Nurturing The Gifts Within You

To develop our personal ingenuity, it’s important to nourish the gifts we were born with. But if you don’t know what they are, how do you do that? Where do you start? In Episode 5 of A Touch of Genius, we start to answer these questions so that you can design your life around your personal gifts.

I also share some personal stories on how I got into this personal development world, and bust a myth that some people have about coaches and therapists.

Whether you believe we were born out of stardust particles, a Godly energy of creation or we’re part of some massive test tube experiment, there is one thing that I hope we can agree on… the question of how to tap into this thing called Genius that resides within all of us and amplify it. We can also call it “personal excellence” or “brilliance”. Pick your favourite adjective.

It’s from this place where the magic happens within us.

We’ve already started to talk about why this is important for you, for me, and for the rest of us. Without living into our best selves, it’s harder to make our world a safer, happier and healthier place together. People often talk about nature versus nurture when it comes to Genius, and today we’ll talk about nurturing it.

David Viscott was an author and a psychiatrist who hosted a pioneering radio talk show in the 1980s and 1990s during which he provided counselling to callers. In his book, “Finding Your Strength in Difficult Times: A Book of Meditations”, Viscott stated the following:

“The purpose of life is to discover your gift.
The work of life is to develop it.
The meaning of life is to give your gift away.”

You may have seen or heard shorter versions of this quote that only include the first and third sentences. Having seen it in full, I wonder why people choose to skip the middle part, when the development of our work is so crucial to applying purpose and meaning. Without doing the work itself, we can’t expect any decent result, can we? This applies to anything in life, and why having discipline around it is so important.

No musician ever got good at their craft just sitting around waiting for it to happen, even though they may be really talented.

No athlete could win races like they do without putting in time to train, eat well, and sleep well.

Listen to Episode 5 of A Touch of Genius wherever you get your podcasts.