Plant seeds that have lain dormant for decades will spring into life if the conditions are right. The same is true of the gifts we have that go unused.
Unfortunately, it’s only too often that our natural gifts get cast aside and buried in our childhood. It doesn’t take much. It’s a paradox that our gifts on the one hand are enduring and robust but on the other delicate and in need of nurture when first emerging.
Even when we know our gifts well, they still require attention. As the saying goes, ‘The flowers of tomorrow are the seeds of today.’ It’s a fact of nature that there’s lots of growth before every bloom reaches its full glory.
My conversation with Andrew brought this point home. His unique compelling quality ('UCQ') contains a natural inner strength. However, like a muscle, it needed exercising to blossom into its full potential. Andrew achieved this over the years doing improv. Having to be both spontaneous and entertaining, while under the glare of the spotlight, teaches you to believe in yourself, because in improv that’s all you have to lean on.
Andrew’s other gifts are the ability to be both structured and intuitive, as well as having an appetite for solving problems. Like an artist who first builds his scaffolding and then has the stability to express himself freely.
Beyond improv, he specializes in helping people develop their elevator pitches and network effectively. His approach mirrors his UCQ. The pitch provides a stable structure that acts as the springboard from which one can dive into a deeper connection.
This gift for structure also gives him the ability to analyze the component parts of a pitch while his intuition allows him to craft the story.
All too often, we forget that we’re designed to work in harmony. Our intellect and embodied intelligence in sync with each other. Andrew has both parts naturally complementing each other as they are designed to do.
And what makes a great pitch?
Well, it needs to draw people in and find a match between what we’re offering and what the other person wants but perhaps more important than that it needs to get over who we are. It must allow us to tell our story authentically.
Andrew made a point that went to the heart of the problem. We can easily get so deeply embedded in who we are and the expertise we have that it’s hard for us to be objective about how others see us.
He told me the story of when he was part of an improv group, taking classes. They called themselves ‘the myths and legends.’
“So it was kind of, dragons and princes and kings and all that kind of stuff. And we were having a crisis of confidence.
We had our first show coming up and we were really in a rough shape. One of the guys that I knew, he was a really good improvisor, better than I'll ever be, And he went on stage and just blew it. It's hard to blow it in improv, but he absolutely blew it.
And he came off stage shaking and was like, “What’s going on?”
So our director sat us in a circle and said, “Okay, so you're going to turn to the person next to you, and you're going to tell them one thing you admire about them and one piece of work they've done that really caught your attention.”
And there were couple of crazy things about that. The first was none of us had any trouble coming up with either of those things. No matter who you were sitting next to, you knew who the people were and you knew what they were about.
And the person sitting to my left turned to me and said, "You know, you really play regal characters well, like the princes and the kings, you have a real knack for that."
And the funny thing was that I had been trying to avoid those because I kind of naturally fell into them.”
This is the thing, and I find it time and time again, when you name the gift you give it wings and the more accurately you can describe it the easier it is to see how you can best apply it.
Now Andrew didn’t want to play kings and princes forever but naming that talent meant that when he did, he could embrace it in a different way, and inhabit the role more completely. And, of course, you can play King Lear or Hamlet, Aragon (Narnia) or King Arthur. The possibilities are endless.
That’s the thing about our gifts. They are what we naturally excel at but it’s for us to decide which wall to put our ladder up against. And if we want others to know about them we need to be clear how to tell them our story.
If you would like to know more about Andrew you can find him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewwinig/
If you would like your free copy of how to turn your UCQ into a seven-figure gift click here: https://www.embodiedintelligence.world/sevenfiguregift
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