A small, frail looking man sat across the aisle from me on the long flight from Dallas. His stringy, colorless hair hung lifelessly from beneath a cowboy hat, and his movements were repetitive and quirky. His talon-like fingers moved constantly, as if rolling marbles, guided shakily by arms littered with faded tattoos adorning his tissue-paper skin. He had the appearance of some deteriorating Hell’s Angel… or a badass cattle rancher gone to seed. As he craned his neck to read the words on his iPad, blown up to staggering size on the page,  I wondered, “Who is this decrepit and inconsequential looking man?”

And, I’d never have known…had the flight attendant not bent to serve him asking, “Is there anything else I can get you Johnny, I mean Mr. Winter?”  My mind blanked for a moment in the astonishment of recognizing this little man as an international superstar.  “Of course!” I thought. How could I not have seen it (Although the years have not been kind)? Johnny Winter!

My mind began to dance around an odd question. I wondered, does this musical icon, this legend disguised as a low-life barfly, ever wish he were Alec Baldwin, or some other glamorous star? And what about Alec? Do you imagine that he ever thinks, “Sure I’m famous and I have great comic timing and God-like good looks, but Oh to be Johnny Winter!” Maybe. I’ll have to ask him the next time I see him.

We all devalue ourselves and compare ourselves to others…until WE decide to stop. Nobody has the power to transform me from a giddy fan into a peer and colleague of Brian Tracy or Tony Robbins …. except for me.

Sure, they’re accomplished to an extent that I’m not…YET… but when did they really develop the attitude they have now? Did it come FROM accomplishment, or did accomplishment come from the intention to embrace their greatness?

The question isn’t whether or not I…or you….have something to offer, but when we’re going to live inside that awareness. The path to self-confidence and owning our space is not to carry our inferiority complex all the way to our own perfection but to leave that complex behind using the technology of mental reprogramming. Oddly, I’ve heard that from my mother all my life.

First, we have to accept that selling ourselves on ourselves MUST be unconditional. We need to be able to say “I am unique. I have no competition.” And we need to be able to believe it. That of course brings us to the million dollar question. How do we come to believe the things we tell ourselves?  That’s a big part of why I wrote UnHypnosis… But the main thing is this…BE AN ORIGINAL. Nobody can deny that Johnny is one, and it makes little difference to us (or Alec) what he looks like.

Leave a comment and tell us what YOU think! Have you struggled with embracing YOUR greatness? Have you decided to love your uniqueness? What’s your challenge?

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