a lot of people were raised to believe that they need to fix their weaknesses but their talents would take care of themselves*
Mary Reckmeyer

May you have the grace of encouragement
To awaken the gift in another’s heart,
Building in them the confidence
To follow the call of the gift.**
John O’Donohue

We’re not trying to become balanced in our skills-set –
That’s an individualistic view of things;
Our strengths are what they are because –
Consciously or unconsciously –
We have poured time and effort into them …
And not into other abilities;
There’ll be others out there who have
totally the opposite talents and strengths to us, and
that’s a good thing –
This is how the balance should be.

Doing the things we must will be
hard enough, but
we find ourselves drawn back to them again and again;
There are other things that we never have
the energy for, that we never want to return to –
We must stop doing these things – we’ll never be really any good at them – and
focus on what really matters to us.

*Mary Reckmeyer’s Strengths Based Parenting;
**John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For a New Position.