If you are granted one superpower, what would that be?
I am sure most of us have heard that question in Table Topics sessions before.
And usually, we answer in jest, indulging the Topics Master and the audience with some sort of fantasy.
Well, what if I tell you that while we may not be superheroes, we DO HAVE have a superpower. You probably say, really?
Like you, I would consider that a frivolous, pointless question, because we don’t have a superpower.
But a few months ago, this belief changed. Now not only do I believe, but I KNOW for certain, that each of us has a SUPERPOWER.
Do you want to know what your superpower is?
It is the special unique Gift that God put inside our soul when he created us.
Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Toastmasters and friends, today, I will share with you how to I discovered my gift, my superpower, and how that changed my life radically, And why I believe that it is important that we all know and understand our special gift.
Last month, at my division contest, two contestants out of six, spoke about suicide. Of all the topics that they could have talked about in the world, one-third was about suicide. The statistics are staggering, isn’t it?
Based on the 2016 WHO statistics on World suicide rates,
Close to 800 000 people die due to suicide every year, which means, in 2016, in every 40 seconds, one person died from suicide.
For every suicide, there are many more people who attempt suicide every year.
Suicide is the third leading cause of death in 15-19 year-olds.
The statistics are staggering, remember this was from 5 years ago.
However, my focus today is not on the suicide rates, rather on what this really means.
The statistics showed more and more people are suffering from mental health disorders, such as depression, anxiety, bipolar, ADD, addictions, and many others, as well as fatal diseases. We don’t need statistics to know there has been a steady increase in deaths by cancer, a heart attack, diabetes, etc, we know more people in our lives who have succumbed to the above.
Being a life coach specializing in emotional healing, I’m privy to the root causes of these problems, mainly loneliness, feeling not good enough, feeling unworthy, emptiness which all lead to hopelessness.
And when you look deeper into the cause of suicide, it is mostly hopelessness, a belief that there is nothing they could do to change the situation they're in, that suicide seemed to be the only viable solution to free themselves from all pain and sufferings.
Most of us know someone who suffered from mental health disorders, fatal illnesses or has committed suicide
I know there are plenty, because all of my clients experienced them, even if they didn’t come to me for those issues. And because I’ve experienced it myself.
When you see me you see someone who's put reasonably together, competent, capable, intelligent, sane and some may even say, an attractive elderly?
But between appearances, behind closed doors, I often felt lost, empty, unfocused, depressed.
It's only because of my knowledge and training that I managed to stay alive and function well enough when I needed to.
Inside me, there was a constant battle between wanting to be authentic, but afraid that people wouldn’t like nor want the authentic me. It was mentally, emotionally, and physically tiring, until I got to the point where I was sick and tired of being tired.
I believe healing is possible, I can and have facilitated healing for others, but somehow, there’s a deep-seated belief that something is wrong with me that I could not be healed.
For me, this was getting to a point of very scary.
I managed to live with this inner torment for over 5 decades.
But I’m 59 years old now, what if with everything that I have and know, and despite all the relative worldly success I’ve enjoyed, things don’t change inside, who would I be if nothing ever changed?
Finally, I surrendered.
I did the only thing left me to do that I know to do:
I prayed to God, or Abba, as I call him. I said: “Abba, I don’t know what I need to ask you, please just show me the way, because I just don’t want to live like this anymore!”
And my prayer was answered. And like answers from God, usually it doesn’t come as what you expect, and you still have some work to do figuring it out and acting on his guidance.
His answer changed my life radically.
And this is what I want to share with all of you because I believe this knowledge if you decide to act on it, will change your life in a way you couldn’t imagine before..
It started with a chance encounter with a fellow coach, Leng, a Singaporean, who moved to Bali from New York and currently lives about 2 kilometers from my house.
He told me it was his 55th birthday that day. On impulse, I offered to treat him to lunch for his birthday present. He accepted and we planned to meet the next day.
We went to my favorite Japanese restaurant in Ubud, called Kagemusha which serves Japanese home cooking. In a typical Bali open-space restaurant, surrounded by lots of plants, ponds, and predominantly bamboo structures, sitting on the tatami floor, we talked about life, coaching experiences, Leng’s experience moving to Bali… We had an enjoyable and delicious lunch.
After 2 hours Leng had to leave, and I had some time to myself to catch up on my messages.
From the corner of my eyes, I saw a tall, lanky Caucasian guy, in his early sixties with greying hair, sitting alone at a table across the aisle, looking at me. I acknowledged him with a smile and went back to my phone.
Then I heard him say: “I’m sorry I couldn’t help listening to your conversation. What do you do?” I looked around, and back at him, me? Yes, he was talking to me.
*** What do you do if someone asked you what do you do? If you had a product or service to sell, you would make a pitch right?
That’s what I did. I gave him my elevator, hoping that maybe he had some life issues and was in need of coaching. Upon hearing my answer, he was quiet for a while.
So I got up and started to leave.
Upon passing his table, he said, “Hey, would you like to sit here and chat for a while?”
I looked at him, seems safe enough and I got time.
So I sat down, we introduced ourselves and then I asked him, “Where are you from and what do you do?”
And that's how I met Thomas from Sweden. We chatted for about an hour, mostly about his life, with him talking mostly, and me listening,
But one thing from this conversation left a deep impression on me: It was about how he discovered and lived his gift.
This is Thomas’ story.
One day, when Thomas was 10 years old, he was at the town square in Stockholm. He saw a big crowd gathering listening to someone speaking, but he couldn’t see who it was. So he squeezed his little body through the crowd and got to the front row.
There he saw a man selling magic mops, you know the kind you mop the floor with, that squeeze the water out after you use it. I know… It’s common now, but 50 years ago, it was a novelty.
So there's this salesman, who like a showman, talking in front of a big crowd, demonstrating how to use this mop that could wipe clean any dirt in seconds, and then became clean again like magic.
The salesman expertly captured his audience's attention, and then at the end of the show, he made the offer, ”If you bought this mop today, you will get two for the price of one.”
The crowd went crazy, took out their wallet, waved their money over their heads, fighting their way towards the mop salesman to buy the mop.
Little Thomas watched it all with awe as the showman got so much attention, and received so much money which he stuffed carelessly into the biscuit tin. Thomas said to himself: “That's who I want to be when I grow up.”
Fast forward eight years. Thomas graduated from high school and had a few months to kill before university started. Some of his friends were vacationing in Malibu, California, and they invited him to join them, telling him how much fun they were having there.
Having nothing better to do, Thomas joined them in California.
The weekend after he arrived, he was walking on Malibu beach for the first time, and then he saw in front of him, standing before a large crowd, the magic mop salesman from Sweden from ten years before, selling … can you guess: the magic mop. Thomas just couldn't believe his eyes. The coincidence was too much. He recalled his childhood dream, and decided there and then that he would sell mops like the salesman.
So he went to the salesman and asked if he could learn how to do what the salesman did. The salesman said yes so Thomas started learning. He quickly became very good at it; he was a natural.
Eventually, he started his own show, bought some air time, and became one of those TV salespersons. He made millions of dollars. And as you could guess, the university became redundant. He never went and ended up staying in America for many more years.
There was a lot of stories there but what stuck with me was: “This is how knowing and living your gift look like”.
Thomas also said: “I found my gift, and my gift to talk to a crowd and persuade him to buy something from me. It's very easy for me to do it.
Right, I used to think a gift would be something more special, bigger, more important, like music, sports, arts… but here was Thomas, with whose gift was selling to a crowd.
A week later, it was an exceptionally beautiful day, the sky was brilliant blue and cloudless, I was in my beautiful home surrounded by emerald-green rice fields and in the distance, a range of bluish-purple mountains looming high, an idyllic scene many would gladly pay a good sum to enjoy.
Yet I was feeling particularly depressed that day, for seemingly no reason. I was unmotivated, uninspired, which was such an inconvenience for me because I had tons of things to do and deadlines to meet.
I couldn't understand because I had a good job, I was doing what I love and I was good at what I do.
But how come I couldn’t get myself inspired nor wanted to do more with it.
I got more depressed with the thought that I was wasting my skills, knowledge, experience, and talents
So I did what I usually did when I’m depressed. I surfed and watched YouTube numb myself from feeling depressed.
Hours went by, and then a recommended YouTube title caught my eyes.
It had the word gift in it, and it reminded me of Thomas and his gift.
I clicked on it. It was a three-minute motivational video by Steve Harvey, who later I found out was quite famous being the host for Family Feud and Miss Universe pageants. Eventually, I learned that he was also notorious for calling out the wrong Miss Universe in 2015.
What resonated for me at first was how Steve approached spirituality. He used examples from everyday life and spoke in colloquial, everyday language.
He was insouciant, irreverent, and funny. He didn’t try to put on airs. He was not a pastor nor was he a preacher, and yet he spoke of God liberally and intimately, like a trusted companion.
I became an instant fan.
So I watched a few more of his videos and found he talked a lot about the gift.
Then it dawned on me, meeting Thomas, whom by the way I never saw again, and then discovering Steve Harvey who had been so famous all along, yet completely unknown to me, was God’s answer to my prayer.
God was showing me something very important about finding and understanding one’s gift.
Both men spoke about their special gift. Then when I learned that Steve wrote a book called Act like success, Think like success, I bought it because, by this time, I wanted to learn everything I could about the gift.
Steve Harvey spoke a lot about the special gift in a way that I never heard it said before. He shared about the hardships in his life, and his journey from being rock bottom to when his life started changing after he started living his gift, which resulted in his stratospheric success as a TV personality. It was nothing short of miraculous and impressive.
So, what is the gift he’s talking about?
He defined a gift as the single thing that you do at your absolute best with the least amount of effort. God gives only to you when He created your soul.
And he said you only get one gift that’s uniquely yours. No one else can have it or take it from you, and it is you all the time.
I became obsessed with finding out what my gift was. I got a sense of knowing it will be life-changing for me. I read the book and started doing the process Steve outlined in the book.
And over the course of a few days and week, I breathed, ate, and slept with this question: What is the single thing that I do at my absolute best, with the least amount of effort?
I found my gift, to make what already exists better, by bringing out the potentials, the opportunities, and possibilities. An architect doesn’t make things from scratch. They ask people what they want, what they would like to experience, and then the architect creates a visual of that, based on their wants.
All my life I never created anything original. I was always in the business of improving what was already there to make it better. And by better I mean more beautiful, more useful, more efficient, more meaningful, more whole. So that’s where I realize that I’m a Human Architect, I help build people’s lives to become better, more meaningful, and fulfilling.
This shows up when I founded the bi-lingual school, I wasn’t satisfied with the schools available then for my son, I had a vision of what a better school for children could be. So my friends and I created one.
When I started the shoe business which I had for 16 years, I knew nothing about shoes, but I know what beautiful and comfortable shoes should be, so I set to help improve the whole hand-made shoe industry in Bali.
When I did events, I would imagine what the participants would want to see, experience and feel, and set about to create that based on the resources available at hand.
But all these things I had had without knowing what my gift was, so there were many trials and errors, successes and failures along the way. Once I reflected back, I saw the successes were when I utilize my gift, and the failures when I wasn’t.
Once I knew my gift, I was able to see how unknowingly Toastmasters had helped me develop my gift, with the confidence, the acceptance, but I just didn’t know it, so I couldn’t really elevate it.
Once I knew and understood what my gift was, my life changed radically.
How?
I started to feel serenity, a calm, it's as if I just landed. Everything fell in the right place.
And from that moment onwards, all of its self-doubt, the fears, the worries the feeling that I'm not good enough, started to disappear, and life became very exciting of possibilities of potentials and I could see in so many ways I could do that,
I could teach people about this, I could help people. I could. There are so many ways that I could do this. And so that was my process.
So, and I thought, once I felt that relief because this is, I've been, I'm 59 years old now and I've been a life coach for about 10 years, and I've dealt with this kind of mental issues, the whole time, and this is the first time that I felt at ease at peace with my understanding that I have worked my gift is my word, and my gift is also my superpower. If I applied right, and then once I started looking at that thing starting to show up the opportunity started to come, and because I'm no longer worried not, no longer trying to try to be like other people. And so from this thought I had a thought, well, there are so many people who are lonely, who think they're not working, who think they're not good enough, who think they're inadequate or they don't have hope. And that is because they don't know how special they are that they already are special just by being.
In short, the most radical change in me once I identified my gift was I was done with the business of trying to be someone else, worrying about how people will receive me or think of me, and I got busy with understanding and nurturing my gift.
If I could have one wish of what my speech will do for you, it is that you would be so curious, and start obsessing with the question: What is my gift? So obsessed that you have trouble sleeping because you want to know as quickly as possible, what your gift is.
Finding your gift is not a set of steps, but rather it is a process of soul searching, a spiritual experience, and a journey of self-discovery. You can read Act Like Success, Think Like Success and do the process suggested, but I have known for fact, of someone whom I know very well who had read the book before I did, and didn’t experience what I experienced.
Because it has to start with the desire of knowing your gift. And have a discussion about your gift.
So if you’re curious and want to know more about it, let’s have a conversation. Comment on this post or ask me a question. You can find the form under ‘Contact’.