httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARFGYKJFSuk

As a kid, I was teased a lot.

People thought I was weird.

I was fat. Part African. Part Japanese. With a miracle maker for a father. I loved Jazz. I was obsessed with self-help/spiritual books.

That was not a good recipe for popularity when you are 10 years old and living in one of the toughest neighborhoods in South London.

I was laughed at. Teased a lot. Outcast. And ridiculed quite a bit.

I wasn’t normal. I didn’t quite fit in with the group. I didn’t have a lot of friends, and I spent a lot of time in my room alone. It was difficult being a sensitive kid in a sometimes harsh world.

The world is sadly full of amazing people that have made normal their religion. And accepted the limitations that come with that.

What is normal really anyway?

And who decided what normal is?

Is normal staying in a relationship with someone you don’t love because that’s what your family expects of you?

Is normal settling for working in a respectable job you hate just to pay the bills and to keep up with those around you?

Is normal abusing your body with all sorts of artificial drugs and beauty procedures to fit what media deems as beautiful?

Is normal postponing happiness until you retire?

Is normal chasing money at the expense of your health, then eventually spending your wealth to chase the health you lost in the process?

It takes courage to stand in your truth when those around you speak otherwise.

It takes courage to listen to your heart and follow your truth, even if it means being different from your family and risk being outcast.

It takes courage to love fully, in a world where there is so much pain.

Few people have the courage to step out of the herd mentality, and stand in the conviction of who they really are. This takes courage and is the journey of being authentically alive.

It takes courage to be who you really are in a world that bombards you with messages of who you should be. And there’s no shortage of people in life who will tell you who you should or shouldn’t be.

You can spend your time listening to their negative voices and let it drown out the fire in your soul. Or you can step up, find your own wings and fly.

You are a unique expression of the Divine. Yet we spend so much time from childhood trying to fit into the group and blend in with the crowd, in an effort to gain love and acceptance.

You may succeed in gaining acceptance from the world. You might attain fame, money, popularity. But the validation you gain from being what you think you need to be in order to be loved, isn’t real love. It’s counterfeit goods. And it will never be truly fulfilling since deep down you will know the price you had to pay was yourself. And that was painfully way too expensive.

So what did they tell you that you should be more like?

Be more quiet. More well behaved. More educated. More skinny. More like your sister. More outgoing. More pretty. Be a good girl or boy.

Be more normal.

I say that Normal is overrated.

No one that impacted the world was normal. They dared to be themselves fully. They risked ridicule. They faced rejection. They didn’t let fear stop them. They were even considered crazy at times.

Nothing great was accomplished by living safely or timidly. Living fully is a risk, but what’s the point of living if you aren’t going to live fully. You are alive, and the point of being alive is to live, not put your life on layaway for some potential future promise.

No one that impacted the world accepted the status quo. They even shocked the future with the boldness of their creativity, innovation and courage.

Gandhi. Picasso. Bob Marley. John Lennon. Maya Angelou.  Richard Branson. Martin Luther King. J.K. Rowling. Nelson Mandela. Elvis Presley. Muhammad Ali. Elon Musk. Pharrell Williams. Bruce Lee.

They are game changers that dared to transcend ‘the norm’.

So celebrate your craziness. Embrace your weird. Love your uniqueness. It makes you unlike anyone else ever born.

The greatest gift you can give the world is the gift of being authentically you. Everyone else is taken. The more YOU you become, the more you give others around you the inspiration and permission to be fully themselves.

Every single experience of your life, positive and negative, makes you uniquely you. To deny your full expression is to kill off a part of yourself. When you suppress a part of yourself, you dampen your aliveness.

Give yourself permission to be you. If you don’t, who is going to give it to you?

You are living art. Art isn’t just for special museums where it hangs on walls or exhibitions. You are art and your life is your art. What will you create?

When your life is over, you won’t care about the face you saved by trying to fit in, but the joy of expressing yourself authentically.

When your life is over, you won’t care about the times you saved yourself from heart break but the times you dared to love fully.

When your life is over, you won’t care about fame and adulation of the masses, but whether you were able to look yourself in the mirror and feel peace.

So when they tell you who you should be and they say to you, “Why can’t you be more normal?”

Kindly tell them with love and a big smile on your face:

… Fuck normal!!

Love.Now

Kute

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P.P.S. I would love to hear your comments below!