Step One INHALE

In the prelude to great moments in your life, you prepared yourself for action. Remember? You stopped and expanded your chest with a breath that cleansed the fears embedded within you. That’s what happened seconds before you brushed across those lips: You paused to take in a long breath before attempting that kiss; you closed your eyes and expanded as if in a ritual encapsulating your fears.

The times you dared to pedal without help were wonderful, the first time you swam deep into the sea, the time you crossed the dark alley of so many nightmares alone. It happened just before the great moments—that inhalation announced you would say yes, you would initiate that change, you would finally decide to let go of the pain you were carrying. You inhaled to prepare yourself, and after you exhaled, you took the step that had been so hard to take.

Unfortunately, with the arrival of obligations to fulfill and bills to pay, the impulse that drove you to move forward with your dreams weakened. You began to distance yourself from what you wanted, passions disappeared, and suddenly you stopped recognizing yourself in the mirror. Audacious inspiration ceased to appear with the same frequency; your heart became constricted; your soul went silent; and the muffled roar in your throat began to wither.

To regain that breath you need to relearn how to fill your chest, to swell with courage, and this begins with the act of knowing yourself in depth. It is time to take back what belongs to you, to set aside time to talk with yourself, and to do so regarding who you are. We have spent a good part of our lives learning about numbers and doctrines, about the names of trees and literary devices, about the erosion of rocks and the heroes who wrote our past, but far less time has been taken to teach us how to get to know ourselves: to understand how we think or why we think the way we do.

Gathering the momentum to roar involves rediscovering ourselves, knowing our attachments, identifying our talents, and understanding why we carry wounds that condition our behaviors.

In the following pages, I will guide you through this process. It all begins with a deep breath that you can turn into a tornado.

THE BODY DANCES WITH ANYBODY, BUT THE SOUL DOES NOT LAUGH WITH ANYONE.

TALENTS

One of the reasons we are unable to pursue the activities we most enjoy is the burden of wondering if we have the right talents. Many people are unaware of their true skills, and they will never get to discover them if they remain where they never have the opportunity to put them into practice. This may be your case. We’ve been conditioned to ignore our talents because we’re still tied to an educational system that seems sometimes not only to hide them, but also to stifle their development. How can we know our talents if we’ve spent our lives surrounded by obstacles that prevent us from using them?

THE COMFORT ZONE IS ALSO A CONFLICT ZONE.

First, we’ve been led to believe that ability and talent are one and the same. But we need to differentiate them. Talent is natural, one of the many gifts God brings us into the world with. Everyone, without exception, has multiple talents—we have innate aptitudes in intellectual, physical, emotional, and even spiritual areas—but not everyone enjoys them. On the other hand, ability is something that can be learned, even if it is extremely complicated.

Music is the most common example used to explain this difference. We all know someone with great musical talent: They are effortlessly in tune, have rhythm and an amazing ability to pick up and repeat melodies. However, these people could not play an instrument without having studied and practiced it. On the other hand, someone without these gifts but with an unwavering sense of discipline could develop the ability to play an instrument and interpret a piece by Mozart or Chopin to perfection. But this would only be possible after a colossal effort—it wouldn’t come as naturally to them. The same can happen in other fields.

No untapped talent can surpass the skills of discipline, but no discipline can produce the passion that comes from expressing raw talent. The great leaders in various fields have achieved mastery through a combination of natural talent, aptitude, perseverance, and effort. That’s why it’s important to identify your natural talents if you don’t already know them.

I am no longer surprised when a friend or family member says they don’t know what their talent is, but I still find it alarming that there are so many people who blatantly say they have no talent. This is what we have been taught to think. Everyone has a talent. The best recipe for discovering it is to venture out and try something you’ve never done before, no matter how simple it may seem, while genuinely believing that you will find a talent within you in these attempts.

If we explore our options by first defining what we are not, it’s difficult for our natural abilities to manifest themselves. In other words, if we have preconceived notions about what we are capable of doing, we will get very different results. From a young age, maybe you were taught to say, “I suck at sports,” because your parents didn’t sign you up for activities you liked; they put you in the ones they liked. Since you didn’t make it into the top three of those events, they hung the “terrible at sports” medal on you, and you accepted it. So you’ve lived all these years believing that because you’re not good at something, you’re bad at everything. You won’t be able to find your gifts if you only look in those dark corners of your life.

You must find your hidden talent, and as Luke states in 15:8−9: “Or what woman having ten pieces of silver, if she loses one piece, doth not light a lamp, and sweep the house, and seek diligently until she finds it? And when she hath found it, she calleth together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me for I have found the piece which I had lost.’ ” First, she turns on the light (how do we turn on the light of our mind?) to see clearly. Next, she uses the broom to sweep the places that are most difficult for her to clean, and then she is ready to search with extreme care. She is never indifferent to what is lost or hidden; on the contrary, she is extremely diligent and, above all, she wants to find the coin with great fervor.

Your talent is a treasure to be sought. Many do not search for their talent because they don’t think it’s a valuable treasure worth the effort. They compare the amount of effort to the returns they think they’ll get from a talent they’ve minimized because they’ve miscalculated its value. Do not underestimate the size of that treasure, for it may be the weapon that will lead to your victory. There are no small talents.

Skills are given to you by someone else. For example, you can learn pastry-making from the best teachers, but what you feel when you bake your first cake is something that only belongs to you. If you haven’t found your talent yet, I bet it’s hiding in the activities you think you’re bad at. Remember, don’t look for it in the outcome but in what you feel when you do it.

OUR GREATEST CHALLENGE IN A MACHINE-FILLED WORLD WILL BE TO ACT HUMANELY.

Talents are competitions that are easy for us, and we naturally find great pleasure in doing them. We are born with that ease, but we still have to work at developing them. Our ability to assimilate knowledge is conditioned by our thoughts. There are two opposing mindsets when we enter learning processes:

When a person with a fixed mindset says, “I don’t know how to dance,” they are describing a situation that they already consider to be set in stone. When someone with a growth mindset says, “I don’t know how to dance,” they are referring to the fact that they have not yet explored the resources to learn how to do it. This comes from the science of teaching and is good to remember at this point, because if you are dominated by a fixed mindset, you will not have the necessary stimuli to explore your talents.

In short, forget about everything you’ve been told and have believed you can and can’t do. Forget about what you think you’re failing at and start over. A good way to explore your talents is to pay attention to the people you admire, the ones who, when you see them developing their art, inspire you to say, “What would that feel like?” If you’re on the right track, you’ll be more moved by what these people experience at work than by the prestige or income they earn.

Another important step is to create a space for yourself in your everyday life to explore your talents. If routine and monotony take over, you won’t find opportunities to try. Also, step away from the herd. When we insist on sticking to what others like, we limit our contact with the things we might like. This can happen without us even realizing it; going with the tide is a way of giving up who we can become.

Discovering your talents or reconciling with them is essential to roaring. They’re the driving force you need to fill the void of silence.

YOUR INTELLIGENCES

As previously mentioned, discovering a talent implies learning, and this doesn’t happen within the comfort of what we already know. It must be an adventure, and like explorers in a new field in nature, beyond the weeds we may find a meadow or rocky terrain, and we need to have the same willingness to cross them both. Learning something new involves the risk of stumbling, especially if we don’t modify the way we walk.

Changing how we face ourselves is crucial. This isn’t a minor detail; it’s the key to the vault. We are observers, seekers, and permanent witnesses of our entire being, but we get lost within ourselves because we don’t travel there often. Let’s enter, cleanse, and conquer the breadth of our domain, leaving no land unexplored. Inside we will find a cosmos, a mirror of other universes and worlds. Let’s tear down the shrines and caves we’ve used as a refuge to hide from ourselves. Let’s confront ourselves so that we don’t abandon ourselves. Let’s visit, stay, and enjoy ourselves. Let’s pick up the pieces that others have left behind, clean up, make room for ourselves, and stay there.

SOME ANSWERS ARE FOUND IN THE DETAILS.

It’s normal to think that we prefer to learn in a certain way. We’ve been taught as much for a long time. And yes, it’s true that some techniques work better for some people than others, but that’s not always the case, even if we study endlessly. Just as we must be open to new knowledge, we must also be open to using different ways of learning. We risk turning away from specific topics because we insist on adhering to the idea that “this is how I understand.” That is a limiting belief we must abandon when we wish to discover inherent, unexplored talents.

Theories of learning styles have been popular for several decades. They’re understood as the result of studying people’s preferred mechanisms for digesting, translating, organizing, and interpreting new information. Knowing these preferences has helped us confirm the value of different instructional pathways. Thanks to these theories, many educators and students have adjusted their methods—the greatest contribution has been proving that not everyone should be treated equally when it comes to learning. But their usefulness ends when, instead of helping us grow, they limit us, because we think that if we have one optimal learning style, we don’t need to explore the rest. We get rusty.

Forty years ago the psychologist Howard Gardner came up with the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which he classified according to the type of information people use when processing a subject.1 Initially, Gardner mentioned five types of intelligences, although his theory has given rise to the identification of many others. Most texts recognize eight.

The intelligences are presented as different programs that operate in our brain, with a fair number doing so independently. Some of these programs are more efficient than others. The greatest intelligences would be those with the most efficient algorithms in their software. This theory broke with a long-held view that intelligence was a unit that predicted efficient results across the board, regardless of the subject matter.

This approach demonstrates that a person may have a certain ease in some subjects, while not getting notable results in others. For example, one of the intelligences mentioned by Gardner is linguistic intelligence, which processes information related to the meaning of words in various forms. People with a high linguistic ability are usually labeled as “intelligent,” even if their spatial or mathematical processing is not particularly sharp. In other words, we usually perceive a person as intelligent when they express themselves with fluency and grace, even if they can’t solve basic logistical problems or, even worse, the most common personal conflicts.