“The greatest gift you can ever give another person is your own happiness” ~ Esther Hicks
This time of year, for many, is a time of gifts and of resolutions.
Let this year’s be simple: give freely of your gifts and resolve to stay firmly aligned with these gifts throughout the year.
In our efforts to strive and perform, obtain validation and adulation, we get off track. Often performing to standards and motivations we can no longer name we continue mindlessly pursuing goals that no longer have meaning to us. Resolve to get or keep yourself on track.
Whether we navigate by head, heart or soul, we “know” when we are in our right place, we know when our efforts, actions, and strivings are aligned with the gifts we have. We see it in the results. We feel it. Others feel it. The alignment is palpable, sometimes indescribable but we know it when it happens.
We have learned to apply effort and endurance to get out of life what we want. And indeed, self-discipline and determination are tremendous life skills. Without them we are limited in our capacity to express the gifts that we have. But these are skills to apply and are different from the gifts themselves.
When we remain strongly connected to our gifts (guided by the feedback we gather over time and experience), our energy is more fluid, ideas come more easily, doors open without force, people and results let us know. We’ve all experienced the difference in the results produced by pure effort and those produced by our core gifts or talents, enabled by effort and commitment.
If we’re open to it, if we have “faith” in our talents, the outcomes await us: feeling engrossed, inspired, connected, a sense of purpose, contribution, often “achievement” or reward without directly pursuing any of these happiness-inducing states. They are natural outcomes.
The beauty is that when we come from this place, we benefit. Others benefit. We needn’t “pursue.” We need only connect to this natural source.
Our only challenge, or mission as it were, is to learn how we can bring our gifts to our lives, to our work, to our relationships.
This is where we sometimes get off track, when we fail to see the connection, or fail to see the path, we get lost in translation.
This is where some combination of faith and resolve come into play. We need not question our gifts because the path is unclear, because others question us, or tell us our gifts should be different than what they are. We need to remain the guardians of what we have to bring and how we bring it.
This year, consider taking a different tack. Instead of trying to assess what a job, relationship or mission needs you to be, reflect upon how you can bring who you are and your gifts to it.
So, before you leave the station for year 2015, take a moment to remind yourself of your unique qualities, talents, or capacities and think about how you can anchor yourself firmly, bring these to bear on where you have set your sights for the year ahead.
Be open to the abundance that comes from this natural source for you and the fortunate who surround you.
Happy 2015!
The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it. ” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.” ~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle