I am a woman, just like you. A woman with dreams and aspirations, with goals and to-do lists to accomplish those goals. I want to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous. Just like you!
Sometimes I am also afraid, scared to take risks, and scared of rejection and disappointment. I worry about what people will think! I also messed up in my life. Some of those messes I will never be able to fix.
For most of my life, I felt like a DUD, (Damned Ugly Duckling)!
As a duckling, I did not fit in in the farm yard. Not in the school cliques, not in the hockey team. Not at the office or in the boardroom.
As a duckling in the farmyard of life, I was bullied too! I had to do things I did not really want to do. I had to be who I was not! …. I so had enough of “Duckie do this!”, “Duckie do that”, “Duckie, you shouldn’t”, Duckie, you have to…” I tried to duck out of it….. Many times I just wanted to shout “Duck off!”
I came to a place where I looked in the mirror like the ugly duckling looked at her reflection in the water of the pond, and I hated what I saw.
Then… one day… someone came to my aid and said: “Duckie, you are much more than you have become…” She said: “Duckie, I believe in you, you can do this!” The words “Duckie, the world is your oyster!“ was such an inspiration to me!
So, I put my big girl pants on and went on a journey! Not a journey out into the world, but a journey inward.
My wish for you is that you will go on this journey. Choose the road less traveled by. And go it alone. No baggage, no worries, no expectation!
On this journey you will discover that there are two important days in one’s life… the day you are born, and the day you find out why you were born. I figured out that my purpose is to grow into a mountain, not to shrink to a grain of sand! I can become the swan I am destined to be. I am not a DUD, not a heap of tangled feathers in the dirt.
But times of transformation are uncomfortable, and yuk – just like the time when the ugly ducking spend that dark and dreary winter hidden away in a makeshift shelter in the reeds. In those dark times, we work on our belief systems. We mend our relationships. We learn to stop sabotaging our success. We grow our confidence. We watch our language. We speak life over ourselves. We start to understand that we are enough!
We are more than the numbers on the scale! We are more than the price tag on our clothes. I learned that I was more than the mark on my math test and much, much more than the number of likes I got on Facebook.
As we go through trials and tribulations, we realize good things about ourselves. These realizations create ripples in the pond…it makes us expand our consciousness. And one day, when we look again… we are no longer ugly ducklings.
Dear one, you are a …. SWAN! Significant Woman, Acting Now! You do not have to play small in the world just to make sure others do not feel uncomfortable around you!
All we need to do is to remember that “being hatched in a duck’s nest, in a farm yard, is of no consequence to a woman if she is hatched from a swan’s egg!!”
Inside of you is a force, that knows that it knows, that it knows that you are nature’s greatest miracle. Accept the challenge to share your wisdom with all those searching for a wise, comforting voice…. I salute each one of you!
Source: Some of my phrases are reworked from much-loved books such as “The greatest salesman in the world” – Og Mandino.