There’s a feeling I trigger often in people. Maybe you’ve experienced it yourself. When you’ve been in the audience for one of my events, one of my Zooms, read one of my articles, or watched a video of mine.
I didn’t even realize I was doing it, until very recently. It was instinctive in me, I make myself feel good when I do it, without realizing it.
My superpower is: I elicit awe in people.
I do awesome things, tell awesome stories, I collect awesome stories to tell, I do things that scare me and let people watch in awe, I create a feeling in myself and then I can create it in others.
The sad reality is with this awareness came the realization that I learned to do this as a child. A child so neglected and ignored I learned to operate at this highest level to get the attention I was desperately craving.
It became another known superpower, all born from my childhood trauma.
I’ve been aware for a while of my extreme self-reliance. It has served me powerfully. Again, born out of my childhood trauma. Terrible lessons for a child to learn from their parents.
I also never ask permission. Doing so as a child put me at risk. I take action and just do it.
Not all of these superpowers are 100% good. Many have a dark side and steep price to be paid if left unchecked.
I learned to compartmentalize my fear and trauma growing up, as a lot of trauma survivors do. It’s what you do to survive.
Over time, these survival techniques overcompensate. I was so good at hiding from danger, it manifested itself in ways like estranging myself from my business partner and making me unable to enjoy the success I had earned.
This was all happening without me consciously thinking about it, and I withdrew from a lot of things.
The key difference these days is I’ve come to terms with it. I understand where it comes from, how it affects me, how it has affected me, and most importantly… I now control it.
I know what it’s like to create awe in people. I know exactly how to do it. I know the feeling it gives me, and I find new situations to create it.
And as I’ve learned these truths about myself I have realized one other thing – everyone has hidden superpowers that they don’t even know they have. I see them now. That’s another of my superpowers. Because I see it in myself, I have clarity and see them clearly in others. Even if they have no idea they’re doing it, just as I hadn’t.
Someone I’m thinking of is the person you reach out to when you’re in crisis. They’re the person that will drive for hours in the middle of the night to be with you and support you. They will listen intently and hold space for you. What a superpower.
Someone I’m thinking of spreads love through crafts. They make them by hand, personalized to the recipient, package and send them out. They have confessed to me that no one is going to like their “piece of crap”. But I know the truth, that they are sending tangible love. That the recipient feels love, when they hold this object that was made for them, that they were thought of, that time was spent making this for them. What a gift.
Someone I know brings the super power of laughter. Not as a comic or clown, there to entertain us, but of bringing an energy into the room. That we can all laugh at ourselves. And if we can’t laugh at ourselves, what can we laugh at? Bringing laughter into the room is such a superpower.
As I wrote this article I wondered what I could do to unlock it for a reader.
It all started with this statement for me: The things that make me great I carry as secret shame.
So my invitation would be to start there. What is so easy for you, that feels so unearned, so different from everyone else, so “nothing”, that you feel shame about it? What changes for you when you choose to look at it as a superpower instead?
PS: I wrote this article some weeks previous and sat on it. I was afraid to share it until today. Sometimes I have to remind myself to ask what scares me and do that thing. This is the result.
