Please Note: This is a Guest post from Srinivas Rao of The Skool of Life and Blogcastfm
I think every one of us has hidden potential. The problem however is that we live in a world where social programming, expectations and conformity have driven the behaviour of people in the society. We get rewarded for conformity and punished for going against the grain. Unfortunately we condition people over and over again with small rewards for fitting in and not challenging the status quo. These small rewards reinforce this behavior. It starts at an early age when you hear things like “Don’t color outside the lines, don’t talk to strangers” and whole list of “rules” that serve no purpose in adult life. Ultimately, they keep you from unleashing your hidden potential. It’s time to shatter all of that for a new way of thinking. The Skool of Life is such a different place than the schools we’ve attended and learned from.
Be willing to fail more: Failure has such a bad connotation in our society. When you get an F on a report card, that is the lowest score you can possibly get. You get punished for failing. As a result from a very early age we’re taught not to fail. As a result we take less risks, we play it safe and we don’t have any small failures. We just have one giant one, LIFE. Would you rather have thousands of small failures and one giant success that trumps all of the failures or would you rather never fail and live up to only a small portion of your potential?
Don’t listen to the naysayers: Naysayers always tend to emerge when you want to challenge the status quo. The reality is that they are afraid. They are afraid of seeing you reach your full potential because it forces them to deal with the fact they are not reaching theirs. If they can get you to stay where you are at, then they don’t have to deal with the fact they are wasting their own potential.
Trust your Instincts: Instincts are interesting. Im sure I’m not the first person telling you to trust your instincts. But the real question is how often do you do it? When you have an intuition or a feeling, what do you do about it? For two weeks I was hesitant to write this post because I had no idea what the hell it was going to be about. Then it finally came to me. When you have an intuition or feeling do you just let it go as another passing thought? If you do then read on.
Take Action: Good instincts are great. But they’re useless if you don’t do anything with them. If your instincts tell you to start a company, then do it. For the first time in history you can lay the groundwork for almost anything with virtually zero capital investment. It’s important be action oriented.
Choose to be extraordinary: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. “Ordinary lives are for ordinary people, extraordinary lives for those who are extraordinary. My life was never meant to be ordinary.” How you define that is really up to you. But, I don’t believe we were meant to live ordinary lives. We were meant to live life to its fullest.
Be Patient: Of all the advice I’ve offered you in this post, this is the one you will fail with over and over again. Unleashing your full potential takes time. Years or bad conditioning have to be erased and while you can begin the path to success over night, you won’t reach your goal overnight. Ironically, the more patient you are the faster you’ll able to unleash your hidden potential.
How do you plan to unleash your hidden potential?
Srinivas Rao is a personal development blogger, avid surfer and author at The Skool of Life. He is also the host and co-founder of BlogcastFM, a podcast for bloggers.
