Taking Responsibility for What You Love

Rosetta Thurman has long been one of my favorite bloggers--I've been reading her blog since she began in 2007. Today she has a 5-year anniversary post (Congrats, Rosetta!) that really resonated for me. It's about taking responsibility for what you love and what happens when you do:

What I really want to say is that when you take responsibility for what you love and begin to show up with your unique gifts and talents, magic happens. People start to support you and help you in your quest to do meaningful work. You begin to see new possibilities for changing the world in your own way – whether that’s through writing or teaching or making art or feeding the homeless or taking care of babies or preserving the environment or making sure that we all have affordable healthcare.

Here's what gets me about Rosetta's post. It's about taking responsibility for our passions and gifts. Do you hear that? Taking responsibility. 

I've written before about the impact that our career stories and frames have on our thinking. For many of us, our passions and gifts are either completely unacknowledged (at worst) or we see them as being "impractical" and somehow less important. As a result, we will pay little attention to those gifts. We don't call attention to them or nurture them. If they somehow get in the way of the "real work," we will actively do what we can to shut them down. There's no room for them so we need to push them aside. 

How would our thinking and approach to our gifts change if we saw ourselves as having a responsibility to bring them into the world, to nurture and grow them? What if I felt irresponsible when I pushed my gifts aside or did work that didn't make the most of what I bring to the world? What if my REAL responsibility wasn't to fit in to what everyone else wants from me, but to, instead, be clear about my own gifts and do what I could to nurture and express them? What a different world THAT might be. . . 

 Try an experiment. Ask yourself how your thinking about yourself shifts when you see yourself as taking responsible for your passions and gifts, really owning them. How would it change how you see yourself? What would you do differently? 

Comments

[Tera Qualls]

Thank you again for a great post and making us all aware of great resources and ideas out in the world. I'm thankful to have found your posts, some how they are always the right thing, at the right time.

[Michele]

Tera--you made my day!