Work Your Brilliance: the uncommon art of being paid to be yourself

"Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you." - Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak

Most people look for their gift. Some people eventually realise they've been living it.

The thing you didn't realise was your work

James Doty writes: only when we believe we are enough in ourselves do we find the ability to contribute to life, but only in contributing to our world do we discover we are inherently enough. It's a paradox that resolves itself through action, not through certainty.

But there is something that makes stepping into contribution easier — and it's this: recognising that the thing you kept returning to, the thing that fascinated you long before it had any commercial logic, the thing you were informally studying while doing other things entirely — is probably the precise place your deepest expertise lives.

You didn't acquire it in a training. You acquired it by living. By being challenged in it, curious about it, compelled by it across decades and contexts.

The person who has spent forty years in a complicated relationship with money and meaning - and has done the work to come through it - knows things about that landscape that no certificate can confer. The person who was always the one people came to, always the one who saw what others missed, always the one holding the difficult truths that needed speaking - she has been practising for a long time.

Your gift was never somewhere you had to get to. It has been moving through you for years, finding expression wherever it could, waiting for you to stop looking elsewhere and notice it.

What have you always been called back to?

Work Your Brilliance is a daily publication for people living the uncommon art of being paid to be themselves.