How Do You Achieve Your Full Potential?

Do you have any idea what your potential might be?

I would say that no one knows his or her true potential because it’s limitless. It’s fun to learn about our potential. This is one of the reasons why I recommend that we set goals. Our periodic review of our goals will show us our progress toward realizing our potential.

We often start out in life with a limited view of what we can do. All too often, we base what we can do on what we’ve done in the past, but that will always be less than what we’re capable of doing.

We truly have unlimited potential locked up inside of us, so if we use it, we can truly do almost anything that we want to do.

How is potential like a rock?

Do you know what a geode is? It is a rock that looks plain on the outside but has a beautiful crystalline interior. If we saw a pile of geodes, we probably wouldn’t give them any special regard because they look like plain rocks. However, if we cut one open, we’d find beauty on the inside.

We are like geodes: from the outside, we may appear plain, but once we look inside, we find that we are filled with a treasure of gifts and talents. Everyone is truly beautiful on the inside.

What is our true potential?

We really don’t have any idea of our true potential. I remember being told that I would never make it in university by my high school teachers and counselors who knew me, or thought they knew me. What they saw was a troubled young man who had attitude problems. What they didn’t see was that I had a lot of drive and ambition.

Without channels for that drive and ambition, I was bored and frustrated. But when I got a chance to use them later in life, I came alive and accomplished what I feel are great things. I still believe that the best is yet to come in my life.

Our potential is truly unlimited.

• We must find ways to use the potential we possess.
• Try new things all the time.
• Experiment with what we think we would like to do.
• Don’t just blindly follow what others tell us to do. Often they’re talking from their limited experience with us, so they don’t know what we could achieve if we were given the opportunity.
  • No matter what we want to do, a whole tribe of people will tell us that we can’t do it or that it can’t be done. If we listen to them, we may find ourselves not succeeding.

When I was a teenager, I wanted to move to California. I was told that it was impossible to get to California from Nova Scotia – not physically impossible, but impossible for someone like me who was performing at less than my potential. This would have been terribly limiting had I truly believed it. However, two people showed me that this wasn’t true.

The first one was Denny Doherty, a member of the popular musical group The Mamas and the Papas, who was from Halifax. Not only had he made it to California, but he was also a member of one of the great groups of that time.

The second happened when I was in grade nine. My homeroom teacher left during the school year to go to California to get married. Despite the fact that people had said it was impossible to get from Nova Scotia to California, here were two people who contradicted that idea and allowed me to have hope of going there.

When I was thirty years old, I moved to California and lived there for the next twenty-five years. So much for being impossible!

Until the 16th century, people believed that the earth was the center of the solar system until Copernicus wrote that the sun was the center of or solar system.

Christopher Columbus set sail on his remarkable voyage to find a westward passage to the East. It is worth noting that Columbus was a failure in that he did not do what he set out to do, yet he is regarded as one of the great men in the history of the world. Why did he achieve success? Because he set out to do something! He had a goal and took action to achieve it.

Many people believed that heavier-than-air flight was impossible until the Wright brothers did it.

A large number of people believed that a man of color could not get elected president of the United States until Barack Obama went out and did it.

We can look at history and see case after case of people going against the grain and achieving great success. We all have great potential within us; we just have to find a way to tap into it to achieve our goals.

Not everyone has the same potential. God gives each of us a unique set of gifts and talents that we need for our specific purpose. It is necessary for us to find out what that special purpose is and to go after it.

In our next article, we’ll discuss our how our Life Experiences affect our potential.

This is an excerpt from Bruce’s book “Attitude Determines Destiny”. 

As a motivational speaker, he conducts seminars and workshops based upon the ideas in his book. He entertains and inspires audiences wherever he goes.

Contact him for your next event