I have always had a curiosity about what motivates us to change, or often more precisely, what finally motivates us to change.
My interest is professional – as everyone I work with wants to change. But my interest is deeply personal too.
When I reflect on why I eventually left my well paid corporate career three decades ago to start my own business. It came down to feeling that I hoped that I had an unlived life, gifts innately within me that weren’t being expressed much and that I could bring to a fuller expression.
There were no external pressures to change – it all came from within me. Like a seed wanting to push through the soil to reach the light, your gifts long to be expressed.
I came across this poem a couple of years ago, and I was staggered by the beautiful simplicity of these twelve words:
You have gifts.
The world needs your gifts.
You must deliver them.
Here is the whole poem:
Cargo, by Greg Kimura
You enter life a ship laden with meaning, purpose and gifts
sent to be delivered to a hungry world.
And as much as the world needs your cargo,
you need to give it away.
Everything depends on this.
But the world forgets its needs,
and you forget your mission,
and the ancestral maps used to guide you
have become faded scrawls on the parchment of dead Pharaohs.
The cargo weighs you heavy the longer it is held
and spoilage becomes a risk.
The ship sputters from port to port and at each you ask:
“Is this the way?”
But the way cannot be found without knowing the cargo,
and the cargo cannot be known without recognizing there is a way,
and it is simply this:
You have gifts.
The world needs your gifts.
You must deliver them.
The world may not know it is starving,
but the hungry know,
and they will find you
when you discover your cargo
and start to give it away.
I think we all need to either find or create the opportunity to have vehicles to express our unique gifts in the world.
Ideally your leadership, career and business give you that opportunity, but sadly, in a world of commoditization, you may find it difficult to fully express your own unique gifts.
You might play smaller than you truly are, you might hide out, you might stifle yourself and hold yourself back.
For me, when I am not sharing my gifts I can go to dark places of low energy and even depression.
But your playing small and holding back on your gifts doesn’t serve anyone. When you don’t fully give your gifts, we are all a little poorer, and you can even become a little self-destructive. There are people who need what you can uniquely give.
If you are in leadership, and would value an opportunity to explore how you can more fully give your gifts, just drop me an email at nick@iamnickwilliams.com
