I had my aura photographed.
It came back almost entirely indigo and violet. Violet at the center. Violet in what I project outward. Violet even in the part of the reading associated with grounding. Indigo around the mind and the energy coming into my field. The language attached to those colors was intuition, higher vision, spirituality, seeing beyond what is immediately visible.
I liked it. That is probably worth admitting before I qualify it into oblivion.
I don’t know exactly what an aura photograph can tell us about a person. I don’t need to. I took it as one interesting, decidedly non-scientific reflection — something fun to hold against what years of experience, feedback, behavioral assessments and self-observation have taught me, not evidence from which to construct an identity. I’ve spent enough of my life in spiritual spaces to be comfortable with mystery, and enough of my professional life around evidence, behavior and human systems to know that not everything meaningful needs to be turned into proof.
What stayed with me was the recognition. I looked at the reading and thought: I know her.
But there was another part of the report I found even more interesting. My two strongest chakra readings were solar plexus and throat, with sacral close behind. In the language of the reading, solar plexus represented personal power and creative and intellectual thought. Throat represented communication, speech and emotional expression. Sacral represented creativity, productivity and the emotional expression of life energy.
I loved that almost more than the violet. For all that upper-spectrum language about intuition and vision, the strongest activity in my reading wasn’t concentrated at the crown. It was in power and expression, with creativity and life energy right behind it. That felt like a much more complete reflection of me.
I have never been especially drawn to spirituality as an escape from being human. I want insight to become language. I want intuition to inform choices. I want ideas to become things we build. I want what we know about ourselves to change how we love, lead, create, work and live.
For me, pattern recognition is rarely about predicting what will happen. It is noticing what keeps happening. The sentence someone repeats without realizing it. The contradiction between what a team says it values and what its systems reward. The shift in cadence inside a relationship before anyone has named that something changed. The decision underneath a series of decisions. I notice those things quickly. But noticing them is only the beginning. The work is figuring out what the pattern means, testing whether I am right, finding language for it, and then deciding whether what I see asks anything of me.
Not transcendence for its own sake. Embodiment.
And I think this is where the reading touched something I’ve been noticing for years. I’ve been fortunate to spend time around extraordinarily talented people across music, art, business and leadership. Some are celebrated for what they do. Some operate much more quietly. But with the truly exceptional ones, there is often a moment when you understand exactly why they are where they are.
They just live it.
The musician hears what most of us cannot hear and trusts it. The artist sees something the rest of us walked past and makes it visible. The entrepreneur sees what could exist where everyone else sees what already does. The exceptional leader notices what is happening in a room before anyone has found language for it.
What strikes me is how little energy the best of them seem to spend apologizing for the thing they are exceptional at. They don’t necessarily announce it. They don’t need everyone else to agree with it. In many cases, they don’t even seem particularly impressed by it anymore. It has become integrated. Their gift is no longer something they are standing outside of, evaluating.
They use it. They live it.
There is something magnetic about being around someone who has stopped negotiating with their own nature.
That is not the same as announcing it. The exceptional people I am describing rarely lead with their gifts. They simply no longer spend energy pretending the gifts aren’t there.
And there is a particular generosity in people who are secure enough in their own gifts to recognize someone else’s without needing to reduce them. The most remarkable people I have known have often been unusually willing to name what is remarkable in someone else. Recognition does not diminish them. Someone else’s brilliance does not require theirs to become smaller.
And I think we sometimes mistake that for ego.
We are comfortable acknowledging what is wrong with us. Tell someone they have a blind spot, an attachment pattern, an overused strength, a leadership weakness or some unresolved childhood material and many of us will immediately begin investigating. Tell someone they are unusually perceptive, powerful, creative, intelligent, visionary or capable of changing a room simply by entering it and watch how quickly the qualifications arrive.
Well, I wouldn’t say that. Other people are much better. I’ve just been lucky. I still have so much to learn.
All of those things might be true. But they don’t make the first thing untrue.
Some of us have been more consistently taught to make the second thing louder. The qualifications come faster, sit more comfortably, feel more socially safe — particularly for women, and for anyone who learned early that taking up space required justification.
I know that impulse well. I’ve qualified what I could see, softened what I knew, or made myself smaller so I wouldn’t seem too certain, too ambitious, too much — and sometimes a room got less of me than I could have given it.
Somewhere along the way, we learned to trust self-awareness more when it reveals our flaws than when it reveals our gifts. We confuse knowing our limitations with humility and knowing our gifts with ego.
Leadership makes that distinction consequential. A leader does not become safer by pretending to possess less power than they actually have. A person with enormous influence who insists they have none still influences the room. A charismatic leader who refuses to acknowledge their charisma still affects people. Someone who sees patterns others miss will still shape decisions with those perceptions. Someone whose approval matters enormously to their team does not make that power disappear by thinking of themselves as “just another person in the room.”
What we refuse to claim does not stop operating. We simply become less conscious of how we are using it.
That is why I think leadership development requires more than an honest inventory of our weaknesses. It requires an accurate inventory of our gifts. What am I unusually good at? What do I see that others sometimes miss? What have I practiced for so long that I now assume everybody can do it? What happens differently when I am fully present?
And then, more importantly: What is that capacity for?
That question separates self-recognition from self-importance. It also keeps claiming honest. Owning your charisma without asking what it’s for produces a different kind of unconsciousness than denying it — one that can be equally damaging, and considerably harder to see from the inside. If you see farther, help people see what is coming. If you can move a room, become very careful about where you move it. If people trust you, understand that their trust gives you responsibility, not entitlement. If you have power, become trustworthy with power.
That isn’t dimming. It is stewardship.
And none of this means pretending our strengths have no shadows. Mine certainly do. I know what happens when pattern recognition becomes overanalysis. When vision becomes impatience. When expression keeps going several paragraphs after the point has been adequately established.
My future robot assistant has already been assigned responsibility for the last one: “I’ve analyzed the situation, Babe. You are correct, but you have now explained it sufficiently.”
Fair.
But recognizing the shadow does not require disowning the gift. In fact, I think the opposite may be true. We become more responsible for our gifts when we are willing to name them accurately. I can say that I am intuitive without believing every intuition is correct. I can know that I see patterns quickly while remaining open to the possibility that I have misread one. I can know that I have a strong voice without assuming mine should always be the loudest. I can acknowledge power without needing power to prove anything about my worth.
The standard is neither inflation nor diminishment. Accuracy.
That is ultimately what stayed with me about seeing all that violet. The photograph didn’t grant me an identity. It reflected something I already knew. I am intuitive. I see patterns. I care deeply about what sits underneath what is immediately visible. I find language for things people often feel before they can name them. I create. I teach. I question. I want what I know to become useful.
And I no longer need to pretend not to know those things about myself simply because acknowledging them might sound immodest.
The most extraordinary people I have known don’t seem to spend much time doing that either. They know what they carry. They refine it. They become responsible for its shadow. They put it in service of something beyond their own reflection.
And then they live it.
Maybe that is the invitation I saw in the violet. Not to become something more impressive, but to more fully inhabit what is already here.
Know what you carry.
Become responsible for it.
Then live it.
