Uncover your superpower.

In other words, how can doing what you love and what you’re best at, combine to deliver value for others and as a result create value for yourself? The process of discovery must go in that order because making money will be the organic consequence of providing value. And of course, providing value is easiest to do when you lead with your strengths and are inspired by your work.

For those of you who have read Jim Collins’ book Good to Great, you’ll recognize ‘The Hedgehog Concept’ inside of this advice. 

The work that happens in coaching is certainly not about offering up this advice; because of course if people knew their passion and were anchored to their superpower, they’d likely not be coming to see me. My work instead functions to help people discover these things when they are otherwise obscured from sight. It begs the question, how do people discover these drivers in themselves? Well as the saying goes, “don’t ask people who have never been where you are going for directions”. 

So I figured I could share some of my story to illuminate how these principles have guided me on my path. Recently I was asked to create a bio for a networking platform where I would be working as a mentor/coach to a community of senior manager and director-level career professionals. These folks were often in some career transition and were looking to connect with peers and mentors as a way to get support and advice as they evolved in their professional lives. Anyway, the ask for the bio was, “what’s your superpower?” I kinda liked the question. It encouraged me to speculate on how my journey had always been guided by an either subtle or at times overt awareness of my “superpower”. I like to talk about life in this way, as a journey, and more specifically, as ‘The Hero’s Journey’. I use this concept with some clients to help them place themselves inside of a narrative arch of their lives and even sometimes to conceptualize where they are in our work together. (I also tend to think inherent in the concept is some optimism that I believe serves all people when they are inside of uncertain times). Some readers may be familiar with the book by Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces in which the author discusses the archetypal hero’s journey which can be found in myths across the world. A basic overview might go like this. 

• Discover the Ordinary World

  Why are you not satisfied? What do you want? What don’t you want? How are you knowingly or unknowingly complicit in creating those conditions?

• Call to Adventure

  What’s actually possible and how does it contrast to what you think is possible? Where did you encounter this possibility? How can you start to envision a shift from ordinary to extraordinary?

• Take a trip

  Decide you will do it. Begin to explore actions and insights that might take you to a new realm. An adventure will begin that aims to move from ordinary to extraordinary. Here you will meet resistance – but this resistance, if endured will provide the foundation for breakthroughs.

• Cross the threshold

  There will have been tests, allies, and enemies. You will learn to separate yourself from old patterns to find new possibilities. You will begin to internalize those possibilities as new ways of being. Your identity begins to shift from ordinary to extraordinary.

• The road back

  Returning with the Elixir. Here you will learn to create your world rather than letting it create you. You will share your insights with the people in your life and train them on how to respond to you and to their lives in a way that causes breakthroughs for them.

What is your Superpower?

With every great hero comes a great superpower, virtue, asset, or character feature that they come to rely on. So in the spirit of the hero’s journey and in response to the prompt for the bio, here is what I came up with as my ‘superpower’.

I can make the invisible visible.

So how does this function? I’ve discovered that so many people are tugged around by invisible saboteurs that live inside of their psyche. You may recognize them as fear, doubt, shame, blame, guilt, apprehension, and the list goes on. These imposters obscure our virtues, steal our power, inhibit our self-expression, stifle our freedom, and ultimately limit the possibility of finding passion, joy, happiness, fulfillment, and success. They may in fact have climbed aboard the metaphorical bus early on in your life with the intention of keeping you safe. But now, unchecked, they are disproportionate to each threat. The imposters like ‘fear’ masquerade themselves as virtues like ‘safety’. They make you small. They confine you to the ‘ordinary world’. In this world, there is of course no possibility. So to make the invisible, visible is to help people gain access to their power. 

Now, bear with me. I know it might feel a bit too superpower-y but I do think it speaks to the character strengths that I have come to rely on. And like any good superhero story, my ‘superpower’ emerged from my liabilities or my biggest vulnerabilities. Covering those in depth would require a whole other blog post as there would be quite a breath of material. So for now I’ll just offer a sneak peek. Learning disabled. Victim of a violent crime. Product of an inner-city where poverty, violence, and trauma could not be unseen. 

From this place you have only two paths it seems. You learn to harness compassion or let resentment harness you. Resentment towards the teachers that didn’t hold hope for you, for the system that put you in the ‘special’ classes, the middle schools that disqualified you, the tests that justified your public shaming. Or compassion for them.

Resentment towards the person that left you for dead, eventually to wake up with an oxygen mask on in the ICU, 90 stitches in the face, blood in the lungs, 7 chipped teeth, and a soft food diet fed through a syringe. Or compassion for him.

Resentment towards the system that allows for the richest and ‘greatest country in the world’ to leave so many of its own people homeless, foodless, and worst of all without reprieve from the violence in their community or even their homes. Or compassion for it. 

Making the invisible visible, like any superpower, like your superpower, was likely born from some novel combination of innate predispositions and unique environmental circumstances. Compassion was probably the foundation though. So let’s start there. This process of recounting the origin story might help you discover your superpower as well. It might help you understand why the novel combination of nature and nurture makes it uniquely yours. As for me, here is how the context of my life forged the virtues that I have come to know as my own. 

As far as these virtues go, I think compassion forms the foundation. I’d like to think it emerged as some amalgamation of a natural affinity for people, curiosity, dependence, and humility. All of which on their own seem to have some origin story. I’d like to say that with some great determination I overcame my resentment and miraculously found some deep reserve of compassion. But I think it’s just the way I’ve always experienced the world. A natural affinity for people contradicts resentment… This paired with an optimism that was both inborn and nurtured made compassion a default setting. 

Connection necessitates compassion, and dependence is made easier via connection. And for me depending on others was not so much a choice, but an adaptive survival instinct. To help me navigate both the challenges I had in school along with the at times dangerous inner-city environment, I learned that I needed to depend on others. Society’s message of ‘pass the test or become a garbage man’ had somehow seeped in. I didn’t know how to pass the test and didn’t want to become a garbage man. And thus I had to look to others for support. I had to depend on their willingness to go out of their way to help me. Additionally, getting on the bus as the skinny white kid in my neighborhood was no privilege, in fact, it made me an alluring target. But not as much if I had a crew. So, I got a crew. As I said connection starts with empathy and compassion… always. I required connection almost for survival, and thus I developed these assets. You can imagine how difficult it would be to connect to and rely on others with a heart full of resentment. Compassion was a far more adaptive feature of the mind.

The other seemingly incidental consequences of the merit-based mockery that our school systems subjected me to, were both humility and curiosity. First being evaluated and stacked ranked against your peers from the age of 6 and perpetually finding yourself on the bottom of the list on the measurement that purported to describe the virtue that would determine the rest of your life (ie. intellect as measured by academic success) made it extremely difficult for me to assume I was better than anyone. What a blessing. Thus, what choice did I have but to develop some humility? There just wasn’t much evidence to suggest I owned any superior virtues, at least as they were being measured at that point in my life. 

As for curiosity, being told that I was not capable (while others clearly were) of course, raised the question, ‘why is this the case?’. I was often enamored by my peer’s ability to do math or even understand the assignment upon hearing the first set of instructions. But I was seeing that these same kids couldn’t play sports or make friends the way I could. Seeing that their profound abilities were as significant as their limitations, made me believe that perhaps I had checkboxes on each end of this continuum, limitations as well as capabilities. Because my ‘differences’ were made so salient by the system, there wasn’t much of an option for me to ignore them. And thus it left me with a burning curiosity to understand the causes of these differences.  Moreover, I wondered how having these differences may be the very thing that is most universal in the human experience. I realized that no one has everything but everyone has something, and that, that very factor is what makes us all more similar than different in the end. I came to believe that if I lead with my power and am not crippled by my kryptonite, there will be a place for me. Thus this curiosity, forced humility, and compassion formed the basis of the character strengths that I now count as my superpowers.

So it wasn’t in spite of these circumstances or limitations but rather because of them that these assets, or in this context, these ‘superpowers’, evolved. I could see virtues that people couldn’t see in themselves. On some level, I understood that if I didn’t have some affinity towards people, they wouldn’t have an affinity towards me. And as I have already described, in my circumstances I couldn’t really afford that. I found that with empathy, compassion, curiosity, and humility at the foundation of my interactions, I was often able to help shed light on aspects of their experience that they had spent their lives learning how to hide from the world. In doing so, I came to believe that this orientation gave people the space they needed to begin to accept all of themselves. There seemed to be some healing in that. I discovered that I could make the Invisible, Visible. Now the question for the rest of my life would be, “what can I do with this superpower?” And that question has come to define my ‘Hero’s Journey’. Perhaps my origin story has also left some clues about what your origin story may be. I hope it prompts some contemplation and has you uncover or rediscover the unique combination of nature and nurture that gave life to your power. In doing so, I hope you take the opportunity to rediscover or nurture these powers as something you can strap your faith to. Perhaps this will reveal the trailhead that allows you to cross the threshold from the ordinary world into the extraordinary.