As we just finished the first full week of the New Year, historical data would suggest that 25% of us have abandoned our new year’s resolution goals and by the end of the month, that rate could go as high as 50%. Be a trend breaker this year and continue to make progress towards your goals! As we continue our journey to build and strengthen our character, we need to discuss a topic similar to setting and achieving goals and that is reaching our potential in a world that tries to simply drive us towards comparisons.
There is a great deal of measurement and assessment in schools, sports, the workplace, and our homes that is necessary to establish benchmarks and standards to provide a sense of order and guidance to all those involved. Many times, these important measurements and assessments drive the unintended consequence that our “relative ranking” to others also becomes a measure of our own self-worth.
Healthy competition and the assessment of that competition is a good thing to help us reach our full potential. However, we have to be disciplined and self-aware around our own personal interpretation of the measurement to ensure that it remains a simple assessment of fact, and not a definition of our true self-worth. In addition, in our roles as parents and mentors, we need to be especially proactive in ensuring our children don’t fall into the trap of identifying their self-worth by their class rank, their time in the 40 yard dash, or the colleges they do or do not get into.
The “keeping up with the Jones” mindset is the adult manifestation of finding our self-worth in a measurement of what I have relative to others. Spending a great deal of energy thinking about how our bank account, salary, career progress, accomplishments of our kids, state of our marriage, etc. stack-up to others can all be adult manifestations of finding our self-worth relative to others.
In terms of determining our self-worth, I like to remind myself of John Wooden’s definition of success: “Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.” The legendary basketball player and coach was in essence, saying, you find peace when you give it all you have to reach your full potential, regardless of what those around you achieve or don’t achieve.
Our greatest challenge in life is to reach our potential. It is not winning a certain championship, reaching the corner office, solving some major problem in the world, or getting our kids prepared for life. Our greatest challenge in life is to reach our potential. In a similar concept to the note above and Coach Wooden’s definition, Judeo-Christian teaching defines sin as not just some transgression against a rule or standard of living that breaks our connection to God and peace in our lives, sin is just simply falling short of the mark that God has on our lives…in essence, not reaching our God-given potential.
In striving to reach our potential, there are just a few points that I would like to reinforce:
- Reaching our potential has nothing to do with our relative ranking vs others. Our relative ranking may help us get motivated, but reaching our potential has to do with us doing our very best to becoming the best that we can be.
- Understanding our potential in all areas of our lives, both at work and at home, requires self-reflection, honest assessment, prayer, and wisdom that comes over time.
- We will find a sense of peace, like Coach Wooden described, if we can consistently give our best effort in our journey of trying to reach our potential.
When we spend time and effort on determining what our true potential really is, I am reminded of my old high school pole vaulting coach who used to say to me every time before I would jump, “Espo, the sky is the limit!”
It has been my experience in working with individuals and teams over the years that we all have a great deal more potential in our roles at work and at home than any of us thinks we do. If each of us can “raise the bar” on our thinking about our true potential, we will make steady progress on building and strengthening our character and Character Creates Opportunity® for us to reach our potential.