Thinking You Need to be Extraordinary Sabotages You

In the last month, I had a great awareness based on a dream I had a few months ago. The dream had a graduation in it, and my dream-tending therapist asked me what graduation meant to me.

I said accomplishing something, achievement, a step towards growing into the next phase of my life. I proceeded to tell her when I graduated from college, I was given the award Most Likely To Succeed. She asked me if that was a big weight to carry. I looked at her and said, “What do you mean?”

She said, Did being labeled that out of college make you think you had to live up to that?” I sat there and felt my shoulders sink down like a big weight had been lifted off my shoulders. For the first time, I was seeing the reality of that award not as being grateful for being recognized for my potential but a subliminal message that now I had to live up to this. I had to be Extraordinary in order to be successful.

She asked me what it would it be like to just be ordinary, and to not think you have to be extraordinary to be considered a success?

I told her it felt like I just dropped a lot of baggage from my backpack. I felt relieved that I don’t have to keep pushing myself and thinking I have to do what others expect of me. For example, I had been struggling with deciding to go out and speak about my book and promoting myself as a speaker. The thought of marketing myself was not inviting. I have no problem speaking to large groups; I just didn’t want to have to market myself. I prefer magnetizing the opportunities to me by my thoughts and the frequency of energy I project. Staying in the flow of life verses pushing myself to do something I don’t want to do as it doesn’t give me energy.

In that moment, I realized how that one message 28 years ago was laid in my subconscious and served as a driving force in sabotaging me from listening to myself and instead perceive what external comments were telling me I had to do.

I had to live up to be Most Likely to Succeed, and the unconscious pressure that had put on me to have to do something I didn’t want to do in order to be successful. What a light bulb moment!

I love working with dreams because they bring so much of what is unconscious to the surface for me to release and become aware of.

In awakening to this belief and allowing myself to rest in being ordinary, I found my flow. I found that I was honoring more of my authentic nature and that was enough.

I was able to trust myself, what I wanted to do, and how I wanted to be and detach from an outcome. Thinking I had to be extraordinary kept me tied to expectations and controlling my actions verses listening to my intuition more fully. This inhibits flow and our authentic nature to be revealed in all its ordinariness. What I have discovered is that the extraordinary actually lives in our ordinariness. The illusion of being extraordinary is just an illusion that keeps you from your authentic nature.

The next time you think you have to be extraordinary, remember all you really have to honor is being plain old ordinary you – because You are magnificent in your ordinariness.