What are your gifts?

I’ve come to realise just how important it is to truly know and understand our gifts.

And when I say gifts, I don’t mean being “gifted” or having some extraordinary talent, like being able to compose a symphony, invent something that changes the world, paint an incredible work of art or solve a mathematical problem no one else can solve.

I mean something much more subtle and often much harder to recognise.

I mean the gifts that are innately you. The parts of you that come naturally.

It could be the way you listen, the way you make people feel or the way you see things others don’t. It could be your ability to bring people together, make people laugh, create beauty, solve problems, nurture, make people feel safe, see possibilities, bring calm to a situation, understand different perspectives or help people see something in themselves they couldn’t see before.

It could be something so natural to you that you’ve never even stopped to think of it as a gift.

EVERYONE has gifts.

But I don’t think we spend enough time really discovering what ours are. And for the most part, we haven’t been taught to stop and ask ourselves: What are my gifts? What is innately me? What comes so naturally to me that I may not even recognise its value?

And strangely, our gifts can be some of the hardest things for us to see because they are the water we swim in.

They are so natural to us that we assume they are ordinary.

We think, Doesn’t everyone do that?

But they don’t.

And I think there is something incredibly powerful about actually calling them gifts.

Because when we name something, we begin to see it.

When we see it, we can appreciate it.

And when we appreciate it, we can begin to own it as part of who we are.

And I think owning our gifts can have a profound effect on how we feel about ourselves and our own self-worth.

So often we attach our worth to things outside of ourselves: what we do, our work, what we achieve, how successful we are, what we look like or how other people see us.

But our gifts are different.

They are not about what we do. They are about who we innately are.

And how amazing is that!

Because self-worth can be such a difficult thing for so many of us to find.

We can spend so much of our lives trying to become more in the hope that somehow we will finally feel like we are enough.

And the problem is that when our sense of worth is built on those external things, it can be incredibly fragile. There will always be someone more successful, more accomplished, more confident or more beautiful. Our circumstances can change. We can lose a job, fail at something, get older, be rejected or simply go through a time in our lives when we are not achieving very much at all.

But our gifts don’t depend on any of that.

We don’t have to achieve them. We don’t have to earn them. We don’t have to prove them.

We just get to be ourselves.

And that is what feels so powerful to me. Our value doesn’t have to be something we are constantly striving to earn.

What if, instead of trying so hard to find our value in everything outside of us, we began to recognise the value that is already within us?

Some of our greatest value isn’t something we have to create at all. It is already within us, waiting for us to recognise it, value it and own it.

I have experienced this so profoundly in my own life.

For many years, I didn’t even realise I had gifts. It seemed to me that everyone else had something special about them and I couldn’t see what was special about me. I compared myself to other people and wished I had their confidence or the qualities I admired in them.

One of the things I struggled with most was how sensitive I was.

I had been called “sensitive” so many times that I believed it was a weakness. So I became shy, went within myself and in many ways, tried to stay under the radar.

It wasn’t until I worked with a mentor that I began to see myself differently. She saw things in me that I hadn’t been able to see in myself. She reflected back that I was deeply intuitive and very embodied.

At the time, I didn’t even really know what “embodied” meant!

But as she explained it, so much began to make sense.

She explained that my sensitivity was connected to my ability to feel deeply. To feel what was happening in my body. To sense when something felt right or didn’t, physically or emotionally. To read people’s energy, listen deeply and connect with people.

I remember having all these “Oh wow… that’s why I’m like this” moments.

But the biggest realisation was:

I am supposed to be like this. This is who I am.

There was nothing I needed to fix.

And something really interesting happened as I began to understand and own my gifts.

They became more powerful in my life.

My gifts had always been there. The difference was that I finally recognised them as gifts rather than dismissing them as nothing particularly special or in the case of my sensitivity, seeing it as something negative.

Once I could name my gifts, understand them and value them, they were no longer just things I did naturally without giving them much thought.

They became an important part of how I saw and valued myself.

It was almost as though recognising my gifts allowed me to become more fully who I already was.

And perhaps even more importantly, understanding my gifts helped me become much more at peace with myself.

Things I had questioned or wished were different about me suddenly made more sense.

Instead of constantly comparing myself to other people or thinking I should be different, there was a deeper acceptance of:

This is who I am.

And as I began to see my own gifts differently, I also began to understand something else:

Just because a gift feels ordinary to the person who has it, doesn’t mean its impact is ordinary.

Maybe one of your gifts is making people feel seen.

To you, you might simply be having a conversation with someone in the way you always do. But that person may walk away feeling deeply understood at a time when they have felt completely alone.

That may change how they feel about themselves, how they show up with their family or even how they treat the next person they meet.

You may never know the ripple effect of that one interaction.

Or perhaps one of your gifts is connecting people.

You introduce two people because it feels completely natural to you. They might become friends, create something together, support one another through a difficult time or open a door in each other’s lives that neither could have imagined.

To you, it was simply an introduction.

But what comes naturally to us can have an impact far beyond what we ever get to see.

And that is another reason I think it is so important that we don’t dismiss our gifts simply because they feel ordinary to us.

Sometimes we need someone else to help us see our gifts

Because our gifts can be so difficult to recognise in ourselves, sometimes we need someone outside of us to hold up a mirror.

There is something incredibly powerful about someone who knows us well reflecting back something in us that we have completely overlooked.

And when someone does, we also have to be willing to receive what they are saying rather than immediately dismissing or minimising it.

But receiving is a whole other conversation for another time!

For now, I simply invite you to begin noticing.

Notice what comes naturally to you.

Notice what lights you up.

Notice what people repeatedly come to you for.

Notice what you find easy that others may find difficult.

These can all be clues to your gifts.

And perhaps most importantly, ask someone who really knows you, a close friend, partner, family member, mentor or teacher, to help you see what you might not be able to see for yourself.

You could ask them:

What do you think comes naturally to me that I may not realise is special?

What do you come to me for that you might not go to someone else for?

What do you see in me that you think I don’t fully see or appreciate in myself?

Because your gifts are not something you need to go out and acquire.

They are already part of you.

I invite you to be curious …

·      What comes so naturally to me that I may never have thought to call it a gift?

·      What could I happily spend hours doing that seems to give me energy rather than drain me?

·      What parts of myself have I thought I needed to change that might actually be gifts?

·      How might owning my gifts change the way I see and value myself?