HOW TO DELIVER ON YOUR POTENTIAL
WHY ARE SO MANY OF US LIVING BELOW OUR POTENTIAL?
NOTE: This article is the first in a series with guidance and tools to help us achieve all we know we can!
We spend each day the same way, in jobs we don’t love, with people we often don’t know well or admire, while our true interests and passions go unfed.
Endless studies show we work too much, and under prioritize a myriad of requirements for satisfying lives, things as basic as healthy eating, time with those most important to us, planning for success and making sure our routine includes enough of what we truly enjoy.
By now you’re nodding your head in agreement. Yes, this describes most of us.
Buy why? And what should we do about it?
My research shows we can simplify this into three basic buckets. 1) Our habits, 2) Emotional and Behavioral Traps and 3) Lack of Focus.
Reasons We’re Living Below Our Potential
1. Habits — It’s comforting to stay in known routines. And they’re hard to change. Up to 80% of our daily decisions are made without conscious thought, so it’s easy to see how we get off track, repeating the same patterns day after day.
2. Traps — Disempowering behavior patterns and beliefs
a. Behavior patterns — Humans are more like lemmings than we realize. We see others checking their phones, so we check our phones. Society emanates feeling rushed, over-busy and disempowered. We absorb these contagious feelings and demonstrate them ourselves.
b. Beliefs — People commonly stay in unrewarding jobs or pass on daily exercise with justifications like: “It’s not that bad. I don’t know what I’d do anyway. I don’t have time. It’s too much effort….”
3. Lack of Focus — We’re so busy and distracted we don’t take the time to stop and think about changes in our routine that would be more fulfilling. We’re not asking things like “What options are there? What steps would I take to get that book out there that I’ve always dreamed of writing? What need I learn about this (option, activity, career, sport, skill) to make it a bigger part of my life?” Sometimes we don’t need to learn anything, we just have to do what we want to do. And the only thing in our way is dedicating time.
WHAT SHOULD WE DO ABOUT IT?
There’s a classic path here. No rocket science needed. Sometimes it helps to see it laid out clearly.
We need to decide whether it’s WHAT we’re doing, or HOW we’re doing it that must be adjusted.
Very often we’re doing many of the right things, but in the wrong proportion. Too much work, not enough fun and meaningful connection with friends and family.
This next chart shows example time allocation, and the simple thinking needed to readjust our days to better support achieving our potential. This can be repurposing that 20 minutes we take each day to go get our cup of coffee. Maybe we reach out to old friends instead, or look up how to write children’s novels, or find a local dojo to learn karate. It can be anything that moves us closer to living up to our potential.
We can take a few minutes today to plan our next step. Once the ball gets rolling, we often find it rolls downhill, and we accomplish our dreams faster than expected.
Here’s to living up to our potential!
Marcy Strauss Axelrod
Please comment with how this article has influenced you.
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Marcy is an InspirisT — put on this planet to inspire people to achieve their potential, a PossibiliaN -believing in the abilities of all people to achieve their potential, and an AccomplishisT — because Action to achieve is the only way.
Why capitalize the final letters? Because Starting is not enough to accomplish something. We also need to finisH.
Marcy can be reached at marcy@marcyaxelrod.com
When not inspiring people, Marcy is a management consultant with 20+ years of helping some of the most successful companies on the planet (HP, SAP, Cisco, Motorola, BaoSteel) become even more successful.
