Fall is just around the corner! And now that the transition back to school has calmed down, I have an opportunity to continue sharing my thoughts with the world.
Before I wrote my 7 Habits post, I was reading the 7 Habits book and a theme that kept coming up for me was that to fully achieve success with those tools you needed to know what your personal gifts were so you could plan accordingly to put them into play effectively. This goes hand in hand with Energy Profiling for me because knowing what your gifts/talents are is part of knowing your own personality inside and out. This circles back to Covey's work of adding an 8th Habit: Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs. Strangely, this isn't found on the main Habit website, but it does have its own book which is on my reading list so we will probably discuss it more in the future.
This post goes with the first part of finding my own voice. Pulling from Energy Profiling and knowing that I am a dominant Type 4 with a secondary Type 2 I have a good base knowledge of what makes me tick, but to boil it down to what my cores gifts are, I connected with my childhood.
So, apparently I am a member of the "Millennial" group. Being born in 1991, I am on the cusp between Gen Y and Gen Z. I prefer to think on my "generation" as the Disney Generation because we grew up with all the classics... on VHS mostly.
One of my favorites was Sleeping Beauty. (Team Blue!) Gotta love those fairies. They are the true stars of the show, at least in my opinion. I've always been fascinated by the gifts they give baby Aurora. I think all of us budding Disney Princesses want the gifts of Beauty and Song; we all love to dress up and sing along.
My burning question has always been, "What was Merryweather's original gift going to be?" We will never know.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who has wondered what gifts I would've received in Aurora's place. Being LDS I didn't think I'd have to wonder about that after I received my Patriarchal Blessing. This is a special Priesthood blessing you can receive as a youth and I got mine as soon as I could. I was very eager to have this road map to my life that was supposed to tell me more about myself.
In reading through it again, I'm actually surprised how many times the word "gift" is used. But the part that has stuck in my mind since I received this blessing at age 14 is, "There are many gifts and talents which you may not have yet discovered." I was told to seek out and develop these other talents in order to fulfill my potential.
It's been a solid twelve years since I first heard those words. So what have I discovered about my talents? I have found some of them have a parallel to the three Good Fairies and the gifts they gave Aurora.
Flora is the leader of the group and gave the gift of Beauty. Fauna is the glue and gave the gift of Song. Merryweather is the go-getter/problem solver and gave the formula for breaking Maleficent's curse. This is the original order of the gifts but my parallel is in a slightly different order of priority.
For me Fauna comes first. The gift of Song matches my overarching gift of Harmony. My favorite definition of Harmony is, "the quality of forming a pleasing and consistent whole". Harmony is my watchword, what I look for in every aspect of my life. It is also what I try to create in various forms. Harmony is my vision of life in one word. I expanded upon that in my Mission Statement post last month.
Merryweather was able to think on her feet and come up with a plan to break the curse. Planning is my next gift. Planning is how I work to create Harmony. Planning can also be thought of as Organizing which I am really good at. I like to think that my house seems clean (Harmonious) because it is Organized as far as things are within their correct boundaries. I'm not super OCD. My sense of Harmony allows for my house to feel "lived in" (slightly messy because i have three small kids) thing as long as things are generally in the right area.
Flora gave the gift of Beauty. I make things beautiful (Harmonious) by being able to effectively implement my Organization (Planning) with Authority. Mmm... Authority. As a T4, Authority is a big thing in my world. I prefer to either have the Authority or be able to respect others who have it over me. Mostly I just like having it. Being a more "mature" personality, Authority comes quite easily to me. I'm able to stand in front of a group of people and take charge. Prime example: I may be the youngest Cubmaster ever... maybe. (Do the math, I gave you my birth year already.) It was actually a relief to be officially called because I had felt like an impostor being the acting Cubmaster for about a month and not feeling like I really had the Authority I was trying to wield in keeping our Cub Scout Pack running.
I'll just close with a visual metaphor of how I see my gifts make up a the best parts of me. I found that an umbrella made a good match for what I had in mind. I labelled it, but here's a walk-through. Harmony is the canopy that does the actual job of the umbrella of keeping you covered and safe from the elements. It's also the part that you see as a possible fashion statement. But the canopy can't function without the underpinnings of the shaft and ribs. That structure is my Planning portion. Now, the traditional umbrella is one you have to manually push up, but the one I have has a button in the handle that does the popping for you. The pop is the action that moves the structure to accomplish the task of the umbrella. Just so, my Authority moves the Planning into fruition to create Harmony.
Now for the second half of the Habit. I hope I have inspired you to think about your gifts. Yours may not coalesce into an umbrella metaphor, but that's kind of the point; we can't all be umbrellas and we're not supposed to be all the same.
I'd love it if you'd share your gifted metaphors once you have them figured out.