Your Gifts Create Responsibility… Why Being Given Something Isn’t the Same as Having Stewarded It

Matthew Gottesman (0:02)

Welcome to The Niche Is You. My name is Matt Gottesman, at Matt Gottesman on Instagram, and this is my daily podcast where I create short, quick hitting episodes to help you uncomplicate life, creativity, and the pursuit of your highest self. There's only main character energy here. Now let's get into it.

Welcome to episode 875, Your Gifts Create Responsibility. Why being given something isn't the same as having stewarded it. So on this podcast, we often talk about your natural abilities, the niche is you, your gifts, your talent, your purpose, more of what you're here to do, and tapping into that. Yes. And we focus a lot on what are my gifts, what am I good at, what opportunities have opened for me, what events do I carry, what does God place inside of me, meaningful questions, for sure. And that was always a big part of understanding what you've been given matters, because it's, I think, a guiding principle for, oh, what do I need to spend my time? And that's what this episode is about. Because I think there's another question, what am I doing with it? And I've been thinking about this pretty heavily, because I've been in several conversations recently about how do we steward the gift that we've been given accordingly?

And it's not from like just, oh, let me hustle this thing out and drive it home into the world. I think there's a lot of development that comes in stewardship, personal development, there's a lot of mastery in the craft. There's a lot of patience learning, because you can have tremendous creative ability and never develop the craft at all. That's the other underlying thing that's going on here. You can have like influence and use it carelessly. This is, I've had a few conversations around this recently. It's like you see people with great reach. What's the conversation they're having? And so in that great reach, there's a responsibility in it.

Like what we put out into the world, and I get it because some people will say, well, but they believe that they're putting out what they believe that the world needs. And so, and this is why our own personal development, our relationship with ourselves and with God is so important because we realize that as we gain more reach, there's more responsibility, there's more humility in that. You can have incredible relationships, but fail to invest them. That's one. You can be given an opportunity and show up unprepared for it. So there's this idea of like, again, you know, the previous episode, this call and response with God, like praying and then moving. Well, there's also this like having the gifts and then stewarding them all. And stewardship can look like a lot of different things. And I think we should talk about that because that is what happens when we have these tremendous opportunities or gifts or money or whatever it might be. It's different for each person, right? So if you believe your gifts ultimately come from God, then I think that creates an even deeper relationship with them.

So, maybe it isn't only. Maybe we start asking, like, okay, not just what has God given me, but what does having been given this now require of me? That's what I want to explore in this podcast. So a few areas. Why identifying your gifts is only the beginning of stewardship. Again, I mean, The Niche Is You, like, I'm constantly, you know, promoting the idea of you come with a range of skills and gifts. And it's not always craft, and it may not always be a way of doing a task. You know, I've talked about this with my trainer several times. We've had, you know, we've talked about, like, it's interesting watching, like, everybody you could tell gets kind of like certain things that they would need that maybe they don't have to worry about in this lifetime. But in other areas, you know, that like they have to figure out. Because we were basically talking about our own, like, you know, we were saying how like, oh, you know, it's so, how wonderful is it that we have, like these parents that we really love? That's really what the conversation is about, is like, and then you think about people who didn't necessarily maybe have that, but they have other, you know, areas, like with health, that just they was always doing really well in the health. You know, and so, you know, then maybe they didn't necessarily have certain things that we did. You know what I mean? So everybody has certain things that they've been bestowed upon them. How do they steward that well while learning to use them to create the other areas of their life, basically, right? Also, how gifts create responsibility without becoming pressure or entitlement.