Three Reasons to Hide Your Brilliance

Three Reasons to Hide Your Brilliance

This photo is of a cherry tree that I enjoy on my daily walk in the woods. For 2 weeks in May it puts out brilliant, perfect pink, soft blossoms. “Ta daaa!!!!! Expression! Brilliance!” It has no regrets, no fear, no doubt, just a dazzling array of pink petals fluffing into existence. What if flowers had language? Ohhhh, we’d never see a blossom! “I am not pink enough.” “One petal is damaged.” “This hussy flower over here is crowding out the light and space.” “I don’t know how to open up. I can’t figure it out.” “So, therefore, I must stay in the bed (er bud), and die in the bed (oops bud).”

Three reasons we hide our brilliance -

1. Made a decision in past that it’s better to be restrained, invisible, or quiet than risk ridicule, danger.

2. Made a decision in past that there is nothing brilliant about us. We are nothing, nobody, valueless. Mom always liked ________________ best.

3. Made a decision to let others have the stage. We’ll stay back here and support.

(There are more – and I know them, for I am one of the quintessential brilliance hiders.) My first coach used to read this quote to me every couple of months and it always made me cry because the truth was vivid and painful.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to manifest the glory that is within us. And as we let our light shine we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” Marianne Williamson

Three reasons to let your brilliance emerge

1. The world around you has changed – it’s not so dangerous as when you decided that it was, and you are bigger now, anyway.

2. The story about having no value is just a story. Maybe it’s a convenient way to just play small. Maybe you were told that by parents who were deep in their own pain. You were meant to have experiences and create experiences and discover all there is to discover being you. What would you do right now if you didn’t believe you had no brilliance in you? And hooray for you if you don’t know what I’m talking about – you’ve probably outed your brilliance already.

3. The world, whether it be you, your family,community, customers, state, country, or world, needs your brilliance on stage, not the shell that hides it. Your unique brilliance meets the world’s needs and wham! Magic. Solutions. Love. Order. Authenticity.

Here’s a teeny, tiny bit of coaching – a step to brilliance emergence: recall a time, however brief, when you experienced your brilliance. Maybe in your imagination in your room, maybe a subject at school, maybe an activity that your parents or culture didn’t value, maybe in watching or reading about someone who deeply inspired you. Immerse yourself in the feeling of expressing. Now, hold that feeling, and look to where you are hiding some brilliance now, you’re aware of a bud of brilliance aching to burst onto the scene. Bring your remembered experience of brilliance to that bud and know that you have the wisdom to open. It might be just a little, it might be wide open. Now take an action to manifest the opening, the brilliance. All’s good.

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Three Reasons to Hide Your Brilliance

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