Realizing Your True Potential

To uncover your true potential, you must first find your own limits, and then you have to have the courage to blow past them - Picabo Street

What is holding us from realizing our true potential?

That is the question that looms in each of us every day, for unique reasons each one of us carries. Through our everyday life, we come across opportunities that can help us grow, but we merely look at it and let it go by holding ourselves.

- It could be a leadership presentation opportunity at work to improve your presentation skills

- It could be to lead an initiative at work to demonstrate your thinking ability and leadership qualities

- It could be a business idea that you always wanted to embark on

- It could be learning (either an in-person course or self-learning) that you always wanted to do to enrich your knowledge in a specific domain

And the list can go on.

I am 100% sure each of us definitely wants to work on these opportunities for our own growth and betterment. But we hold ourselves from jumping and working on them.

Why do we hold ourselves, and what is holding us?

Why don't we take that first step despite knowing we would fulfill our lives the most by achieving those dreams?

This article will throw light on areas that you should take a deeper look at.

We underestimate ourselves

That is the foremost reason most of us do not progress much with our dreams. We underestimate our strengths. We do not know our self-worth and do not take steps to understand it a bit more.

When could we learn better about our strength and self-worth? Only when we try doing things or experiment with ideas that appeal to us. Unless we work on them, they all would only look impossible to achieve. They would start becoming possibilities when we start working on them.

For example, Usain Bolt, being the world's fastest man, achieved the results (9.58 seconds for 100 meters) by training 1400 hours per year. Without putting in that kind of training hours, attaining the numbers would have just stayed as merely a dream for him and the world.

When we work on our ideas, we start making progress; we move step by step towards achieving our dreams.

We don't experiment enough

We try to boil the ocean all the time and feel overwhelmed by our ideas and thoughts.

A study suggests that an average person generates 6200 thoughts in a day. Our minds literally never rest. Out of those, we would be getting few workable and valuable ideas that we should get hold of as we move through the day. Prioritize them. And start working on them.

If we don't do that, we would be the spectators of our thoughts, and over time, we would become habitual at it. We would just let our thoughts keep leaving us without respecting them.

Pick an idea based on its value, experiment with it.

For example, you want to lose weight. You are currently 100 kg. You have your life to take care of everything that's going on. You feel overwhelmed with where to start. You can start with one idea. If you are not doing any physical activity, start with walking 2 km a day. It would probably take 30 minutes. Don't do big things that would overwhelm you. Start with small ideas, but sustain with them over time, and you would start seeing magical results.

Based on the results that you see with your experiments, you can expand on them. And if you feel are confident and comfortable, pick new ideas like taking little control of your diet. Instead of eating three large meals a day, eat 5 smaller portions of meals throughout the day. You would see that you don't feel lethargic, your digestion is better, fat accumulation reduces.

Always start small on your ideas to see tangible and meaningful results and then expand on your ideas. Before you know it, you would have moved far from where you were.

Risks and Fear of Failure

Those two are very critical. Unless we understand the roles of not taking risks and eradicating the fear of failure in realizing our true potential, we would hardly make any progress.

We fear because we are afraid to take risks. We move away from taking risks because we fear losing.

Once you develop skills to eradicate the fear of failure, you would automatically start taking risks. You would specifically understand how to take calculative risks.

Where to start to overcome the fear of failure?

We fear thinking how much we would lose or sometimes what it is that we would lose. What we lose is not always quantifiable or not always tangible. If you are an investor, you may have had a lot of fear of losing your money when you had started. But if you had started with very little money to experiment with your ideas and hypothesis, even if you had lost your money, it would have only been a little, and the learning you gained would have helped you make better returns.

Life rewards those who take risks and dare to overcome the fear of failure.

We Don't Learn Enough

Sometimes, working on our ideas and thoughts needs us to learn. New learning is always challenging because we need time, effort, energy, and more importantly, a clear purpose.

As Carol Dweck puts it beautifully, "In a growth mindset, challenges are exciting rather than threatening. So rather than thinking, oh, I'm going to reveal my weakness, you say, wow, here's a chance to grow". She is the author of an insightful book called "Mindset". In the book, she talks about how people with a growth mindset continue to progress despite all situations and challenges without giving up vs. people with a fixed mindset who believe their ability to learn, skills, and attitudes are inborn qualities that they cannot change.

When we identify a clear purpose with our ideas, our efforts with learning become purposeful, and that's what is growth mindset is all about.

Being a runner for more than a decade, I have been learning about running sport all the time. I started running to be fitter and healthier, but running in itself brought its own challenges through running injuries. To stay uninjured as I keep running ultramarathons, I had to learn the technicalities of how to prevent injuries through right recovery, rest, strength, nutrition, and so on.

When you have an idea to work on and if that demands you to learn something new, you must first believe that the learning is part of the result you want. Learning also contributes to the results, and there is no difference between the efforts you put into learning and outside it. It is an integral part of the results.

Summary

If you looked deeper into all the above, you would see one common theme that would come out, and that's the lack of courage. At the core of all the passive procrastination that we do in our lives, we lack the courageousness to realize our true potential to achieve our dreams.

How would one develop courageousness? Very simple. Start working on one or more of the above because they all are interconnected. When you take risks, you show courage. When you intend to put effort towards achieving results, you show courage. When you start to believe you have courage in you, you would start taking risks, overcome the fear of failure, learn more, and above all, stop underestimating yourself.

So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and start working on your dreams and ideas.

There is nothing in the world that is holding you. It is only you.