that we're a victim of circumstance, that things are happening to us and not because of us. But when you see how much influence and how much control what's going on in your mind and body have on your external world, and when you finally like break free from any victimization and you can finally master yourself, you can finally step into higher level and upgraded circumstances in your life. And that's why we're here, all right? That's why we're here so that we can restate what's happening inside of you so that you could ultimately experience higher levels of everything outside of you. Now, self-mastery. However, in this self-mastery journey that my then first real life mentor took me on, kept saying these words, and I didn't understand them at first. And those words were uh personal power. All right. And I it it had to sit with those words for a long time because it sounded like personal power sounded like you were going to hurt people. That and that's the that's the place I was in my life at that time. It anytime you talked about personal power, it was like you were gonna use that against other people. And personal power has nothing to do with hurting other people in the world. Personal power has everything to do with who you become in the world. All right. And who you become is really the greatest version of yourself if you continue to upgrade and level up in your personal power. Now, we over the last few weeks, I'd say four or five weeks, we've we've dove deep into healthy selfishness, into uh being on the receiving end of life. We've we've dove deep into some of these, and this episode at the end, I'm gonna tie it back into healthy selfishness and and being on the receiving end of life. But in the meantime, between now and then, we're gonna talk about personal power and what that actually means. All right.

Three Traits That Build Personal Power

SPEAKER_00 8:11

So I want to I'm gonna give you three qualities of someone who has personal power in this world. The first quality that they exhibit is they are radically authentic. All right, they are radically authentic. They have no issues expressing who they really are in this world. They they're not the same person behind closed doors and in, you know, out in public. They are the same person in both places. They are not the same per or they're not different people. I hope I said that correctly. They're not a different person behind the uh clock curtain and outside of the curtain. They are the same person no matter where they go. They are authentic, they are being themselves, and they are being themselves shamelessly. And there's a reason why someone who holds intense and extreme personal power, and as we look, listen, these actually three attributes we're gonna talk about, as these grow, so do your personal power. Okay. And as you strengthen your personal power, these attributes grow. So it's a it's a direct correlation. But someone who is increasing and experiencing higher levels of personal power are gonna become radically authentic in life. And apparently, ultimately, conveniently, people outside of you are gonna say, they're gonna see transformation, they're gonna see change. And some people are gonna love it and some people aren't. It doesn't mean you shouldn't embark on the journey of personal power and authenticity. It just means that as you step into a higher version of yourself, you're gonna transform, and so will the dynamic of the relationships that you experience. And that that happens through all of these things that I'm about to share is that your relationships will change and transform. Some people will love the higher versions of you and some people will not. And you must be willing to allow the people who are like in love with the journey that you're on to lean in. And you must allow the people that only love the current version of you that don't want the new version, you must allow those people to peel away. All right. So authenticity is required, and authenticity has been a theme in my life. I remember sitting down in my first day of ninth grade, and I sat down to next to a fellow named Rich. And I've I've told the story of Rich before, and this guy was the most comfortable person in his own skin that I had ever experienced. And I had never felt that before. I never felt what true authenticity was. And Rich was very, very comfortable in his own skin and loved who he was and expressed it freely. And the people like there were the heavy metal people, there were the punks, there were the whites, the white folks, there were the black folks, there was the, you know, the smart kids, there were the not smart kids. Everybody loved Rich. He was just himself all the time. And everybody admires that. So a very important quality, and the first quality of personal power is authenticity. The second is self-trust, extreme self-trust. You must be willing when you're stepping into your personal power, you must be willing to trust yourself, trust your instincts, trust your intuition, trust your path, trust your knowing, trust your inner guidance system. You must be willing to trust yourself. You must be willing to allow other people to have opinions and to have perspectives and to give you guidance and to point you in different directions, but you must ultimately be able to fall back into a place of self-trust and make the best decision for you from your internal place of awareness. The very one of the very first coaching meetings I had with a business owner when I was doing uh business coaching is we walked around, uh, we walked around the neighborhood where his business office was, and he said, Hey, I'm gonna ask you a thousand questions. I want to pick your brain and I want to know everything that you know, and I want to lean on your experience, and I am going to, I'm gonna ask you so many questions and I'm I'm gonna pick like I'm gonna, we're gonna unpack so many things, but please understand 999 times out of a thousand, I'm probably not gonna go in a direction that you would you guide or you advise because ultimately I'm picking your brain so I can make the best decision for me, not to just listen to somebody that is giving me guidance. And that is self-trust, right? And self-trust is a byproduct and a key ingredient in personal power. Okay, someone who holds personal power ultimately leans back into trusting their own instincts. And the last attribute, not not the like, not the least important, but the last attribute is self-acceptance. It's understanding that you are going to have faults, that you are going to have weaknesses, that you are going to make mistakes, that you are going to fall short, that you are going to, you know, you're not going to get it right all the time. You're going to err. You're going to appear to fail. Radical self-acceptance. You're just a human being, just like everybody else. Nobody has it all figured out. And we ultimately fail our way to success. We don't succeed our way to success. But you also accept your worth and your value. And you feel full of self-esteem, and you recognize your significance, and you feel you feel inspired and you feel secure within yourself, and you feel adequate because you hold high levels of self-acceptance. These are internal states of being, authenticity, self-trust, and self-acceptance. These are internal states of being that help someone really express personal power in the world. And I hope this makes sense.

Emotional Sovereignty Courage Boundaries

SPEAKER_00 14:57

Now we're going to move from the attributes to the expressions. And that's why I lean so heavily into that word. This is how we express in the world. Okay. Someone who holds intense personal power expresses themselves differently from someone who doesn't. And the first attribute of how someone expresses themselves in the world that's holding high personal power is emotional sovereignty. That means they don't, their emotions don't rise and fall with your words. Their emotions don't rise and fall with their circumstances. And you might disagree with someone who is emotionally sovereign and it has no impact on them. Their body, their nervous system doesn't collapse. You may completely reject, or you may completely hate someone who is emotionally sovereign, who holds a high level of personal power, and it has no influence on them. They are so emotionally sovereign, they are not reliant on agreement or approval or circumstances in the world. And we can step into higher levels of this, and we can grow in both emotional sovereignty, which ultimately has a huge impact on the attributes that we demonstrate in the world in authenticity, self-trust, and self-acceptance. The second expression is courage. And courage is not the absence of emotion. These folks have emotion, but real emotional courage is the willingness to feel any and all emotions and still be okay. It's not that their emotions don't rise and fall. It's they don't become a victim of them. They don't allow emotions to have rule over their life. When I was in the Marine Corps, we weren't taught not to have emotions. We were taught, I know you're scared, advance towards the freaking objective anyway. Feel the fear and move into and through the fear and the discomfort. All right. I've done podcast episodes where my wife Angie and I went skydiving and I was freaking terrified. But that didn't mean that I wasn't jumping out of the plane. Emotional courage doesn't mean that you don't have fear. It doesn't mean that you don't have emotion. It means that you're not a victim of your emotion and your nervous system doesn't control you and master you. You are master of it. It is your servant, not your master. All right. And these this can coexist with emotional sovereignty that someone outside of you can't influence your emotional state, or something outside of you can't emotional uh uh alter your emotional state. But also inside of them, they are not a slave to any part of their emotional state. And the last expression of uh of personal power and of authenticity, self-trust and self-acceptance, the the last expression is healthy boundaries. These people, they protect their peace. These people only they only allow people into their lives, their life or their lives, that people who hold high levels of personal power only allow high quality individuals. And as soon as there's any sense of a disruption of, you know, the peace or uh support or encouragement or upliftment of them, as soon as there's a little bit of drama or a lot of drama, then they might demonstrate their healthy boundaries and they might get out of dodge or they might exit you from their life. And it might even be verbally, they might say, hey, I'm just letting you know you have no longer, you no longer have a role in my life and a place in my life because of the drama, the chaos, because of the whatever that you bring. And you might feel when they sit when they express this, you might feel that they're doing something wrong to you. They're just protecting their boundaries. That's it. They believe in themselves and they hide, they hide, uh, they carry around such high levels of personal power and authenticity, self-trust and self-acceptance. And they express themselves in powerful, powerful emotional ways that they don't allow lower quality, lower consciousness, lower awareness people into their life. They just invite the highest quality people, but they also protect themselves shamelessly. All right. And people tend to meet us at the level of our boundaries. They tend to meet us at the level of our boundaries. So I'm gonna go over those three. We got three attributes to someone with high personal power, and we have three expressions of someone with high personal power. You've got the attribute of authenticity, the which is really just knowing the character that you play in this world and being that shamelessly. You've got high levels of self-trust where you not no one gets a vote in their life. They might have opinions or or perspectives, but no one gets a vote. They ultimately are the captain of their own ship. And self-acceptance is they understand they have faults, but they understand they have strengths as well. And they accept all of it. And they don't, their acceptance of themselves and their worth and their value, their internal worth and their value, don't rise and fall with their circumstances. All right. The expressions, you've got emotional sovereignty, is that they are not a victim of you and they are not going to be a victim of their circumstances. They are not gonna let their internal state rise and fall with their external circumstances. You've got emotional courage, right? Courage. You got the willingness and the ability to feel any and all in emotions and still be stable and still be powerful in the world, still say what needs to be said and still do what needs to be done in order for them to live the highest quality life. And you've got healthy boundaries. They're gonna, they're gonna protect themselves and they're gonna make sure that they are shielded and guarded from anything that can influence them in a negative direction and in a negative way and and incite chaos or or disruption, okay? Any kind of any kind of drama in their life. Hope that makes sense. All right.

Healthy Selfishness And Stopping The Leak

SPEAKER_00 21:51

Now, early on I said I was gonna bring this back to healthy selfishness and receiving, is because when I first Like heard about personal power, that sounded selfish as fuck to me. Like when it was being explained, and it wasn't explained, I I articulated it, I articulated that concept much more clearly than I understood. And it was uh articulated to me because I've understood it over the course of 10 years. But when I first started hearing about personal power, I was leaking so much of my power that even feeling like I could withhold that power, it's like normal was everyone leaks together. Because that's the relationship that me and my wife were in. That's the relationship I had with everybody in my life. It's just we're all just leaky together. And and the prospect of even not leaking while other people were leaking just felt selfish to me. And it is selfish. Being personally powerful requires a healthy dose and a healthy brand of selfishness. It means recognizing that you matter and in a way putting yourself above your own needs, above the the wants and needs of those around you, but not hurting other people in the process. Someone with high levels of personal power doesn't go out intentionally to hurt people. They go out intentionally to be themselves and live the highest quality life possible. And this requires a level of healthy selfishness. All right. I hope that makes sense. Healthy selfishness is an awesome attribute of life. And it is something that will help you increase and raise your level of personal power. It'll help you get the very best out of you. And the only, the only time we cross the line with selfishness is when we are intentionally hurting someone else for our own benefit. All right. I hope this is making sense. I hope this is clicking.

Receiving New States And Nervous System Rewiring

SPEAKER_00 24:04

Now, how does this tie into receptivity? Because you have to let these things into your body. You must allow yourself to feel new things in order to become authentic. You must allow yourself to feel new things to build your self-trust. You must allow yourself to feel new things to build your level of self-acceptance. You must feel new things to release and to let go of some of the things that would keep you from being emotionally sovereign. You must feel and receive new things to allow yourself to step into a higher level of courage. And you must feel and and uh receive and and allow yourself to be in the state of the emotions of having healthy boundaries before your internal state can rewire itself around it. You must feel belief in yourself, maybe before mentally you believe in yourself, or maybe before the evidence around you suggest that you have boundaries, or that you are powerful. You must think something different and feel something different, which ultimately, when you think something different, you can allow yourself, you can raise the level of what you feel in your body to correspond with that new thought. And when you when you practice this and you repeat the new thought and the new emotion repeatedly, and you hold it for longer periods of time, your body's going to reshape itself around these new states. My first book was titled The Imposter in Charge. And when I was booted, when I was in corporate, and one of the reasons I got booted from corporate is because I felt like an imposter. I felt like a fraud. I was completely out of control. I held no personal power. I didn't believe in myself at all. I didn't have any self-trust. I didn't have any self-acceptance. And that's what created, I didn't, I didn't even know who I was. That's what created the imposter syndrome. And I was leaking everywhere. And when I started the process of self-mastery, and I started the process of personal power and building personal power, I had to think different things that think things at a higher level than I ever had about myself, which was radically uncomfortable. And I had to feel things, I got to feel things at a higher level than I had ever felt. And ultimately, my body didn't want to feel think and feel those things. They rejected it because your nervous system has one goal and one goal only, and that's to keep you alive. It tries to keep you alive by keeping you in familiar circumstances, and it tries to keep you in familiar circumstances because it knows how to keep you alive there. It's proven that it's been able to keep you alive there. So when you think you are a piece of shit and you feel like a piece of shit, your body's gonna reject thinking some higher thought, and your body's gonna reject feeling some level, higher level of emotion about yourself. And all that is is the nervous system trying to protect you from the threat that it sees, the the unreal threat that it sees from this new circumstance and this new thing that's happening within your body. But if you repeat that often and you hold it for longer states, ultimately your body will rewire around it because that will become your new normal. But you must be willing to receive the newness into your body before any of that can happen. Nothing outside of you can do that. You can't achieve this, you can't accumulate this, you can't accomplish this. No one can give it to you, no one can gift it to you, no one can uh bless you with this. This is something you must receive in your mind and body. It's a proactive activity, it's not a reactive activity, it's not something that happens as a consequence of something else, it's something that happens because of the choice to receive. I hope this is making sense. The first time I chose to receive to feel something at a higher level, it felt like awful. And my body fought it and repeated over time. My body began to accept it at higher levels, and it continued to accept it at higher levels until it came the new normal and became the new baseline from which I operated in all dimensions. And this is how I grew. I'm not saying that I am ultimately the master of any of this or I am the most personal, personally powerful. I would be lying to you if I shared that to you, shared that with you. But the person that I was 10 years ago no longer exists. Personal power has increased because my authenticity has increased, my self-trust has increased, my self-acceptance has increased, I'm more emotionally sovereign, I have more emotional courage, and my boundaries are stronger than that they've ever been. And these express on a daily basis because I was willing to receive them first instead of having them be a consequence of something that I accomplished, achieved, or accumulated. And this is why most people are changing and moving the goalposts because they're trying to feel these things that they can only choose and receive to feel as a choice, not as a consequence, as a cause, not as an effect.

Bookmark This And Get Support

SPEAKER_00 30:17

All right, personal power. I want you to consider bookmarking this episode and coming back and listening to this over and over again. And if you're ever ready to embark on that self-mastery journey, if you're ever ready to level up in your personal power, you must be willing to choose and receive. And if you'd love support in your journey of choosing and receiving higher levels of internal quality of life, which will ultimately reshape your external quality of life, I'm right here. I'm just waiting to hear that you're ready for support. Email me, text me, call me, whatever it takes to get in touch. On my website, interwealthglobal.com, there's a form to fill out. I'll receive that. I'll be in touch. All right. If you're ready for support, you're ready to level up in your personal power, ready to level up in how you feel about yourself and how others perceive you. I'm right here. If you enjoyed what you heard and you want to learn more, go to www.innerwealthglobal.com for more tools and resources.