Authors Note: This is a guest post by my friend Matthias Miller. Matthias is a professional coach who is passionate about seeing people discover the reason they’re alive and reach their maximum potential. You can check out his website here.
Our greatest terror does not always come from facing our weaknesses. It sometimes comes from standing toe-to-toe with our strengths and being forced to reckon with them.
That’s what happened to me in the third grade, though I didn’t know it at the time.
It was 3:45 on a Thursday afternoon, and I’d just gotten home from school. I was frustrated beyond words, practically in tears because I was faced with one of the worst homework assignments I could imagine: writing.
“Mom,” I cried, “I don’t have any idea what to write about!”
I tried hard to think of something fun and interesting, but my mind was blank. And every time I tried to think of an idea, my mind got blanker and blanker.
My mother, like the good mother she was, gently helped me brainstorm. The ideas trickled in slowly, but she patiently encouraged me until at last I settled on an idea. It wasn’t the perfect idea by any means, but it was good enough to start.
My first sentence turned into a second sentence, then my second into a third. My frustration turned to relief when I finished the last sentence of my one-paragraph assignment. I’d done it!
I didn’t know it at the time, but one of my greatest strengths lay on the other side of my frustration and fear.
With every assignment, I fell in love with writing a little more.
I discovered these blank pages, rather than holding me prisoner, could set me free to share ideas and stories that would engage and inspire people around me. I discovered the words I wrote on a page could keep people spellbound, sucking them into a story before they realized its hypnotic power.
By the eighth grade, I knew I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.
But then I got scared.
You might think that once I’d fallen so deeply in love with writing, I’d never stop.
It wasn’t that easy
As I grew older, I began to write the things that were on my mind. I wrote with no particular agenda. I discovered, much to my surprise, that my words were scary to other people.
That’s when I learned I had another strength: I was willing to question the status quo.
As long as I was a little child in school, others could easily ignore me. But as I continued writing, it wasn’t possible any more. Others stopped feeling safe with my ideas, so they stopped feeling safe with me. When they stopped feeling safe with me, I stopped feeling safe with myself.
Not knowing what else to do, I crawled into a hole. I took my little talent and buried it. I was again terrified, not by my weakness, but by the sheer power of my strength. I realized that I had the power to shape culture, to transform lives, to awaken dreams within others. And I would not trust myself to do it, because I had no one trusting me.
Still, something within me refused to die. I would try, again and again, to find my voice in writing. No matter how often I popped my head out into the open, I always found myself retreating and burying my talent.
That’s when I learned that greatness demands courage.
It demands courage to trust yourself before the world trusts you, to love those who care more about your ideas than about your heart. It demands courage to write words that matter, to lead boldly where others shrink back, to love deeply while you challenge others to go outside their comfort zone.
Most of all, it demands courage to stand toe-to-toe with your strengths. Your greatest fear, after all, might not be the fear of weakness. It might be the fear that you truly might be more powerful than you know.
Where are you holding back because you don’t have the courage to become everything you were meant to be?
Then go, live your life courageously because the world longs to see everything you were born to be!
