As you explore our book, Empower Trip: A Teen’s Guide to Finding Your Inner Star Power, you will learn to identify your strengths, improve your interactions with others, and love who you really are. Each chapter starts out and ends with a quote and an affirmation to inspire you. You will find a story about someone who encountered obstacles on their path and found ways to overcome them. Following each story is a brief explanation of why this topic is important to address on your empower trip. Next are tools you will will use to empower yourself and activities you can choose from to facilitate your personal growth. You can do these activities alone or with friends, family, or adults from your school. You can work through the book from start to finish, chapter by chapter, or choose a topic that interests you and explore the book in the order you prefer.

Tools of Empowerment

Tools are for fixing, altering, building, creating, and maintaining things. The chapters in this book are like the drawers in a toolbox—they can be opened whenever you need a specific tool for a specific job. Each drawer, or chapter, represents an emotion you may wish to work through and is filled with tools to help you. As you use them, you’ll start to build positive, healthy habits. Your journey toward empowerment will take time, but small steps each day will build awareness and eventually create change. You may even see an opportunity to share what you’ve learned with someone you care about or perhaps a stranger in need.