No matter what you are doing, the key question is “What are you capable of doing?” If you can understand your potential, success will be knocking at your doorstep.
Realizing your potential is not everything to success but it is indeed an imperative avenue to success. Realizing your potential means to become the best one can be. For example if you are into football realizing your potential might mean becoming one of the best footballers of your time.
What Is Personal Potential?
If you ask different people what they understand about someone’s potential they will probably give you different opinions and answers. General understanding entails that your true potential is supposed to be an activity that you can do amazingly with minimal effort.
*** ALSO CHECK: How to start a new job the right way – 11 Tips
Personal potential, according to some thinkers, has more to do with your mental fortitude than your alleged talents. You can be anything you want to be. Willpower is what you require. You may realize whatever personal potential you desire if you have bravery and a clear aim.
Do These 10 Things and Realize your Potential
1. Identify Your Inner Voice
The first step in realizing your potential is to know and understand yourself. This might mean taking a step back in order to self-introspect and extract who exactly you are. Find out what you truly want in life and what happiness means to you. What is it that you always want or like to be? What is that thing or task you can perform amazingly with minimum effort?
Write down your two to three greatest strengths and your two to three significant weaknesses. This might mean soliciting the views of those around you. Aim to get the views of those that will tell you the brutal truth.
To be effective in understanding yourself and realizing your potential you have to write thoughts down as they come. In most cases visiting your long time personal note book can reveal some personal secrets you had abandoned and help you realign to achieving your potential.
Take yourself to less disturbing but adventurous places where your brain will be forced to think about an ‘ideal you’ and what it can take for you to be there. Perhaps a simple walk can also work on this.
*** ALSO CHECK: How to Master a Job Interview – 15 Steps
2. Make Conscious Efforts
The second step in realizing your potential is to make conscious efforts in the right direction. Conscious efforts refer to actions and decisions that are intentional and deliberate – this might mean setting your own rules to live with. For this to work you have to excel on critical tasks.
Learn new skills every day – identify skills that will help you to be where you want to be and learn them on daily basis. Leverage on soft skills development as they will help you climb the skills requirements ladder.
Experiment on new things and don’t just play it safe. Explore for the sake of understanding and learning. The only guarantee for failure is to stop trying.
They say exposure is probably the greatest life teacher.
Hard working is indeed an important part of the puzzle for realizing your potential. Set time for work and time for refreshing because you will still need it. Develop a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset.
3. Define Your Goals
Have written down SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals which are easy to understand and follow. SMART goals are probably the best way to work towards realizing your potential. The reason is that they are measurable, realistic and time bound and therefore can easily guide you in realizing your potential.
*** ALSO CHECK: HOW TO SPOT A FAKE JOB – 14 Indicators
4. Demonstrate Character and Leadership
Good character and leadership traits commands respect. Therefore they are must-haves for realizing your potential. As an aspiring leader develop your leadership skills by listening to others, networking, embracing diversity, finding a mentor and always thinking through before you act.
Perhaps a mentor will do half of this job therefore get one.
Always offer to lead where others are not willing to volunteer leadership. Develop a good character – a person with good character is respectful and never condescending.
*** ALSO CHECK: How to start a new job the right way – 11 Tips
5. Have a Good Company
Always attract people of good mindsets and character around you. In a bid to realizing your potential some people might not deserve to be around you as they might not be bringing anything positive to you. Therefore select a diversified group of friends, colleagues and mentors. Make sure you are learning something from each and every one of them. Keep reviewing this circle of people, remove or add some to continue improving yourself.
6. Set Milestones
As an extension of defining your goals – set milestones in your life. Have short term and long term goals. Short term goals will guide for the near future and long term goals will guide you for the future itself. Break down the long-term goals and processes into smaller milestones where you can track achievements.
*** ALSO CHECK: WHAT IS A SOLAR HOME SYSTEM (SHS) – 7 treasure things to know
7. Play Long Term Games
Plan for long term instead of just short term. Know where you want to be in 5 to 10 years. This will always remind you in every step you are doing to know if it aligns with the long term plan. This will mean that there are some things you will not do or fall for simply because they do not align with your long term plan.
8. Be Confident
Being confident in yourself helps in realizing your potential. Stir yourself up for motivation in moments of depression or unexpected results. Understand the things or activities that boost your confidence and do such things occasionally to keep yourself confident.
9. Accept Failures
In the quest to realizing your potential you have to understand that failure is part of that life and at some points in time you will fail. In life the truth is that you can’t be perfect immediately. Perhaps what they don’t tell us is that failures and inconveniences are part of every success story.
Fail fast and fail forward. This knowledge is what many people don’t have. This means that it should not take you much time to fail and get stuck in that failure but rather fail and move forward to try something new that might work. Do not allow to get soaked and trapped in failure.
Another important dimension of accepting failure is to archive failures. Keep some pictures of where you failed dismally and made an effort to change that. This will give you good memories of where you were once and give you the energy to grind more.
10. Celebrate Your Successes
Celebrate every small win as this will give you more confidence and energy towards your ultimate goal. This will also keep your spirit high.
Keep yourself plugged!
Did you enjoy the above article on REALIZING YOUR POTENTIAL – 10 proven things to do? We are happy if it was helpful. To keep yourself updated on such information follow our Social Media channels.
*** ALSO CHECK: How to start a new job the right way – 11 Tips
