How To Realise Your Potential

For most if not all of my school life, I was told that I ‘could do better’. This despite the fact that for most of my subjects, I tended to be in the higher attainment classes, especially for the subjects I enjoyed.

Over the years, I’ve come to see that this essentially negative comment, was just another way of saying ‘has lots of potential’. At the time, however, I didn’t see this as a positive assessment of my abilities and instead took it as a criticism, thinking I wasn’t behaving as I should have been.

My teachers’ assurances that I had some buried potential didn’t really make much sense to me in those teenage years, and no one ever really sat me down and explained where I was wasting my potential. In a nutshell, I just didn’t really understand what the cryptic message meant!

With hindsight of course and with the benefit of maturity it seems obvious, but I wonder to what extent it really is that obvious?

Because knowing how to realise your potential can lead to the kind of breakthroughs, successes and life changes that you just don’t see most people achieving. And surely, if most people aren’t achieving the life they openly or secretly want, then how can it really be that you know how to realise your potential?

So what does realising your potential really look like?

In today’s post, I’ve attempted to specify the practical features that need to be in place in order to at least start moving towards your greatest potential. Some are more practical than others but leaving any of these out can lead to rocky foundations, which could easily result in a report card that reads ‘could do better’.

Belief

Belief is a fundamental foundation to realise your potential. You must believe and accept that the things you want really are within your reach.

Now that might seem kind of obvious, but how often do we play down our wants so that they are small or insignificant?

Instead we fall back on ‘being realistic’ and accept the smaller results that don’t challenge us too much and that we know we can manage to achieve, usually because we’ve done it before!

But playing small doesn’t allow us to fully realise our potential. After all, for most of us, our “full potential” is a complete unknown because we’ve never pushed ourselves far enough to know that we couldn’t go any further!

There are two elements that we must consider as supporting our belief in ourselves and they are hard work and commitment.

Hard Work

As the saying goes, everything we want is outside our comfort zone, and that’s true! But, most of us think it will take hard work to get there, but it’s often not the physical hard work that’s needed, but the mental hard work that’s required to make us step outside our comfort zone and to stay there.

Commitment

Next comes the need for commitment. Once we’ve stepped outside our comfort zone, we then not only need to stay there, but be committed to pushing further.

These two tasks alone require huge amounts of belief.

Belief in ourselves and our abilities as well as belief in our ideas and plans for the future.

Courage

We may think it will take courage to step outside our comfort zone…which it will, but this pales when compared to courage needed to keep going in the face of doubters and criticism.

We all know they are out there, just waiting to point out all the pitfalls that we’ll face, all the reasons why we shouldn’t do something and all the objections because it will require changes that will ripple throughout the family and our circle of friends.

Staying on track whilst others doubt your ability to ‘pull it off’ requires courage, or maybe it’s just an ability to grow a thicker skin. But in any event, whether you choose to call it courage or a thick skin, you’ll definitely needs lots of it!

Tenacity

It’s worth having some idea when you start out on your goal of what you actually want to achieve. In other words, what level do you want to reach or how far do you want to go?

The reality is, that for most of us with big goals, we don’t really know how we’re going to get there. That’s to say, we’re comfortable with figuring it out as we go along, because, if we already knew how to get there, we’d have done it already!

So, some practical things you can do to know how much work might be involved would be to look up people who are already doing what you want to do. How long ago did they start? What did their early years look like? When did the breakthrough happen?

You might also want to seek out a coach or a mentor to help guide and encourage you on your chosen path.

In any event, the main point to realise is that it will take time, and so being prepared for the long haul, despite not knowing how your goal will come together is a must. In other words, you must be tenacious, obstinate even in the pursuit of your goal.

In Summary

Untapped potential is plentiful, we can feel it within and we can see it all around. It is the norm and therefore it is socially acceptable.

For most of us, there is so much more on the inside than we ever allow into the daylight. We hide our true gifts, wants and desires in fear of being ridiculed, in fear of failure or sometimes because we fear success and all that we perceive that to bring.

Living in a way that allows you to realise your potential requires belief, courage and tenacity to step away from what’s average and acceptable and embrace the uncommon and sometimes rare behaviours that few people adopt.

In doing so you will be ahead of many others who choose to keep their potential suppressed.

Life is meant to be lived to our fullest possible potential. To give it our all, to embrace what comes our way and keep heading towards our ideal life anyway.

Don’t hold back and don’t live with regrets for the desires you are currently choosing to ignore. Life is short but your potential is large!