OPEN YOUR GIFTS

What gifts do you need to open to "fly"? Maybe you feel inadequate, ill-equipped, or lacking the talents or abilities necessary to make positive changes in your life. The secret is to go ahead and make demands on yourself and watch how the essential resources surface. You will rise to the occasion. Circumstances will call forth 'stuff' inside you seldom use, or didn't even know was there.

In the process of maturing and sharpening our skills, we broaden our abilities, but we also tend to focus primarily on the development of certain talents. Only a select few get much of our time and attention. As a result, we end up with a narrowed repertoire because we get better and better at fewer and fewer things. The question is, do we specialize too much? We're like a child that chooses to play with three or four favorite things, while every shelf in the room is crammed with other toys.

Opening our gifts is a process and it is not a complicated exercise. Simply do what you need to do, even if it's not what you normally do, or what you think you do best. The odds are you'll do it well enough. And if you just do it, you immediately begin to get better at it. Start using a muscle, any muscle, and watch it develop. See how quickly it grows in size and strength.

Remember, if you're doing the right things, you don't have to do them flawlessly to make a positive change. And if you're doing the wrong things, it doesn't really matter if you do them imperfectly. They only represent a perfect way to ruin your chances for a quantum leap.

Think of the lowly caterpillar and its metamorphosis into the beautiful, high-flying monarch butterfly. A caterpillar can crawl well. Crawling is the very thing it does best, it can crawl straight up, down, or even upside down. But there's no way the worm can crawl fast enough to fly. Instead, the caterpillar has to give up on crawling and abandon the whole idea of crawling. It has to stop that routine, sacrifice its forward progress for a short while, and open another gift, golden wings. Maybe it was better at crawling than using its wings, but those little worm feet are worthless if the caterpillar wants to sail through the skies.

Talents have a way of coming when they're called. Call out a few more of your talents. Are there things you need to stop doing, even though you do them very well?

Comment below and relate how you broke certain habits to discover other gifts. What was your metamorphosis?