Ignite Your Inner Strengths
What is your greatest strength?
What makes you irreplaceable?
What makes you you?
Let’s say that you know those things. You know your greatest strength. You know what makes you irreplaceable. You know what makes you you. Now what?
Now, you need to release your inner power.
What is inside you. What makes you uniquely who you are, you need to show that, you need to share that, and you need to use that.
“If you want to touch the past, touch a rock. If you want to touch a present, touch a flower. If you want to touch the future, touch a life.” — Joe Duncan
There are over 7 billion people in this world. We all do things differently. We all do things uniquely.
I shared a commonly quoted saying on Tuesday,
“The key to success is playing the hand you were dealt as though it were the hand you wanted” — Unknown
Hopefully, we have identified what makes us uniquely us. Hopefully, we have identified what makes us irreplaceable. Hopefully, we have identified what our greatest strength is.
Jennifer Fonseca shares her 5 P’s with people, those 5 being passion, purpose, proficiencies, personality, and profit centers. I’ll share the 5 P’s and what each of them means to me, though I know that she would explain them differently.
Passion first, is what we love to do, as I wrote on Tuesday, there may be many things that we love, but, if we are not good at them, are they a purpose of ours? Maybe not. Or, maybe we just need to work for them and work to polish our craft.
Our purpose is not ours. It is God’s. Our life’s purpose revolves around what we do better than anyone else. Something you are inherently good at, amazingly talented and gifted at, is that something God intends for you to do regularly? Likely, yes, that connects to your purpose.
So passion and purpose are connected, we should do the things that we love and that impact others, but, what about proficiencies? If we do something all the time but are not good, does that help anyone? It doesn’t even help ourselves.
Think about if you were a dentist who did not know how to operate on people’s teeth. After your reputation was built, that ultimately, you were a dentist who didn’t know how to be a good dentist, would you have any customers? Hopefully not.
Maybe your passion is helping others and your purpose is to improve the health and well-being of others. But, there are so many ways to do that. There are millions of ways to improve the health and well-being of others.
That leads me to personality. Who are you? Jennifer likes to describe herself as a Destiny Activator. She has an unmatched ability to unlock the hidden potential within others. Whether through a conversation at a grocery store, a presentation to a class of university students, or through the authoring of a book, she knows who she is.
As I mentioned, she would also share these 5 P’s differently than I am, we are different people with different personalities.
What works for her will not work for others if they tried to replicate all that she does. This leads me to the fifth and final P in her five P’s.
Profit centers. I would argue that this is the most important one of the five.
Why?
If we are living in a way where our passions are displayed, our purpose is alive, our proficiencies are evident, and our personality is embraced but have no profit centers, it is NOT sustainable.
Profit centers are the things that reward us. As Jennifer might ask, “If you had your dream job in every way, what would be one thing that would make you say no?”
I prefer to look at the other way though.
She also asks, “What makes you feel most alive? When do you feel most alive?”
I’ll take it a step further. In his book, Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains the concept of flow. Here is my note from the book, “experience flow as long as possible by diversifying and beginning to enjoy everything. Time adapts itself to how you feel, sense of time changes during flow.”
If we are experiencing our profit centers, we feel alive, we feel rewarded, we feel limitless.
Because we truly are.
If we are truly embracing and utilizing the inner power that we have, we are limitless. God blesses those who bless others.
If you keep your greatest powers for yourself, what good is that?
One of my all-time favorite quotes is that by Marianne Williamson,
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world.”
We need to share our inner power with others. If we don’t, who will?
“Envision, create, and believe in your own universe, and the universe will form around you.” — Tony Hsieh
If George Washington had not shared his inner power, would the US be independent?
If Henry Ford had not shared his inner power, would there be automobiles for all?
If Martin Luther King Jr. had not shared his inner power, would society be the same?
If Adolf Hitler had shared his inner power differently, would the world be different?
If Al Capone had shared his inner power differently, would the world be different?
What are you here for? What did God create you for?
Find your inner power and identify positive locations to unleash it.
Release your inner power. Embrace it. Share it. Build it. Create your legacy. But, it is not just for you.
“If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.” — C.S. Lewis