What is Your Potential and Can You Reach it?

“… being at the peak of my potential”.

Read that again, out loud and ponder on it for a moment.

“What is or what could be your Peak Potential?” This is what I ask many of my life coaching clients.

The more I think about it, the more it starts to blow my mind.

I think that we are so used to our everyday routine of waking up as late as our schedule will allow, hovering over to the bathroom, getting dressed, going to work for a few hours, watching the clock as it approaches 5 pm, racing out the office door and into rush hour traffic so we can get home, slap on the TV, eat dinner, go to bed and then repeat the whole process the next day that we don’t even realize how little of our explosive and massive potential we may be missing out on.

Yes, I agree with the need for stability and chores and kids’ needs, but what about you? Are you not living your life? You weren’t born with a child in either arm and a spouse wanting dinner. This is Your life!

Every child has ambitious dreams regardless of how far-fetched they may be. They believe that they can be as powerful as superman. As courageous as a fireman. As adventurous as an astronaut.

Yet, our children are eventually numbed down until they conform to society, get a job, get married and have children.

No wonder adults are so prone to a mid-life crisis!

Our full potential withers away from us before we can even test how far we can go with it.

This is why we glorify athletes.

We admire what they have been able to achieve.

Unfortunately, we often give them too much credit and state that they have a stronger genetic make-up or they are gifted or they know the right people or whatever rubbish we place on them, just so that we can justify why we haven’t done anything in our lives that is remarkable.

What we fail to realize is that these high-performing people are normally no different to us other than the fact that for years and years, they have slogged at their speciality and refined their technique to the point where they are deemed the best at what they do.

Let me take that back. They are different. They are different because they are willing to sacrifice whatever it takes to reach their full potential.

That is the difference. Dedication, persistence, tenacity, and endurance. That is the difference.

So what if you decided today that maybe you won’t be an amazing athlete, singer or business person, but from today you will get better at your job, rocking up every day, giving it your all and making more money? I bet that if you performed at your peak every day, people will start to notice. You will become a lynchpin asset to the company and when you feel it’s time for a raise or promotion, you will have your past performance as a backup. If you don’t get what you want, I can promise you now that there are endless amounts of companies out there who will be happy to have such a dedicated asset on board with them.

What’s stopping you from trying a new path in life over time with enough education and dedication, you will not only be good at what you do, but you will become so good that people will think that you are just gifted.

The only thing, when you think about it will be how much time you are willing to sacrifice to attain success.

Life is busy for everyone, not just you. Successful people are probably the busiest, yet they accomplish things that we may never do. Don’t let “I don’t have time” be your excuse.

Do yourself a favour and read Oprah’s biography. Notice when she starts becoming a peak performer and what doors that peak performance starts to open up for her.

Peak performance is fairly difficult to sustain all the time and that is why most people will be able to stick with it for a short while and then slowly but surely come back down to their old performance rate and stay there. It’s almost the natural thing to do.

So how do you sustain your peak so that it becomes the norm so that you are consistently getting high performance?

The main way to stay at your point of peak performance is to have a compelling vision of where you want to be and what goal you want to achieve. It has to have great significance to you. You must have a great dream or vision that you must fulfil to consistently perform at your peak.

This vision or goal or dream must surround your thoughts and it must be the thing that fills your mind at night and wakes you up in the morning. You must have something so great that you desire to achieve it, that it excites you. Some kind of personal value will be honoured by trying to achieve your goal or vision. You have to understand why you want to achieve peak performance.

Create smaller goals that you can achieve almost straight away, which will lead you to bigger goals, which will eventually lead you to your main goal.

If you want better performance you must have a stronger vision. Visualize it, write it down, and think about it. You need to build yourself up toward attaining peak performance, otherwise, you may not reach it and at the same time, lose your confidence so that you don’t try it again.

Learn to build up the habit of everyday being, just that much better than you were today, yesterday or last week. If you are just 1% better at getting your job done today than you did yesterday, then imagine in a month how much better you will be.

For you to start achieving peak performance, you need to become a planner.

Plan your day. Last night you would have wanted to write down what you want to achieve today and in what order of priority.

If you fail to plan, you will plan to fail.

Focus 100% on your current task. No distractions until the task is done and then move on.

This is not difficult to do, but it will require discipline. Surprise yourself! You are more powerful than you know.