The World Needs More of Your Magic

How often have you criticized or critiqued yourself for your most natural ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving?

Judging yourself for what is just part of who you are and how you exist in the world?

For the things that you do with such ease you can’t stop yourself even when you or others want you to do so? 

I have all my life.

I’ve judged and tried to change myself to fit the mold and model of what the modern-day mainstream world messages as most valuable.

For a while, I did a fantastic job of mostly masking the unacceptable parts and only allowing the parts that led to achievements and accolades to shine.

The effort and energy needed for this was so significant that eventually, I collapsed under its weight. For too long I was doing double duty, delivering what others expected while hiding the parts of me I decided were unacceptable, unappreciated, or unattractive.

I was masking my magic. I don’t mean magic like witches and broomsticks, I mean:

Magic, as in, the innate talent within us all that when properly applied, creates magical results and impact in our lives and the lives of those around us.

Your Sign to Shine

Many of us (especially women) were raised to downplay and dismiss our unique magic. We were guided to be gracious and act with humility. We were instructed not to brag or boast about our successes.

Regularly examined and evaluated, we were graded not by our gifts, but by our gaps. Our level of mastery a signal of our success.

If our magic wasn’t what was measured, the message was clear: Your uniqueness has no value here.

As children, we learned quickly to trade our magic for medals. To suppress and silence what can’t be scored. To focus instead on fitting in and following the well-worn paths to power and prestige.

For far too long, we’ve dismissed and denigrated the diamonds we have embedded within us. The very thing we’ve denied, what we uniquely possess and can contribute to the world, is also our greatest value.

I’ve written this article and am sharing my story to shine a light on the wisdom within us all that’s just waiting to be released.

To point out the power of embracing what makes us different is truly what makes us exceptional.

To recognize your magic is ready to be revealed and once it is, its light will create a ripple of results in your life and the lives of those around you.

If you found your way to this message, consider it a sign. A sign to stop suppressing your magic, step out of the shadows, and stand in the spotlight. 

Your signal to stop hiding behind humility and embrace what makes you unique. To make your unique value visible and become an invitation for others to do the same.

The Beginning: I’m a Mess & It’s My Magic

Being diagnosed with ADHD back in the 1990s meant that few understood it, let alone how to explain it to a child. As an 8-year-old, all I knew was that it meant I was different and that meant I didn’t belong. In my young mind, it meant I was wrong.

I was wrong because:

• I had to leave at lunch to get my medication.
• I needed extra help to focus and complete my work at home and school.
• I often wasn’t listening when teachers, parents, or other kids asked me a question.
• I lived mostly in my head, my own made-up world filled with stories and dreams.
• I struggled to connect, communicate, and cultivate relationships with other kids.

To protect myself, I turned inward. I tried to fix what I felt was broken inside me. To push harder to perform and prove my worth, my value.

Even more so, to mask my magic. To mask my intuitive inner sense of knowing about myself and the world. To hide my natural ways of being that were too messy to accept.

What do I mean by messy?

My mind is messy. The way I think about things, create things, and feel things are all messy. My messy mind doesn’t go from A to B to C, it must explore all the possibilities.

My mind tries to think about everything from every vantage point. When someone shares an opinion, even if my instinct is to agree, my mind decides to disagree. My mind always directing me to play the devils advocate, turning discussions into debates.

My mind is messy because it’s either focused on only one thing or on everything all at once. My brain chain can go on for miles with semi-related thoughts, ideas, and insights until I can’t even remember where I started.

My mind is messy because it demands I experience it all for myself. Never able to learn from others, I have always had an innate need to explore it all myself.

When told what not to do, I would definitely do it because I had to experience it myself to learn the lesson. (This, of course, got me into lots of trouble as a kid, constantly getting hurt or making poor choices).

From the Inside Out

The messiness on the inside translates into messiness on the outside. It’s not just my metaphorical mind; my messiness exists all around me in everything I think, feel, and do.

For many (or even most), my messiness can be overwhelming, frustrating, or even angering. But for me, and those like me, it’s just how we are, our ways of being. For example:

• I often forget to follow up on emails, text messages, and phone calls. This creates conflict and challenges my ability to start and sustain friendships.
• I struggle to notice, let alone name, process, or explain my feelings. When they are chaotic or intense, it can cause discomfort because many are ill-equipped to honor, hold, or handle emotional expressions.
• I find it either impossible to stay on topic or I get so focused I forget everything but that one thing. This can cause issues with meeting deadlines and following up on simple daily tasks or activities.
• My desire to experience everything immediately upon discovery leads to many paused projects and unused purchases. The clutter this creates can be chaotic and overwhelming to others.
• My creativity and love for creating leads to literal messes as those creations come into being. I’m constantly filled with ideas, of which I can’t possibly pursue, execute, or complete them all.

Nothing I do naturally is linear or logical, it’s all the result of my messy mind. A mind for years I felt was a curse not a cure.

My Talents Turned Toxic

I’ve been a Gallup CliftonStrengths Coach for years, and yet, I never really saw the magic in my talents. I was constantly critiqued for them: 

• too many words (Communication®), 
• too much (Maximizer®), 
• too complicated (Strategic®), 
• too much information (Input®), 
• too many ideas (Ideation®).

No wonder I thought they were messy; I’ve gotten that message for years. My most innate talents and ways of being were perpetually picked apart and put down by those who disliked them.

However, I can now see the truth that their dislike of my ways of being was not about me. Their discomfort was never truly a reflection of my talent, but an expression of their discomfort with them.

Our uniqueness means we will experience friction with those who perceive, process, and perform differently.

Those with the greatest confidence and talents valued most by society grow up to believe theirs are the right or best way to be. But you see, here’s the thing, the truth is, there is no one right or best way. There is simply my way and your way.

Unfortunately, I’ve experienced firsthand the difficulties created by conflicting ways of being:

• People with Discipline® don’t like my Ideation®, they want structure and routine while I seek flexibility.
• People with Deliberative® and Analytical® talents don’t like my Communication®, they’re skeptical of stories and suspicious of sharing many words.
• People with Responsibility® don’t like my Maximizer®, they say “yes” to maintain trust while I say “no” to focus on excellence.

Of course, our different ways of being bump up against each other! Our bodies don’t like ways that feel different from the ones we know best. Those neural pathways we’ve strengthened all our lives shaped by all our experiences and environments.

We internalize these messages throughout our lives leaving us believing their issue with us is something to be fixed. But really, it’s our magic. And now I am beginning to see my messy mind is my magic.

Not a Machine, but a Living Being!

In a world with such complex, creative, and compelling natural beauty, we’ve made the mistake of mechanizing what was meant to be our magic.

Instead of nurturing nature and its natural beauty and brilliance, we have dissected it to recreate it with industrialized machines.

This treatment has extended into how we expect human beings to perform. Our approaches are tailored to shape how people think, feel, and act with machine-like methods. None of which work well, if at all.

Our brilliant bodies were built to be able to accomplish and achieve more than our machines. We can embed so much more in our memories than the files on our disks and drives.

We were diligently designed with billions of neurons and trillions of neural connections far surpassing anything made by man. Our complexity and capacity are greater than any machine.

Our brains aren’t linear—they’re not processes or checklists. They are dynamic, unpredictable, alive. They are complex webs of neural connections.

My messy mind works like our brains and bodies work with everything intermingled and wired together in a beautiful web of neural connections.

That is how I exist…

Within that web is the wisdom of the world. Within that web is everything we need, both known and unknown. To discern and decipher the knowledge we need, we must seek the wisdom within.

And yet…despite all the ways the world tried to mold me into something machine-like, my magic has manifested, and my humanness has triumphed.

My brain hasn’t stayed within the straight lines it was sent to stay on. Instead, it has followed its own webs, spirals, connections.

And over time, I began to see something extraordinary:

That the very mind I once believed was messy was, in fact, a masterful systems creator. The messiness wasn’t a malfunction; it was the blueprint for my brilliance.

My Messy Magical Mind

We often forget everything we do requires energy, both seen and unseen. I often wish I could clean a little each day, so that I could notice and address things as they happen. But I can’t, because my brain is too busy deciphering complexity. And when it’s done, there’s nothing left. No more energy for me to be able to categorize and clean. To pick up and put away, I have to devote an entire day. My mind can’t be divided between the mundane and its magic. 

You see, all this messiness has led me to be the ultimate systems creator. My mind bounces so easily from one thing to the next, I need systems and structure that can create the clarity needed to support my success.

My ways of working and getting things done are messy because my brain needs systems or it perpetually jumps from one thing to another, forgetting the last thing with the start of the next.

Out of necessity, I began creating systems, not despite my messiness, but because of it. And now I’ve been creating systems for decades:

• Systems for learning that got me into and through law school, supporting my successful journey to the top of my class, achieving awards along the way.
• Systems for managing, leading, and partnering with people to propel them to peak performance.
• Systems for how to hire, onboard, develop, engage, and retain talent, earning global awards for programs we developed and being an exceptional workplace.
• Systems for technology teams, allowing successful implementation of document management systems, phone systems, and modern technology training systems.
• Systems for operations, leading to successfully managed and completed projects, improvements in order processing, and increasing customer satisfaction.

The thing I’ve forever been trying to fix in myself is the very thing that catapulted me into my magic.

Embracing My Magic

I’ve tried to overcome it.

I’ve tried to suppress it. 

I’ve tried to medicate it.

I’ve tried to deny it. 

I’ve tried to hide it.

I’ve tried to survive it.

All while feeling like it was wrong, like it meant I was wrong.

—

I am now declaring I’m done.

This is my flag at the summit.

My stake in the ground, showing I made it to the peak.

For me, the peak of this performance mountain journey was finding my way to accepting me and my magic.

—

I am not wrong. I am not broken.

I am not faulty or incomplete.

I am me. A marvelous human being.

One of many.

Each of us with our own unique magic.

—

What you think of me is not who I am.

What I think of me is not who I am.

I am who I am, with all my innate me-ness!

I am many things.

To some, these things make me messy.

To me, they make me magical.

• I’m an artist, lawyer, leader, author, coach, consultant, mother, wife, and so much more!
• I am a decoder of complexity, making the invisible, internal, and intricate understandable and actionable.
• I am a NeuroNarrator, giving voice to the nervous system signals and somatic messages our bodies have been sending all along.
• I am a weaver of wisdom, helping others integrate and embody their insights into how they are living, being, and becoming.
• I am a performance partner, walking beside leaders as they evolve themselves, those they lead, and their workplace systems and practices.
• I am a cultivator of consciousness leadership, rooted in coherence, creativity, compassion, and courage.
• I am a pattern breaker, challenging norms that no longer serve the needs of humans or humanity.
• I am a disrupter of dysregulation, rewiring how we lead from the inside out.
• I am a capacity code creator, upgrading systems to support humans in a way that enhances, evolves, and expands possible for people, teams, and workplaces.
• I am a systems specialist, turning organizational dysfunction into high-performance ecosystems.
• I am a builder of brave workplaces, where humans feel safe to grow and empowered to perform.
• I am a spark in the shift, igniting change in how we work, lead, and live.

To me these many messy things are my magic, my innate gifts to offer the world.

My ways of being are mine.

• My ways of thinking about everything and anything, randomly and all of the time.
• My ways of feeling deeply and expressing those feelings fully for all to see.
• My ways of behaving by bravely choosing to face my fears and experience everything, the good and the bad.

To some, my many layers may look like a mess. But to me, they’re my magic and masterpiece.

Mining Your Magic

Are you ready to make your magic visible? 

To bring it out of the dark and into the light where it can begin bringing your brilliance into the world.

• What is your unique innate inner magic?
• What have you hidden or even hated that is truly your greatest gift?
• What have you suppressed or silenced to perform for and please others, but is aching to be shared?
• What would it be like to not just feel good about your magic but to embrace it, experience it, and enjoy it every day?

The darkness of today’s world demands we share our bright bold brilliance to light it up! We’ve no time for humility, hesitation, or fear of humiliation. The time to discover your magic and make it visible is now, not tomorrow or next week!

This is your sign to cease your silence, step out of the shadows, shine your light, and share your magic publicly!

If this calls to you, but you aren’t sure how to start message us so we can help!