Claiming Your Power: How to Get Off Autopilot

Ask a room full of people what power means and you get strength, energy, influence, confidence, and love. Then the darker words arrive too: manipulation, control, abuse, arrogance. That spread of answers is where Mastin Kipp begins episode 142 of his podcast, "How To Take Your Life Off Autopilot And Claim Your Power," published in August 2018. He sets aside the usual money-and-mindset framing and defines power as the ability to make a purpose real and keep it real. From there he argues that the gap between what we want and what we actually build usually lives in the body: in sensations we push down, in automatic reactions we never examine, and in a habit of reading every feeling as a verdict. His answer is a three-part practice of emotional awareness, emotional intelligence, and emotional fitness, and an insistence that none of it works as a one-time fix.

What does it actually mean to claim your power?

Kipp opens the way a good workshop leader does, by making the room define its terms before anyone gets to work. He asks what comes to mind, collects the answers, and then asks about the negative connotations. When someone hears "claim your power" and decides it means becoming more arrogant, he laughs it off, because the phrase is easy to misread. His working definition is deliberately plain:

"Very simply put, power is your ability to make your purpose real. Thought, action, reaction, reality. Can I take an idea, an inspiration, a calling, a nudging, something that I wanna create, and can I make it real? And not just for five seconds, can I sustain it, right?"

The word doing the heavy lifting is "sustain." Plenty of people can produce a burst of inspiration, a good week, or a single brave decision. Power in Kipp's sense is the capacity to carry an idea from the first nudge all the way into daily reality and keep it there. That reframes the familiar question of what determines how much power you have. When the audience answers money and mindset, he jokes that it sounds like a webinar, then points at something more basic: being yourself, and believing in yourself.

Why does so much of our power feel stuck inside us?

To make the point, Kipp reaches for a cartoon image. He asks whether anyone has ever felt like the genie from Aladdin, with "infinite cosmic power" and an "itty bitty living space." Most people recognize the feeling of having something large inside them with no clear route out. The practical question he poses is how to get that energy out and make it free. His answer is not a list of affirmations. It is three things, and only three: emotional awareness, then intelligence, then fitness.

What is emotional awareness without the mystical overlay?

Awareness is a word that spiritual people throw around so often it can lose its meaning. Kipp cuts through that. "Here's what awareness means," he says, "you notice it." The reason it matters, in his account, is that most of us do the opposite when something uncomfortable shows up, whether that is a physical tweak or an emotion we would rather not feel. We push it down, ignore it, or go for the sugar. He lists the usual escape routes: we numb, fight, argue, run, eat, and overwork. Awareness simply asks what you are noticing in the sensations of your body. It does not mean dissecting them or dressing them up in meaning.

Kipp is just as direct about the stories we attach. Humans, he says, tend to be superstitious about emotional states. A person feels anxious and decides Mercury must be in retrograde. Another feels upset and calls it a very Taurus thing to do. The sensation becomes a sign that something is not meant to be, and then other people nod along. He tells the audience that he has signed contracts while Mercury was in retrograde and had them go badly, and others that went fine. He does not mock anyone's belief system outright, but he pushes on the habit underneath it:

"What if it was just a sensation? What if it was just information? What would that mean? If it's just info, what do you do with information?"

Treating a feeling as information rather than a prophecy is the core shift in this stage. You look at it, you learn from it, and then you decide what to do next. That decision is where the second stage begins.

How do you design a feeling instead of just enduring it?

Kipp's second step is intelligence, and he gives it a clean division of labor: "awareness is, this is how I'm feeling right now, intelligence is, this is how I design the emotions I wanna feel." He acknowledges that emotional intelligence is a whole field of study and calls it important, but he says it is not enough on its own. The question he wants people to take seriously is whether you can architect feeling good, and how.

He makes the point with a joke about the easiest way to feel better: pour a glass of wine and drink it. Then he sets the terms of the real question. Can you design emotional states without substances? His verdict is that you can. It is just harder, and also better. The implication is that chemical shortcuts change a state without giving you any capacity to choose the next one. Design, in his framing, means learning to move your own state on purpose, using tools you can carry with you.

Why is emotional fitness the real name of the game?

This is the part Kipp says most people do not want to hear. Audiences want a magic bullet, six steps to success that stick permanently, a set-it-and-forget-it solution. He rejects that model in favor of emotional fitness, and he uses the word fitness deliberately. Fitness, he points out, implies that you consistently rehearse something. No one becomes physically fit from one workout, and the same logic applies to the emotional side. The natural follow-up question is what happens when you stop rehearsing. The answer, for most people, is that the old patterns return.

That is why the three stages form a practice rather than a checklist. Awareness tells you what is happening, intelligence gives you options for responding, and fitness is the repetition that makes the options available when you are under pressure. Pressure is the moment that matters, because it is when the body takes over.

Why are our bodies built for automatic responses?

Kipp's explanation begins with a simple test. Does someone in your life have a look or a tone that triggers an immediate reaction in you? He asks the room to raise hands, and most do. He jokes about a casual "how you doin'?" delivered in a particular way. The point is that automatic responses are real, and they serve a purpose. Asked why evolution would build them in, an audience member answers survival, and Kipp agrees: things happen too fast for you to stop and think about how to respond.

Then he makes a bolder claim. Most of the threat assessment your body performs happens from the neck down, and the organs are sending information upward. He puts it this way:

"The organs of your body are literally sending you information through your vagus nerve, up into your brain, and you call it anxiety. Maybe, or maybe it's good info."

He ties this to intuition. Feeling something and then talking yourself out of it, by deciding that pushing it down is the safe move or that doing what someone wants is the only option, is how many people learn to ignore their own signals. He also describes the human threat detector as finely tuned, noting that the prefrontal cortex can read facial expressions and tell safe from threatening. The stakes of all this are that the automatic system is always running. Autopilot is not a character flaw. It is the default setting, and claiming your power begins with noticing when it is driving.

The "automatic and manual" distinction is the thread that runs through the episode. Our bodies react automatically, and we also have the capacity to choose manually. Emotional fitness is the practice of widening the space between the two, so that the automatic response stops being the only one available.

Why can't you do this by yourself?

Late in the segment, Kipp turns to support. He asks the audience whether they can do this by themselves, gets a few quiet answers, and then says that learning to ask for help is the name of the game. Practice needs mentors and consistent feedback, not just good intentions. The image is familiar from any serious discipline: you rehearse the skill, but you also need someone who can see what you cannot see from inside your own patterns.

"Learning how to ask for help is the name of the game."

He also returns to comparison. The episode's highlighted quote, published with the video's description, carries the same instinct: "You've got to learn to be curious instead of comparison." Curiosity asks what a feeling or a pattern is telling you. Comparison measures you against someone else's track and leaves the signal unread.

Where to go from here

The episode is short, about nineteen minutes, and it is more a set of questions than a program. Still, its logic gives you a usable place to start. Kipp's model reads like a sequence of questions to carry into an ordinary week:

• What am I noticing in my body right now, without judging it?
• Is this feeling a verdict, or is it just information?
• How would I like to feel, and what can I do, without a substance, to move there?
• What practice am I rehearsing so that my response holds under pressure?
• Who can give me feedback I cannot give myself?

Power, in this reading, is not a personality trait you either have or lack. It is the ability to take a purpose from thought into reality and sustain it. Getting off autopilot means noticing the automatic responses that run your days, learning to read them as information, and practicing the manual choices that let you act on purpose. Kipp's own framing is that the name of the game is emotional fitness, and that it is built the way physical fitness is: slowly, repeatedly, and with help.