Meaningful Work and Gifts & Talents

Affirmation: My feelings deserve to be expressed. I will share them. (It may be that you need to let yourself be the first person you share your feelings with.😊)

The Active Decision 

I AM A PERSON OF ACTION. I am Resilient 

I will create a new future by creating a new me. I inspire others with my activity. I am a leader.

Brené Brown couldn’t just shake the ideas off and throw them away. After more interviews and research this is what she found: (excerpt from Gifts of Imperfection)

• “We all have gifts and talents. When we cultivate those gifts and share them with the world, we create a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. 
• Squandering our gifts brings distress to our lives. As it turns out, it’s not merely benign or “too bad” if we don’t use the gifts that we’ve been given; we pay for it with our emotional and physical well-being. When we don’t use our talents to cultivate meaningful work, we struggle. We feel disconnected and weighed down by feelings of emptiness, frustration, resentment, shame, disappointment, fear, and even grief. 
• Most of us who are searching for spiritual connection spend too much time looking up at the sky and wondering why God lives so far away. God lives within us, not above us. Sharing our gifts and talents with the world is the most powerful source of connection with God. 
• Using our gifts and talents to create meaningful work takes a tremendous amount of commitment, because in many cases the meaningful work is not what pays the bills. Some folks have managed to align everything—they use their gifts and talents to do work that feeds their souls and their families; however, most people piece it together. 
• No one can define what’s meaningful for us. Culture doesn’t get to dictate if it’s working outside the home, raising children, teaching, lawyering or painting. Like our gifts and talents, meaning is unique to each on of us.”