Is Your Best Trait Also Your Biggest Weakness?

The way I work with your purpose – you can experience your purpose through its light side and its shadow side.

(Of course, these polarities don’t actually exist since your purpose is the entirety and more like one big continuum. But since we’re human and it’s easier to talk about things in dualities, we’ll start there.)

On the light side, your purpose feels great. You feel aligned, fulfilled, energized, and like you’re contributing effortlessly. You are in the flow.

On the shadow side, you can be wracked with insecurity, fear, doubt, and anger. You may wonder about your life, your personality, your meaning – everything.

That’s because in order to express the highest and most refined aspects of your purpose, you ALSO have to know its heaviest, ugliest, darkest sides too.

Imagine it’s like hiking – you can’t get to the top of the mountain without starting in a valley. In fact, you can’t even conceive of the top of a mountain without the parallel and opposite concept of a valley.

In the same way, all of your gifts and talents have a parallel and opposite side too.

The key to feeling good about yourself and your life is figuring out when and how to navigate them.

In the video below, I share how the qualities that help you excel in your career, may be the worst qualities you bring to your relationship.

But here’s the trick – they are the SAME qualities. They are just expressed to different extents in a different context.

I first wrote about this concept for The Huffington Post in 2014, and it came back up this week in a conversation with a friend:

He shared his vision for a new business venture, in which he’d be speaking on stage. This man is an EXCELLENT speaker. I mean, top notch. He’s funny, likable, and easy to understand. But more than that – he can connect with the audience and adapt his talk to meet their needs in the moment. It’s brilliant!

But switch to a different context – love – and his ability to surrender himself to the needs of another makes him co-dependent.

Here’s the key – that DOES NOT mean he needs to get rid of the underlying quality in both of those – deep attentiveness and care for others.

It means he needs to A) accentuate it on the light side and B) become aware of how it shows up on the shadow side, so that he can make conscious and deliberate choices about how he uses his best gift for good.

I’m willing to be the same is true for you.

Watch the video below to see how it might be happening for you:

You can read The Huffington Post article I mentioned HERE.

Love,
Alexis