Written by MJ Ryan, SheEO Development Guide

I’ve always said I’m a person with goals or dreams. And mostly that’s true. I’ve navigated through life by bumping up to opportunities and saying yes, without an ultimate destination in mind. It turns out, I’ve discovered, that folks generally fall into either planners or opportunity takers. And researchers say that there is no difference between the two when it comes to income or achievement. But that’s a topic for another day…

Because it turns out I do have a goal, two actually. One is to support other people’s dreams to come true, which I am currently doing as a SheEO development guide. But the bigger one, the one that truly drives me, is to support folks, women and nonbinary people especially, in seeing themselves as the amazing individuals that they truly are. It hurts my heart whenever I hear someone say, and I hear it a LOT, that they lack confidence, have imposter syndrome, suffer from self doubt….I see it as my goal in life to change that once and for all, so that no future generations are burdened with these same insecurities.

There are many ways I try to wake folks up to their magnificence…And I am going to try some of them right here, right now. May they awaken in you the awe of your beingness.

Let’s start with this: it’s a magnification of a human brain cell. Isn’t that incredible? You literally have 100 billion of these in your head!

Cellular landscape cross-section through a eukaryotic cell, by Evan Ingersoll & Gael McGill

Or how about this from Aubrey Marcus:

“You are comprised of: 84 minerals, 23 elements and 8 gallons of water spread across 38 trillion cells. You have been built up from nothing by the spare parts of the Earth you have consumed, according to a set of instructions hidden in a double helix and small enough to be carried by (an egg) and a sperm. You are recycled butterflies, plants, rocks, streams, firewood, wolf fur, and shark teeth, broken down to their smallest parts and result into our planet’s most complex living thing. You are not living on Earth. You are Earth.”

Miraculous enough for you yet? How about these statistics about your uniqueness?

• Your mind/body/ spirit has never been replicated in the more than 70 billion humans who have lived on this planet.
• Three hundred thousand billion humans could have been created from your parents’ genes… But YOU were.
• There are 33 million possible combinations of your talents of thinking.

As my teacher Dawna Markova likes to say, we’re here to name, claim and aim our uniqueness for the benefit of all. There’s no time to waste. And for those in the U.S. where we are about to celebrate Thanksgiving, I’m going to add an additional request—please give thanks for the miracle of you this Thursday. The more we embrace and appreciate ourselves in our specificity, the more we fully inhabit the gifts we have to give.