Revealing Your Inner Beauty

We were so touched by your responses to our recent post, Broken. It’s powerful to realize that we’re all broken in life in many different ways and celebrating how we’ve put ourselves back together is an important part of honoring how our brokenness has contributed to who we are now.

This week we want share with you a way to think about life’s challenges and the difference between those that get you closer to your internal beauty, and those that just beat you up.

Please don’t take this absolutely literally – we’re not gemologists after all – but as a metaphor it’s a pretty interesting way to think about your life.

When rubies and sapphires and many other precious gems come out of the ground they’re encased in rock and look pretty gnarly. To get to the gemstone, the rocks are tossed into a tumbler with other stones of equal hardness so that as they tumble, the rocky exterior and dirt get knocked off and the beauty of the stone within is revealed. 

If the gems are put into a tumbler with other stones that are too soft, the rocky exterior won’t be knocked off. And, if they’re put into the tumbler with stones that are too hard, they’ll be broken apart and crushed by the other rocks.

People are like those stones.
We all have some rocky exterior that keeps us from shining.

As we live our lives, we bump into people and things that knock some of that dirt and rock off of us. We’re all tumbling through life’s situations that are either soft on us, hard on us or just perfect, just as the tumbler is on the gems.

If we don’t challenge ourselves enough, we never get to the true essence of who we are. If we put ourselves into situations that are too challenging we can find ourselves emotionally and sometimes physically decimated.

If we’re lucky, we have a good friend or two who bump into us just hard enough to help knock off the rocky exterior as we do the same for them.

This week, we’d like you to think about the tumble that is your life. 

• Are you playing too small and too easy to bring out the best of you?
• Does it challenge you to sparkle and shine?
• Are you in too many situations where you’re getting beaten up and beaten down?

Once you have a sense of this, you can seek out opportunities that will bring out the most beautiful part of your inner being without crushing the gem within.

Take care of yourself,
Your Coaches and Allies at Carpenter Smith Consulting