Episode 62. Invest in yourself no one else will. Brought to you by the universal law of Abundance. Nothing is ever missing.

Did you know that you have a superpower? We all do. We give it different names such as life purpose or our greatest talent or even a gift that we have such as the ability to sing in perfect tune. When we are given that superpower at birth we may not recognise it because we think we are normal. But none of us are normal.

This is complex.

I think it’s great to think of this superpower. Once you find it, or better I say once you accept it, then you’ll find your style. Style is a very important thing in life because it means that you play to your strengths. You will see in Human Nature that everybody thinks that their watch tells the right time and so knowing your style allows you to accommodate other people wishes and yet feel like you are authentic.

If you take the top 100 people you considered to be great leaders or great composers or great athletes in the history you know, and look at their photograph, you will not see a common denominator in facial recognition. To that degree what you can say is all great leaders are unique and that uniqueness is what makes them a great leader.

Throughout the duration of my childhood I considered myself to be a world champion potential in sport. I competed at high levels right throughout my school years but as the sport got more competitive, and my competition got more skilled, it became conspicuous that ball sport was not my superpower. I also started up a rock band. And after one or two concert it was obvious that being a rockstar was not going to be my superpower. Then I tried my hand at being a surfy and that didn’t work either.

I think we are all searching for our superpower and all too often we are barking up the wrong tree wanting to be something that we are not, such as an apple tree wanting to be a lemon tree. Sure, yes we are all trees but we are unique. Sometimes what we are really good at in our juvenile years is true in context only. We might be good at something in school only because the competition is not strong or the cost of loss is not high.

One of the most important things to do in life is to admit when we are not in our superpower. Many of the problems I have helped people with over the years is when they are not only a superpower in their chosen field, but they tried to be a superpower in life itself. That means they can’t admit where they are incompetent or weak. We all have this duality of having a superpower that is highly functional in one area of life that makes us an incompetent fool in another.

For example, I built a really great business from the ashes of a bankrupt business that I bought, along with its sheet-metal engineering factory, into a really fabulous nationally branded company constructing some of the worlds most sophisticated air-pollution systems under license to technology Giant in Germany. What I demonstrated in creating this business in a very short period of time with very little business experience was that I had an uncanny knack for building business. But business is more than and uncanny knack to build things, there is also the human aspect, the P and L, the manufacturing side and the boring bits. And so, although I did build a very successful and profitable business nobody would suggest that I was a brilliant business owner. I recognised this vacuum in my capability and bought in a business partner to run the parts of the business I was totally hopeless at. In that regard I was lucky that my incompetence was quite transparent.

But incompetence is not welcomed in a corporate life. This is a problem because instead of honouring the diversity of skills each individual brings to the table, people are treated as generic. People are asked to do task not focused on their unique superpower but more focused on how hard they will work or how hard somebody else can work. And therefore there is great in efficiency and great dissatisfaction because nobody likes working on the things that they’re not good at.

The great thing is when you find your superpower you can start to use it and hone it into everything you do. The most fascinating aspect of this for me is to witness the soft skills that we all try to run away from. Sometimes our superpower is a soft skill rather than a talent. If that soft skill, that capacity, contradicts a stereotype that people have, we can be ridiculed and we can ridicule ourselves for having that superpower and pack it away, beneath lots and lots of veneer, because we don’t want to appear week. And this is really sad for some people.

When I was a child my nickname was “sunshine” and everybody knew it. I was rarely called Chris, I was typically called sunshine. The reason for this nickname was that I was very blonde, was always laughing and joking around, loved playing with exciting toys and had a joyful demeanour. When I went to school in the outback of Australia where the only other students were predominantly Italian immigrants children, or aboriginal, sunshine made my life hell. I was the one that the other kids picked on. I was the one they teased. I was the one that was pushed and poked and provoked. To survive I decided to put sunshine away. Instead of seeing this love of life as a strength I saw it as a weakness. And that happens to many people.

Nature is doing all it can to teach us to love ourselves. And no matter how hard nature tried, I was always very private about sunshine. So when the student is ready the teacher appears, and nature persisted, and eventually I was ready to hear that sunshine was worthy of love. It took a lot of persistence for nature to get through my barriers on that topic and my investment in hiding away sunshine in my marriage was so extreme. But nature is a very very persistent teacher. And eventually I was ready.

We all have a superpower. And that superpower is what we most want the world to have. Somehow, there is this beautiful link between what we want, what we give, our superpower and life purpose. It’s very magical when you finally wake up and see that there is something very special about you that you may have judged many long years ago.

It’s really hard to invest in yourself until you know this superpower. This is the superpower that guarantees you the results that you want in your life. It’s not always the thing you like most about yourself or the thing that you enjoy most doing or being. And so, there are sometimes barriers to discovering this aspect that is quite unique about you. If that aspect of you has not been discovered it’s really hard to invest in anything else but what you know and think. But you are way way more powerful than that.

We have from time to time said that life is an adventure. But it’s not an adventure if you don’t know your superpower and have not yet come to grips with the fact that something about you that you don’t necessarily like or you might like, is an incredible gift way more than the money you earn all the children you have all the spouse that you support and love. When you find this superpower investing in yourself is absolutely 100% guaranteed success.

That’s the end of this episode.

With spirit

Chris