What Makes You YOU?

Right now, there are over 7.6 billion people alive on the earth today. Nearly 8 billion people with their own unique experiences, talents, hopes and aspirations. Some of those people are experiencing the best day of their lives while others are facing the very worst. With so many people around, you may have found yourself asking what, if anything, is special about you? Well, the answer is yes. A lot! Today we’re are continuing our Independence series where it’s all about you. To build a healthy relationship, you will first need to develop a healthy mentality and in order to do that, first you need to know who you are!

How do you feel about your uniqueness? Thinking about it, are you happy, confident, uncomfortable, embarrassed? Is it understated in your day-to-day life or does it need to be recognized in order for you to feel validated? Are what come to mind the superficial differences based off of what you do, what you wear or what you say about yourself or is it something deeper? In order to embrace our uniqueness, it is essential to understand what it is that truly makes you unique; what makes you you, and to understand that we have to go all the way back to the beginning.

Allie – Before you were one in 7.6 billion people, you were 1 in 40-250 million sperm cells. (Yep, we’re going back to the beginning beginning!)

https://www.livescience.com/32437-why-are-250-million-sperm-cells-released-during-sex.html

The crazy thing to think about here is that had it been any of those other cells that had fertilized the egg instead of yours, you would not exist. It wouldn’t just be you with different hair color or different eyes, but a completely separate person!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2176016/It-DOES-make-difference-wins-race-Scientists-scan-100-sperm-man--huge-DNA-differences.html

So, before you were even born, at the moment of your conception, you were already this amazingly unique individual who could never exist exactly the same in any other combination. From the very beginning, you were you!

Now, let’s fast forward to today, and you are surrounded by almost 8 billion other people with completely different lives, experiences, perspectives. And in all of these people, you will never find another person who is just like you. 1 in 8 billion. That may sound pretty mind blowing, but let’s take it a step further. Let’s look throughout all of human history. There has never been another person before who was just like you. No one in the past could have had your unique DNA sequence. No one in the past had ever lived in the same exact situation that you were brought up in. There has never been another person just like you before...And there never will be again. In the future there will never be anyone else exactly like you, either. Even if in some sci-fi version of the future, scientists were able to create a genetic replica clone down to each individual cell, that clone would not have your experiences. It would not have your life and it would be existing in a completely different environment from the one you are in. Face it, there is never going to be another person just like you again!

And this is exactly what makes you so valuable! The truth is, you don’t have to do anything to make you any more unique because you already are as unique as you will ever be. Your value as an individual is intrinsic; that means in came with you from the beginning. No one can give it to you and nobody can take it away. It means that nothing you do can make you more or less valuable. If everyone in the world got together and decided you were a really great person, it wouldn’t change your individual worth by one bit. It also means that when anyone else refuses to acknowledge your value, when they take advantage of you, use you and even the traumatic abuses that far too many of us have to endure could never diminish your value, either. They didn’t give it to you so they can’t take it away.

So, our first key to developing a healthy mentality is that you have to know who you are. You need to understand your true individual worth and that it doesn’t come from what you do, what you know, how you dress or any external thing but it is about who you are. A diamond isn’t considered to be so valuable because of what it does. It’s a rock. When it is pulled from the earth, it doesn’t even look that great, but once it is cleaned and cut and polished and placed in a setting, it becomes one of the most expensive things many people will ever buy, and still it just sits there. It’s not valuable because of what it does, it’s value comes from it’s perceived rarity. But there are millions of diamonds in the world. Now, they can even create diamonds in labs but there will never be another person EVER who is like you. How much more infinitely valuable must you be?

Today we covered the first step to developing a healthy mentality and next week, we will continue our conversation as we talk about the dark side of self worth when we cover toxic independence. We’ll finish the month with the 2nd key to developing a healthy mentality as we learn to invest our worth in the world by finding our purpose!

Thank you for joining us and we’ll see you back here next week!