Unleash Your Greatness: A Guide to Transforming Your Life Through Your Authentic Purpose
108
Unleash Your Greatness: A Guide to Transforming Your Life Through Your Authentic Purpose
108eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504368872 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Balboa Press |
| Publication date: | 11/21/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 108 |
| File size: | 173 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Unleash Your Greatness
A Guide to Transforming Your Life Through Your Authentic Purpose
By Rachel Hale
Balboa Press
Copyright © 2016 Rachel HaleAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5043-6886-5
CHAPTER 1
Revenge of the Underachiever
"You'll never amount to anything".
The teacher announced from one end of the classroom. The silence that followed seemed deafening to my ears.
I was standing up, amidst a sea of heads, and about 50 pairs of eyes burning holes through my skin.
My hand was still stinging from the corporal punishment meted out to me by the classroom ruler, that dreaded dispenser of justice, a minute or so ago.
I hadn't done my homework to the teacher's satisfaction.
I think I was supposed to cut out pictures of vegetables and paste it on a cardboard, but as far as I can remember I didn't have enough vegetables to show.
I was 8 years old.
It makes me deviously happy now, to think how my teacher got it all wrong.
But at the time, she certainly made it clear that I was an unpromising child, not bound for great things in life.
After my initial public humiliation, I decided that I WAS going to amount to SOMETHING.
Partly because I wanted it, partly because I wanted to prove her wrong and mostly because I was far more ambitious than my teacher could have ever imagined despite my shortcomings.
See ... I've always felt it on the inside.
Not in a cocky, or arrogant sort of way, but in a way that helped me look beyond the multitude of random people, dotted throughout my life, who had the audacity to tell me how my life should be, what I should say and how I should act.
I've felt greatness.
I've felt that I was born for greatness.
It was a feeling that came from deep within that felt as if I could trust my life with it.
I knew.
I somehow also knew from a young age, though I can't say I fully understood it back then, that greatness needed expression, and without expression, it would wither, it would retreat to a dark corner of your soul, and it would not see the light of day for years to come.
Greatness needs nurture to come into being, and doing what makes your heart sing and feel alive with freedom has a lot to do with the "How To" part of unleashing greatness.
As far as I can look back into my childhood, I remember being able to sing from about when I was 3.5 years old. If I heard something on the radio, I did a pretty good job of memorising it and singing it, or rather humming it, on pitch and with gusto, according to my Mum.
I don't ever remember LOVING singing. I have to borrow a quote from To Kill A Mockingbird, here to explain.
"One does not love breathing".
It was so natural, I didn't think about it, it flowed right through me like breathing.
It didn't take effort, it felt like it was the most natural thing I could do.
I didn't realise how much I loved it until later on when I hit a dreaded writer's block and entered into a soul famine that sucked the creativity and happiness from my life.
Anyway getting back to the story at hand, I grew up to be a quiet, yet observant and a curious child, who did more singing, dancing, acting and any other form of expression which felt completely natural to me.
It wasn't a part of me. It was ME.
It took me a while to figure out but it was my way of expressing the greatness within.
To sing, to dance, to act, without a care in the world.
Unashamed and unbound self-expression.
Without any need to re-think, manipulate, follow a strategy, build a business or a career plan around.
I've always felt that everyone has greatness within them but unless you grew up in a home where you were 100% nurtured and allowed to be who you are, we all eventually learn to forget and let go of our greatness as we grow old.
It's like we come into this world as perfection itself and slowly through nature and nurture, teach ourselves to move away from our own inherent greatness.
Ironically we also get caught up in a lifetime habit of perfectionism trying to FIX the part that we feel is broken so we can get back to being whole.
All of a sudden, acknowledging your greatness in any shape or form, becomes a faux pas, and the adults admonish us with "Don't show off, be polite, let others have a go, don't say it like that, you're not special" and so the list continues.
So you start off with perfect confidence, and before you're a toddler most of that is whittled away from you.
This process continues and creates such a confusing vortex of disconnection within that the angst that it creates by the time we hit our confusing teenage years can be life-altering to say the least.
Some of us barely made it out alive from that period.
See, as a child, Greatness used to feel natural to me. And then I made the mistake of growing up.
Basically I decided that I was no longer that great.
Why?
Well ... all sorts of reasons really.
People told me I wasn't that great. Refer to my teacher episode at the start. (and it only increased from there)
I found out that what I did was never quite good enough. (Cue, confidence being eroded away by an onslaught of other people's opinions)
I was just alright, nothing that impressed the average observer, in fact it took a few greatly perceptive people to realise the gifts, the compassion, the sensitivity and love I carried within.
I was easy to doubt and dismiss.
Standing at 5 ft 4 it's difficult to be impressive.
I was out of touch with what I have always known to be true, and felt as if I was now no longer good enough.
It drove me to adopt a habit of perfectionism, that would destroy my creativity and happiness many times over before I learned the lesson.
There was a lot going on at the time ...
Society told me that I was just another face in a sea of faces, and I can't stand out unless my skin colour was a fair bit lighter, and quite frankly unless I looked a little bit more like a girl.
(See ... I was a quintessential Tomboy, a skinny little stick figure and a mite of a child. People sometimes mistook me for a boy.)
I was that girl who loved playing with dolls, but did it while wearing jeans and a baggy Guns n' Roses t-shirt.
Yet even as my world was changing, I was blessed with some moments that would leave a deep mark on me, and give me an unshakeable sense of self, and an ability to know that I was here for a purpose and that my own greatness lay hidden within me, ready to unleash.
I remember one particular incident from when I was probably around 10 years old.
My Mum was a Teacher at my school, respected and loved by her students for her incomparable intelligence, wit, charm, beauty and grace. She was strict too.
So here we were standing around with a few other teachers, my mum and I, and inevitably the conversation turned towards me.
One of the teachers remarked that my Mum ought to make me dress up in a more feminine manner, I suppose to disguise the fact that I looked like a little boy, and that I ought to act more like a girl or I will be stuck in this predicament (being a tomboy) for the rest of my life.
(She probably had visions of me being a 100 year old tomboy spinster, wearing my Guns n Roses t-shirt and jeans)
I stole an anxious look at my Mum, feeling disappointed and angry at myself for being a cause of embarrassment for someone like her, who was revered, utterly beautiful in all her feminine glory and fierce as a lioness to boot.
She never so much as looked at me. Instead she looked straight ahead and said in her steady yet firm voice, "She's quite ok as she is, and she'll find her own way when she grows up".
Not another word was said on the subject and the teacher, that prophetess of gloom, dared not look my Mum in the eye.
In that instance, I worshipped my Mum. She was a Goddess in my eyes.
The fact that she didn't see the need to CHANGE me in any way, the fact that I was QUITE OK as I was, and that she trusted ME to FIND MY OWN WAY when I grew up, was music to my ears.
It may also give you some clues as to why I've always been an advocate for helping other women be true to themselves in all their weird and wonderful glory.
It may also explain why my first business was an image consulting business focused on helping women discover their own unique beauty and confidence to look and feel like the goddesses they are.
It may also explain why my second business is a coaching business, where I get to work with women from across the globe to help empower and call out their gifts and greatness from within.
I didn't fit the box. My mum didn't try to fit me into a box.
In fact years later, she would tell me that when I was 3.5 years old she KNEW that I would be independent, unconventional, and be someone who would do things their own way to make their own mark in the world.
So here I was poised for greatness. Ready to make my mark on the world.
And hearing this uplifting story, you might think that my future from that point onwards was glorious, and I was nurtured into greatness and the rest was history.
Not so fast.
Soon, things happened that broke my heart.
This took away some of my innocence and deeply ingrained some deadly stories that I told myself for years to come.
Feelings of unworthiness, unhappiness and that I was to blame for the pain I felt.
I've heard that if you've been through some sort of trauma, then hearing, seeing or reading about another person's traumatic experiences can make you feel as if you're going through the experience yourself.
This is especially true for the highly sensitive, compassionate and empathic souls amongst us (I'm one of those too), so in consideration of you, my beautiful soul, I will spare you the details here.
Suffice to say that from a young age, I felt so much pain.
I took on other people's pain on top of mine.
I mistrusted everyone including myself.
I started feeling a deep seated anger, slow burning but sudden and impetuous.
It would take me decades before I heard phrases like "Highly-Sensitive", "Empathic", and "Highly Intuitive", that described me to a tee, and helped me bring context and healing into why I felt the way I did.
CHAPTER 2Spitfire
Soon any thoughts or memories of greatness took a backseat.
Instead came anger, determination, striving to prove myself and striving to prove anyone wrong should they dare challenge me on the basis of me being a skinny little brown immigrant girl.
See, my parents moved from a then war torn country of Sri Lanka, to the greener pastures of New Zealand when I was a kid.
All I knew about New Zealand in my young mind at the time was that they had loads of sheep, and made Anchor milk. So I imagined some sort of a place where you couldn't
take a step without tripping on a sheep, abounding in rolling green hills, where I could drink lots of milk and own a farm.
Instead we grew up in the very average suburbs of West Auckland, and having not encountered racism before, I couldn't quite understand why I was asked by some kids at my new school whether we owned a dairy. (A corner store, for rest of the world)
A lot of the dairies in Auckland at the time was owned by Indian nationals, so those school kids were doubly wrong.
We didn't own a dairy and I wasn't an Indian!
I saw the sacrifices that my parents made and the indelible mark it left on them, so I was determined as hell to not be shaken by racial slurs or be pushed around by anyone.
I was always on the defense, on alert, always scanning my horizon for threats and taking care of them swiftly.
I was like one of those animals that puff themselves up so that they can look twice as big to scare away the predators.
Proving myself became the most important thing in the world for me.
That in itself is not a bad thing.
Except, mine was founded on a deep seated fear of not being good enough, not feeling loved, and hence feeling the need to protect myself from a world that was out to get me.
(Hark back to my teacher uttering those words "You'll never amount to anything", "You're not good enough") I didn't feel like I was enough.
If it was just determination and drive, maybe I would have turned out to be a much better, or a well rounded person.
Except I had anger to deal with.
I'd feel rage bubbling up within me, feelings that I thought others may not even be capable of feeling.
The more I felt this way, the lower my opinion of myself became.
How can I be good, be responsible and make those I love proud of me, when I felt bad and broken on the inside?
When I felt rage, when I felt FEELINGS all the freaking time in a spectrum that other human beings seem oblivious to?
I felt too much, I cared too much and I would give my world to see other people happy and I was getting used by those who were far more street smart than I was.
So I deliberately fought those feelings, so I could feel less and care less.
As a child I had always been one of those sensitive souls who could feel energy, emotions, and troubles of others and saw it as my nature to be compassionate, to heal and empower others.
Instead I pushed all those feelings down. I will not be used. I will build an empire so my haters can cower and I would be self-sufficient and independent and then I would have proven myself.
Soon I had bottled up enough anger inside of me to the point I hadn't shed a tear in years and then things finally came to a head when I was at University.
Students are pretty broke to start off with, but even with my part time job, what money I made was leaving me faster than it came into my account.
I was trying to buy happiness for me and for those around me and failing miserably.
I had started going to a church at the time, feeling like my lost soul could be saved and nurtured back into health.
Among the church goers, I befriended this girl, who was an exemplary Christian by word, by deed, and by virtue.
She never had a bad word to say about anybody and was always so full of joy, and energy.
She was one of those people who looked like she had a permanent halo around her, angelic in nature and with a sweet soul to match.
It was to this vessel of greatness that I decided to talk about my money troubles.
I wasn't expecting anything from her, (I didn't expect anything from anyone, I didn't ask anyone for help. My motto was that there is no one to help me, and that I must help myself. Hello Miss Independent) I just wanted to share my heavy burden and the unhappiness I felt.
I think I was just short for rent that week.
Without any hesitation, she offered me $200 to make up the shortfall.
I remember choking up with emotion. It was a lot of money back then.
I remember refusing, but I remember most of all, her walking up to an ATM machine and withdrawing the money right there and then and she put it in my hand.
"Pay me when you can Rach. There's no hurry".
At that moment, I had a glimpse of greatness again.
The ability of a human being to shower happiness and hope on another human being by an expression of greatness.
And again we reach a point I could leave you feeling uplifted and tell you that my life changed at this point and the rest was history.
No, instead the story takes a turn ...
A couple of weeks after, I had paid her back and we were walking and chatting together along one of the shaded lanes at the University. It was a gorgeous sunny day.
I can't even remember what we were talking about, but I remember, I suddenly became angry and blurted something out.
Actually it felt like an explosion of anger shooting out of me, spitting fire, burning anything it touched, corrosive in nature like acid.
The recipient of my wrath stopped in her tracks.
The next thing I recall is her face, sublime and serene like the moon, with a hint of sadness in her eyes as she looked at my angry face.
And then without a word, she walked away.
She wasn't angry, she knew her own power and saw my weakness for what it was.
She didn't holler at me, she chose not to engage in whatever anger-infused accusation I made, and she simply walked away.
As I stood there seeing her walk away, I remember my world crashing in slow motion around me.
My cheeks glowing, my heart racing, my head pounding and my world spinning.
It felt like I've spat on the face of a saint or committed some heinous crime, too vile to be forgiven.
How can I spit fire at someone who graciously lent me a helping hand when I needed it the most, only a few days ago?
How can I be this bad, this broken, and this awful inside?
How did I go from being poised for greatness to being the person who felt angry, hurt and out of control?
That was the day I acknowledged that something had to change.
I've been carrying around so much unhappiness, anger, and frustration that I've piled away for years and I had somehow turned into an angry person who shouts at a friend without any justifiable reason.
I knew that wasn't who I was deep down.
I remembered the glimpses that I've had into my own greatness as a child and I decided, that was my true nature.
Not being an angry, frustrated, unhappy, and hurt individual who hurts others, walking around like an open wound, and wincing at each turn because all I could feel was my pain.
I've heard people talk about having "anger management issues", so I decided perhaps that's what I had.
I don't know, maybe I had nothing of the kind, just a whole lot of pain, confusion and frustration doing its damage at a soul level, that needed to be cleared out.
I decided to take action and start dealing with what was beneath the surface.
I finally shed tears I've been holding back for years.
I apologised, I started journaling my thoughts, I started breathing deeply and releasing emotion.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Unleash Your Greatness by Rachel Hale. Copyright © 2016 Rachel Hale. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Dedication, vii,A Note from the Author, ix,
PART 1,
Chapter 1 Revenge of the Underachiever, 1,
Chapter 2 Spitfire, 13,
PART 2,
Chapter 3 Unleashing Greatness, 25,
Chapter 4 Your Heart's Desires, 39,
Chapter 5 What It Takes, 49,
Chapter 6 The Power of Your Thoughts, 63,
Chapter 7 Permission, 73,