Potential as Energy
Reach your potential...or not
If you’ve gone anywhere near a personal or professional development book, blog or podcast in the last 10 years, you’ve probably read some generic phrase about reaching or living up to your highest potential. I’m all for potential, potential is awesome. But how the heck do you ‘reach’ or ‘live up’ to it?
Newsflash…You can’t.
Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hold the phone. ‘What do you mean you can’t reach your potential?’ I hear you say. ‘Then what’s the freakin point of all of it?’ Aren’t you a coach? Isn’t that your job to help people reach their potential?’
Potential isn’t the goal
Touche. I am certainly not exempt when it comes to supporting people to tap into their potential. In fact, it’s built into the purpose of my business and one of the main reasons I do what I do. But I don’t believe you (or anyone else for that matter) can ever reach it. Because, potential is not an end point. It’s not a goal. It’s not something to be achieved.
The obligatory Google search produces a multitude of definitions of potential. Most refer to it in some way as possibility or an ability that’s not yet developed. Where I feel these kind of miss the mark, is they infer potential is something that doesn’t yet exist. This is where I disagree.
Do you feel The Force?
When I talk to people about potential, most have a sense of theirs. They may not know exactly what it is, or how to use it, but they know it’s there. We all know it’s there. We can FEEL it. Think Luke Skywalker feeling into ‘The Force’ in Star Wars. (If you haven’t watched Star wars, please immediately stop reading this article and go and do so now). I actually think it’s why so many of us put ourselves into a spin about achievement and success in life. That feeling of potential is so strong, we believe if we don’t do something with it, we’ll somehow have failed at this messy thing called life. But how do we do something with it when we can’t see it or touch it? We may know it’s there, but it’s kind of nebulous.
Potential as Energy
I believe there’s a very simple way to frame the notion of our potential that makes it sooooo much easier to ‘get’ and is much more helpful for us tapping into and using it for good. And that is seeing potential as untapped energy – a latent energy force. (Yep, just like Star Wars).
Just like electricity is a form of energy that buzzes away in the background until a switch is flicked and some gadget or gizmo turns it into light, heat, sound etc. Potential is the energy source we all have access to, which we can use to turn into…pretty much anything.
When we begin to view potential as energy, all of a sudden we have something we can work with. It gives us agency over our potential and it gives us power (pardon the pun) to do something with it. It becomes something we can create, we can lose, we can grow, we can transform and we can share.
The four types of energy
I like to imagine our potential as buzzing balls of energy we contain within us. (Side note: I don’t believe it’s all necessarily coming from us, but that’s a story for another time). And these balls contain four different types of energy:
Physical energy
Mental energy
Emotional energy
Spiritual energy
Everything we do in our lives either contributes to or depletes these energies. And that impacts how much of those energies we have to fill us up and use out in the world to be awesome and do awesome stuff.
Fuel for the journey
I hope you can now see why we can’t reach our potential. It’s not the destination. It’s the fuel to help us get there.
So let me ask you a few more questions:
Now that you have this new way to see your potential, what’s guzzling your gas?
What improves the quality of the fuel so it lasts longer and keeps the vehicle (you), running smoothly?
And what are you doing to fill your tank?
Want support better understanding, nurturing, growing and sharing your potential? Sign-up for a free discovery call to and work with me as your human potential coach.