Love Yourself–Including Your Gifts
Other Posts in this Series
- The “I” In “Love”
- Love Yourself–You are Miraculously Conceived
- Love Yourself–Including Your Body
- Love Yourself–Including Your Gifts
- Love Yourself–Including Your True Nature
It took me a long time to start believing I was good at something, to acknowledge that I have gifts and abilities others do not possess. For many years I saw only the talents of others and negated my own. My friends could play a musical instrument and I couldn’t. I didn’t seem to have an aptitude for it. My brother could sing like a bird, and I sounded more like a an injured elephant. My athleticism paled in comparison to many of my friends.
That tendency to always compare myself with those better than me led to feelings of inferiority and blindness. It caused me to shove aside all my successes as if they were somehow accidents or anomalies. As a child I made my Little League Baseball All-Star team a couple of times, yet never saw myself as gifted or talented. I always believed it was because my dad was a coach or everyone else on my team was really bad, and they didn’t know who else to choose.
My senior year in high school I was chosen the Outstanding Math Student for the entire school of 2000 students. Yet as I walked on the stage to accept my award, I thought of two or three other people I thought deserved it more than I. Through out my working career I’ve continued to do the same–push aside compliments and wonder if I was good at anything.
Why is it that we cannot see things in us that are so obvious to other people? Why do we choose to compare ourselves to those who are better than us at something? I used to envy people with special obvious gifts, until I began hearing people say they envied me.
It slowly dawned on me that many things I can do easily, others find extremely difficult to do. Those skills that seem natural to me are the ones I value the least because I already have them. Those skills I value the most are those that others have and that don’t come easily to me. What I need to be doing is valuing those gifts I already have. I need to recognize how special it is that I:
- Think analytically
- Can speak before large crowds
- Can organize thoughts
- Bring people to consensus
- Have an eye for photography
- Have an ear for words
- Have a keen sense of emotional intelligence
- Can make difficult concepts understandable
- Can write clearly
When we stop comparing ourselves to others and look clearly at ourselves we will see marvelous gifts that others do not possess. The very things we negate as important are the things that make us special. Perhaps it is the ability to bring laughter to a room or the ability to persuade a skeptic. These are not my gifts, but I am wonderfully made with a special mix of gifts and abilities no other human has. To love myself means that I not only recognize my unique gifts, but also embrace them as good.
As a side note, I know people who have an unrealistically inflated perception of their abilities. It’s not that they don’t have gifts. Rather, they cannot see themselves clearly enough to recognize which gifts they have and which they don’t have. Whether we approach ourselves from an overly pessimistic or optimistic place, the important thing is to take a clear, unobstructed look at what we can do. The object is not so much to look at how much better or worse we are than others. The object is to recognize those things that come naturally to us, those things at which we most easily excel.
Embrace your gifts and thank God for them. Love the specialness of your character. Value your talents. In so doing, love yourself.
When we truly love ourselves in this way, we no longer are envious of others with gifts we do not possess. Instead, we find ourselves celebrating the fact that they have what we do not. We can easily encourage and applaud the wonder we see in other lives as we applaud the wonder of our own.
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