Why Having Potential Means a Man Isn't Finished
The distance between who you are and who you dream of being is not a verdict. It's a direction.
The Truth of It: Your potential is not a verdict on where you've failed. It's everything you haven't chosen yet. The gap between your life now and the life you can still picture is not evidence against you. It's the direction. And something in you already knows the way across.
Potential means a man is not being it yet
Years ago, I heard a facilitator at a self-improvement workshop ask us all about our potential.
“Do you have the potential to be (insert your biggest dream here)?”
Everyone resoundingly said, “YES!”
Then he dropped the bomb. “Potential is anything you aren’t being yet.”
That hit the room hard. It hit me hard.
Unfulfilled dreams. Unattained outcomes. Unrealized goals.
It was a heavy realization. We all knew we had things we were working toward, but to have the unrealized part of them thrown in our faces so abruptly, hurt.
In some ways, I think we each, in living in our dreams, saw ourselves as already there at the summit of them.
That was our biggest obstacle to unlocking our capabilities to make it happen.
Let’s spin this one more way, a way that will ideally feel more empowering than “You’re not there yet.”
That idea: You’re not there...yet. You’re not done…yet.
You can still create (I hesitate to use the word ‘manifest’ here) that dream life. You can still find peace, calm, and purpose.
You have the potential to be all of those things. What’s getting in the way?
What did you imagine before you built your current life?
Your current life started as an idea, and you’ve lived into making that idea reality.
One of my favorite quotes from author Jonathan Carroll is “Everything you want in life has teeth.”
It’s a reminder that every dream has things that will bite into who we are currently being.
That raises the question, if you’re frustrated, why are you creating frustration instead of happiness and peace?
To become real, our dreams must remove the parts of our life that are not in alignment with our desire. For example, if you wish to be a non-smoker, you have to confront and remove the power from the part of you that desires the emotional payoff of a cigarette.
If you wish to be in a committed, healthy marriage, you have to give up always working, and being emotionally unavailable.
Your life, at this moment, is everything you have committed to it being. Consciously, or unconsciously, your life is the culmination of your ideas about what you want and what you think you deserve.
Yet, you still have bigger dreams and big ideas of a much more successful, happy, and expansive life.
What if the picture isn't only yours to draw?
Do you ever wonder where your dreams come from?
Sure, some are obvious: We see people, things, and lifestyles we admire and begin thinking about how our life would look if that was us. That doesn’t cover all of it.
What about the things you can’t quite explain? Ideas that are outside of your family’s story, outside of your direct experience, where do they originate?
Let’s consider that there is an intelligence far greater than any of us. Some might want to call it God, others the Universe, or even Higher Self. Call it what you prefer. The names matter less than the experience of it.
It’s a place where ideas exist, before they ever become reality.
It’s the place and the energy of possibility that you tap into when you slow down and give yourself time and presence to let go of the stress of survival mentality, and start reconnecting to possibility, to pure potentiality.
Your lived experience is a masterclass on the tension between potential and limitation.
An idea arrives, you act on it, it turns out or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you’ll tend to tell yourself a story to justify why it didn’t; stories like, “That kind of life isn’t meant for people like me,” or “I don’t deserve to be that happy,” or “I don’t know why I bother, nothing ever works out for me.”
Old stories hijacking the narrative of your life. Stories based in the past that are corrupting your present and preventing your future happiness.
The key to changing your life is in this very moment of awareness. If you truly believed that putting effort toward a dream was a waste of time, you wouldn’t do it, you’d stay the course on your current life.
But something wiser in you is calling you to create a different life.
Is the gap failure, or is it direction?
Who’s going to create that life? The old you who’s experienced setbacks, or the wiser you who still senses possibilities?
“I’m not there yet/It hasn’t happened yet/I’m behind all my peers/I don’t have enough for retirement.” This is the voice of the old you, the one who is world-weary.
It’s easy to say and hear these words and feel like a failure. Those words are telling you one thing: where you have not yet arrived, who you are not yet being.
You could view it as failure, or you could look at it as potential: that which you are not…yet.
Your direction forward is in the gap. The chasm you are sensing between where you are and where you want to be is yours to build a bridge across.
The question now becomes, “Who builds it?”
Is it built by the you who feels defeated by the gap, or by the future you who is already on the other side of the chasm?
What changes when you stop trying to build toward him, and instead connect to the idea of him reaching across the chasm to pull you into your future?
How big will you let the picture get?
You don't just receive more of what you focus on. You actually create it.
The old you is evaluating where you are not, what you have not accomplished. It’s focusing on what you have not achieved.
Your future self is connected to that greater wisdom that we noted earlier. He’s already achieved the goal.
Your present self stands in the gap, experiencing the tension between what has been and what could be.
What is familiar, what is verifiable, will tend to win here, unless you actively and consciously choose the courage to be different.
This is where I will ask you to stop and pause. Slow down and listen.
After all you have experienced in life, there is still a voice calling you forward toward your dreams. It may be just a whisper, but you can sense it.
While the world around you may be shouting to live according to your present results, you can feel that is not the path to your future.
In a noisy room, the quietest voice is the one worth listening to.
You’ve heard the shouts, you’ve seen the results, those are all coming from the past, from who you’ve been. There is no new potential in those states, only more of the same.
Your potential is calling you to explore what’s possible when you make a new, different decision.
How big is your dream? How much happier do you imagine yourself being? How much calmer and more successful?
That man is there, reaching his hand out to pull you forward into that life.
You just have to decide to accept his offer.
You've read this far because the whisper is real.
The first step across the gap is knowing where you're standing right now.
Take the Undivided Man assessment. Ten minutes. It will show you where your energy is stuck, and who's calling you from the other side of the chasm.
