“You have no idea what brilliance is going to pour out of you that’s already in your heart until you say it out loud to yourself.  Nothing moves emotion like moving your body including your voice,” Stephanie Keiko Kong.  I don’t know if self-doubt is engrained in the human condition or if we are taught—likely it’s both.  I’ve written much and often about the debilitating nature of self-doubt as it relates to unleashing our brilliance and ability to step forward.  We seem to have lost the ability to believe in our ability to shine.  THAT is the nature part of this: we are taught that we aren’t meant to shine.  We are taught that it’s better to go with the crowd, blend in, keep our heads down, do what it takes to survive all filling and building on the same dreams as everyone else.  We are taught a unified belief of what it takes to survive, the fed definition of what success means—and we never question that it could be different in spite of what we feel.  We are trained to lose that trust in our intuition and belief in our abilities in favor of the what we are told is the right thing to do.  We rarely stop to question whose definition of right it is. 

We are built with inherent gifts we are meant to share boldly, broadly, and completely with the world, but it scares the status quo, the people who have a system going that benefits them.  They are of the mind that they have the right idea.  We are in a generation now where we need to start questioning what the right idea really is and seeing how much the systems we were taught to put so much stock in are really serving those it claims.  The truth is we know none of those systems are benefitting the masses.  We are all contributing to our own version of the hamster wheel, caught in the golden handcuffs, and when we can’t achieve that we are told we are failures and blamed for it.  We never question the definition of failure either. But there is always that spark, that voice in the back of our heads that asks, “what if?” That says, “there could be another way.”  And for whatever reason, we ignore that voice because it isn’t something the world at large agrees on.

We are given these flashes of brilliance, these ideas in order to do something with them.  We aren’t meant to sit on them.  Instead of focusing on ways that we can shift and change the world and bring these ideas to light, we are told to keep them quiet and do what everyone else does.  We are taught it’s riskier to share these ideas than it is to develop these ideas.  Then we wake up and suddenly these ideas are things we wish we had done.  And the time is gone.  We no longer have the ability to see these things through.  Look , I don’t claim every idea we have is a pathway to greatness, fame, or fortune.  But I do claim that every idea we have has the potential and the capability to become something that can shift the world—even if it only changes the world for one person.  The ultimate goal isn’t always fame or notoriety—it’s value and assistance, in short, service.  We are here to be of service to each other and we will never know the extent of our ability to serve and help others if we are constantly hindering our movement, hindering our voice, hindering the expression of our creativity to discover who we are and what we can do.  So shuck the idea of having to conform and keep quiet and stifle.  Learn to move, learn to discover clarity, learn to share the ideas, and learn to develop them.  We never know how brightly we can shine until we start practicing living in the light.