Embracing Your Own Uniqueness

The biggest freedom any of us gets is the freedom to be ourselves, to say and do and create what actually comes from inside. Sounds simple. Living it is a different matter. Most people are so busy matching the pace of everyone around them that they never slow down enough to meet themselves, never mind actually live as themselves. What follows is about how carving out time for personal growth lets you step into your own calling and value whatever it is you were put here to give.

Everyone is one of a kind, even when it doesn't feel that way. The old story says there are two sorts of smarts: books and the street. Book smarts usually gets the applause, which quietly tells the common-sense crowd they must not have much worth offering. That quiet message does real damage. It sits underneath a lot of unhappiness, a lot of depression, and shows up in plenty of cases of mental illness.

Choosing to grow and to understand yourself through psychology takes nerve, because living differently from the crowd invites judgment. People may tag you a nonconformist. Some will reach for the word liberal like it's an insult. Underneath the posturing, though, a lot of them respect you. They just won't say it out loud.

And the two-kinds-of-intelligence idea was never accurate anyway. There are at least eight: cognitive, spatial, mechanical, logical and mathematical, creative, academic, analytical, and others. Researchers will probably keep adding to the list. Sorting out where you fit takes patience and a willingness to look at yourself clearly, to accept the person you find and treat him or her with some affection.

Years ago a child who didn't learn the standard way often got sent off to a psychologist and labeled with something like Autism Spectrum Disorder or ADHD. The learning was different, so it got pathologized. Now that schools and workplaces push collaboration and co-working so hard, the people who are wired differently can struggle to connect and end up left behind. In school that can mean special education classes.

Anyone who takes the path of personal growth may look like they're falling behind too, because mindfulness and meditation ask you to live in the present moment. That slows your life down. Meanwhile everyone chasing cars and square footage is accelerating. Don't let that scare you off. A lot of the people racing past will reach their later years and realize they built nothing that mattered to them, no relationships worth having. Find even one lifelong friend to walk the road with you and you've been handed something rare.

Learning to accept and offer your own particular gift is really the whole point of self-development. Instead of pouring every hour into work, you can put energy into the creative things you were built for. Your audience might stay small. If your life genuinely reaches a handful of people, that is enough, because those few tend to pass it along to a handful of their own. Call it Operation Multiplication.

Notice how the people who move the needle in the world are usually the ones who step out of the line everybody else is standing in. That kind of standing apart comes after a lot of inner work. Others will respect it up to a point while pretending not to, puzzled that you aren't chasing the same possessions they are. There's nothing wrong with owning nice things. The problem starts when owning becomes the center of everything. The old line says whoever dies with the most toys wins, but that person is still dead. Nobody has ever watched a hearse towing a U-Haul.

When people chatter about finding your calling, they almost always mean a job that prints money. If it's not six figures, they file it under something for poor people and move on. That misses it. Your calling is to be the person you actually are, to know yourself as you were made to be.