You Were Made For This
“You were made for this.” Those words were spoken to me just now. I let them wash over me. “You were made for this.” What an incredibly empowering statement. So very simple in words. Nothing longer than 4 letters. Nothing complicated about it. You. Were. Made. For. This.
I had a completely visceral response to these words. It’s been a long time since I have heard them or felt them and feel like they were accurate. It’s taken me a long time to get to this moment. But she is right. I LIGHT UP when I get to do what I do best.
I want to share a bit of that process with you.
In 2018, I started my own coaching journey with my strengths coach. He started out in a way that should have been simple – “three words that describe you”. I’ve been a mental health counselor for the majority of my adult life. My job is structured around finding out what is happening in the lives of others. It’s what I am good at. I am not good at letting people know about me and furthermore I quickly realized – do I even know me? That is when I knew that this coaching thing could be really good for me. We worked through naming my various talents – literally just saying the name out loud and discovering what the word actually meant. We then worked through looking at how they fit into my life -where I saw them when I was young, how others see them in my life, how I see them now, etc. It was an act of claiming the talents and accepting them as my own. We then moved into a process of aiming the talents and creating them into strengths and developing them in a way that (hopefully on the good days) lead to near perfect execution of them. It was hard work. It was constant thinking about my own unique set of strengths and how I use them to interact with the world.
I knew early on when working with my coach that I wanted to do what he does. I wanted to help people come to a place where they could truly be themselves. So I of course waited to act on that and continued to be a really fabulous counselor but often feeling like I was missing out on something. Let’s pause a moment here. I do not regret for a moment my path as a counselor. It has been a very fulfilling career for me and I have certainly grown and learned a lot throughout this time. I have even had moments where I felt like it was exactly where I needed to be and I think that is important to note here.
In the year 2021 my life changed forever. That is a different story for a different time. But what came from that life changing event was finally doing what I knew I had been called to do in 2018. I worked to become a coach. And not just any coach, but one that focused on looking at what people are already naturally gifted at doing and leveraging those things into strengths. I hit a passion button. I wanted people to feel what I felt when I went through coaching – like it was ok, no, even better than ok, it was BEST to be fully themselves.
So here we are now. My desire is to help people to LEARN who they are – read those words of talent areas and get to know what they mean. I want people to LOVE who they are. I want them to feel a deep sense of connection to themselves and their uniqueness that makes them, well them! I want people to LIVE into who they were designed to be. I want people to have the freedom to be their authentic selves and move into their passion points in a way that makes people be able to say, “YOU WERE MADE FOR THIS.”
So here we are now. I know that not everything I do has the response of “I was made for this” but what if how I operate allows me to be able to feel that even more? That not just when I am coaching others do I feel a sense of “I was made for this” but in my day to day encounters with life. And not only that, but what if YOU were able to do that as well? What if YOU were able to have a sense of “I was made for this” in your daily encounters with life. What if we all wake up and live into who we were made to be?
Take a moment. Breathe in. Let these words wash over you. “I was made for this.” Breathe out.
Xoxo,
Mary – Your Strengths Coach