The world needs YOU just as you were created. Forget the expectations, facades, and cover-ups. Be you and be fully you.

You were uniquely crafted with a distinct mixture of specific personality traits and gifts that match those of no other person on this earth. Sit with that for a minute. There are more than seven billion people on this planet and not one of them was created exactly like you.

This is why the world needs YOU. Only you can fulfill what you were created to become. Only you can utilize your unique mix of gifts to serve the world. Only you can be you. If you choose to seek the life of someone else, who will be you?

It’s imperative you don’t spend your life trying to be like everyone else, look like everyone else, and live like everyone else. If you choose not to be fully you, the rest of us will suffer. The world will miss out on what you were created to do. There will be no one to use the gifts that you’ve been given.

What if you were predestined in your creation to cure cancer, but through the course of your life instead of seeking the desires of your heart you sought what you thought everybody else expected of you and so you chose a different path? The world would miss out on the cure for cancer. What if the desires of your heart urged you to pursue writing, but instead of becoming an author you became a lawyer simply because everyone else in your family is a lawyer? What if the author in you would have written a book that radically changed someone’s life or even saved their life? By not digging to the heart of who we are, we do a disservice to ourselves and the world. By living in fear we bottle up our future and in effect, we chain others down too. The world needs you to live boldly as the purest form of yourself.

I know it can be scary because being purely ourselves makes us incredibly vulnerable. We take away the shields we hide behind and peel back the layers of armor we’ve grown to surround ourselves with and it can be scary.

But you know what?

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we subconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
-Nelson Mandela

SO SHINE, CHILD, SHINE!