A gift is something we did not earn. It just comes to us. It is our choice to accept or ignore our gifts and to use them any way we choose. The greatest thing about our gifts are when we share them with others, everyone’s life is richer. Each of us has gifts whether we recognize them or not. Part of adopting a person centered approach to your life is to spend some intentional effort discovering your gifts.

We can all point to celebrities like athletes or musician whose gifts have been recognized and developed. Yes, these people are gifted, but so are you. What do you like to do? What have you always been “good at”? This is a way to begin discovering your gifts.

It is indeed a fortunate person who discovers enough of their gifts early in their lives and is able to incorporate these gifts into one or more areas of their life. A person whose gifts include attention to detail may be happiest with life experiences with a lot of structure. Vocational choices could come from fields like science and medicine, information technology, accounting or statistics, among a few of the many possibilities.

If your gifts are more in the realm of listening, empathy, encouraging and nurturing, you may fine maximum satisfactions in a profession where close personal relationships with people provide your best working environment. Education and the human services field have many possibilities for satisfying careers.

Everyone recognizes that leadership is a gift, but so is being a valuable team member. The ultimate goal of discovering your gifts is to determine how closely they line up with how you are living your life, investing your talents and energy. You are the happiest you can be when you are living out the fullest expression of your gifts that you possibly can.

This may sound nice and simple. It is anything but. I have talked with many people who do not seem to be living out their gifts. There are many reasons for this. Sometimes the choices we have made mean we cannot live out our gifts–for now . Whenever I try to help some discover their gifts, I ask a question, such as, ”If time and money weren’t an issue, what would you be doing right now?”

Dreaming like this can help us discover, or re-discover our gifts. That is the first step. Once we know what our gifts are, we can decide what, if anything, we wish we were doing to live more in our gifts.

As we move forward, let’s do it with an eye to how we are moving in and utilizing our gifts in every area of our lives. Oh, yes, and it is never too late to discover your gifts. There are always choices we can make based on this knowledge. Remember, the world is waiting for your gifts. What are you waiting for?

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