Where are you holding back on the gifts that are yours to offer?

Looking for some support? If now is the time to consider coaching (or a CEO peer circle), reach out here.

My daughter was looking up at me, beaming. She was holding a piece of art paper with a big heart strewn across the page. The heart was full of large stripes, each a different color. “I made this for you, Papa,” she told me proudly. I knelt next to her, with one arm around her back and the other taking the paper from her. “Wow, this is beautiful, my love. Thank you! I love it.”

My children are without question my greatest teachers. On this particular morning, my daughter was helping me reconnect with a birthright each of us receives but often forfeits: the inclination to share our gifts freely.

My daughter has no doubts about the beauty and value of her art. Most mornings, she plops down at the tiny table we set up for her just outside the kitchen, grabs a handful of crayons or paintbrushes, and sets to work on the morning’s creation. Whenever she deems it finished, she proudly presents it to her chosen recipient or asks that we hang it on the wall for her.

In coaching training, one of the simpler but more difficult elements we learned is called blurting. It means to simply state, without prefacing or framing, whatever thought has come into one’s mind. The gamble is to trust that what is arising in the coach while listening to the client will be of service to the client. (The blurt must arise from deep listening and high regard for the client, not a place of distraction or self-regard.)

I find this practice one of the more difficult in coaching because it involves implicitly trusting myself and my relationship with my client. I also find it difficult because I was trained from a young age to second-guess my gifts. Throughout grade school and early middle school, it felt like most efforts at sharing my authentic self with those around me were met with ridicule. I received the message that the genuine parts of me did not belong or would not be accepted. Carl Jung would say I learned subconsciously to shove those parts of me into my shadow.

In Jungian theory, our shadow is composed of the parts of us that we hide from the world and ourselves because they are undesirable or socially unacceptable. Shadow is sometimes misunderstood to be the dirty parts of us: sexual proclivities and infantile needs. But the truth is, our shadow also often includes our brightest gifts. As an example, many men in Western culture are taught in childhood that to be masculine is to forego deep emotions or the need for an open-hearted connection with others. As a result, many men whose love and openness are needed by the world around them live closed off; this part of their giftedness is relegated to shadow.

Our gifts do not want to remain closed off. They do not want to remain in shadow. They want to be shared freely with the same level of openness and abandon with which my daughter, beaming up at me, offered her drawing.

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I am curious about you as you read this piece. What gifts are you withholding, either partially or fully, from the world around you today? Maybe it is the offering of your full presence to your partner, child, friend, or colleague. Maybe it is your intuition around a strategic decision in your company. Maybe it is your music, your comedy, or that novel you have been putting off writing because “no one will ever read it anyway.”

How would you live if you trusted that your most intimate and personal gifts were desperately needed by others around you? Rather than assuming you were offering the world an act of humility by withholding your offering, what if you reached old age only to realize you were robbing others of something they desperately needed?

For me, this week, these prompts have me reconnecting with the knowledge that one of the most critical gifts I can offer my wife, my children, my friends, and my clients is my open-hearted presence. To be deeply and fully with each of them in the moments between us. And I am recommitting to offering that gift in as many moments as possible this week.

What about you? What are you up for offering this week?

I would love to hear if you are up for sharing.

Looking for some support? If now is the time to consider coaching (or a CEO peer circle), reach out here.

In the meantime, sending a big hug your way from my desk in LA.

-Matt