What is fulfilling our potential and where do we start?
When you hear ideas about fulfilling or realising potential what comes to mind?
For me, my thoughts jump to being better than I am now, of not being where I want to be, and that I can get there by achieving a certain, set outcome, milestone, or goal. Sport also comes to mind and often negative stories about how this player never fulfilled their potential because of injury, that player didn’t fulfil their potential because of off-field distraction, or that player had so much potential but just didn’t work hard enough.
It feels like all of these thoughts miss the, err…, potential inherent in thinking about fulfilling our potential. Those thoughts and stories of unfulfilled potential place the emphasis on the outcome that our potential can produce. In doing so they limit the possibilities of potential fulfilment to a specific context and outcome, failing to recognise that we are all multi-faceted and that fulfilling our potential can take many forms. Yet, these thoughts and stories do also point to a more empowering way for us to think about fulfilling our potential.
What if we stopped thinking of potential fulfilment as an outcome and considered it as a process?
More specifically, what if we considered fulfilling our potential as the process of simply being our best?
That is what if we reframed fulfilling our potential as something we are doing every moment simply by being our best?
We can see this in Timothy Gallwey’s famous formula, which I’ve touched on before.
Performance = potential – interference
One of the founders of modern coaching, Gallwey highlighted how mastering what he called the Inner game, was a crucial element of performing or being our best. Although Gallwey’s work initially focused on tennis, he showed that the inner game is something far more universal (which I can vouch for as someone who hasn’t picked up a tennis racket in years).
This isn’t to say that outcomes aren’t important. Outcomes have many benefits, like creating direction and purpose, however a singular focus on outcomes can become an interference and stop us from being us and being our best.
Where next?
Really, this is just a starting point. Two questions quickly come to mind:
What is me being my best?
What is getting in the way of me being my best? (well something more self-critical like ‘why am I not my best?’)
I have written before (and undoubtedly will write more in the future) about how self-limiting beliefs get in our way, so instead I want to focus on the steps we can do to move towards being our best. In the spirit of potential as unlimited, to focus on the possibility that comes with exploring being our best. More practically the proverb ‘Vision without action is a dream, and action without vision is a nightmare’ comes to mind. We are creating the vision of our best so when we then tackle our interferences it is with a view to being our best.
There are several areas (dare I say it a process) we can focus on to create a foundation from which to be our best.
These areas are:
Visualisation - understanding what being our best is so we can work towards it
Motivation - finding the why that encourages us to be our best
Recognition - identifying our inner resources to be our best
Action - creating the conditions to be our best
Reflection - exploring and learning from our experience to be our best more fully
Visualisation - What is me being my best?
The first challenge to being our best is knowing what ‘being’ and ‘our best’ look like.
As soon as we think about potential fulfilment as being our best we loosen our grip on outcomes which means letting go of comparison. As Gallwey put it:
…in the process of learning to measure our value according to our abilities and achievements, the true and measureless value of each individual is ignored
To tease a question from this: What am I when not considered as the sum or my abilities and achievements?
This can be quite a scary place.
Without comparison and concrete things we can point to like accomplishments only we know what being our best is, what it feels like, and what it involves. So let’s explore that:
What does being your best feel like? How does it feel physically? Where do you feel it?
When you feel at your best what are you doing? Where are you? Who are you with?
When you feel your best, how do you think, feel, and behave?
In exploring the image of what you are when being your best, try to be as specific as possible. What our best looks like is something only we can know and something that we can work towards more easily the greater the clarity of image we have.
If you’re struggling to think of an example or experience to answer those questions some themes that often come up from others include:
feeling spacious, limitless, free or like a super-version of themself
feeling present and engaged in a moment
being wholehearted - being ourselves fully as we are
When may you have experienced some of these things and what did it feel like?
What could that look like in the future?
Motivation - Where am I being my best?
Building on the idea of being ourselves fully, one aspect of being our best is also pursuing what we are passionate about. It is when we are doing the things that mean the most to us that we can often feel and are our best. Sometimes these feelings are hard to put into words but we can just picture ourselves in those spaces, environments and moments where we have felt all that it is to be our best and to live fully.
If you could be your best in the pursuit of one thing, what would it be?
In being able to apply an image of being our best into a context that is important to us we create the motivation, excitement and energy that comes with the possibility of being our best. With motivation comes action and with action we achieve things that are important to us. From the foundation of being our best we’re more likely to achieve them or at least more likely to feel satisfied in how we have shown up in the pursuit of what we want.
We are achieving x because we are being our best rather than our best being the achievement of x.
With the image we are creating of us being our best, what is that allowing us to achieve, simply by being?
Recognition - identifying our inner resources to be our best - what does me at my best have that I currently don’t have?
So far we’ve talked about being and working towards our best. What if we don’t need to work towards our best but simply return to being our best.
To frame this as a question: What does you being your best have that you currently don’t have?
Perhaps the answer is simply nothing.
If being our best is showing up fully as us, utilising all our skills, qualities and attributes available to us then all we need to be our best is already there. In fact, being our best is simply being us.
In some ways being our best is so difficult because it is so effortless.
This is where interference often arises and where simply focusing on being our best in any given moment can help us to let go of all the things we hold on to that get in the way of being our best.
Headspace, the meditation app, often refers to the blue sky behind the clouds and it feels like an apt image here. Our best is the blue sky that is always there, just sometimes hiding behind the clouds.
Action - Creating the conditions to be our best. What allows me to be my best and what am I doing to be my best?
Although a large part of being our best is reframing our approach day to day, we can also work to create the conditions to be our best more easily.
If we return to the image and feelings we came up with about what it is and looks like to be our best, what enabled you to be your best? What helped you prepare?
Some suggestions that come to mind include:
Giving myself time and space to be your best - this could be sleep, it could be taking five minutes before a meeting to prepare, it could be organising your day in a way that gives you breaks or means you will approach a task when you have the most energy.
Cultivating habits that help me be my best - we cannot serve from an empty cup. What are the things that replenish your energies? What is a way of life that allows you to be and so be your best most often?
Being honest about our expectations of what being our best looks like - consider the context. If this is your tenth hour of meetings in a day, being your best may not be what it was for your second or third meeting, if you’re feeling unwell, again being your best will be different. Be clear and kind with yourself about what your best looks like in any given situation.
Reflection - What am I noticing?
To focus on being our best is as much about doing things differently as it is about approaching things differently, it takes time and is not a smooth or linear process. Reflection on what we notice in our efforts to simply be our best and to see what that looks like and creates produces the clarity to continue to be our best more fully, to learn, to grow and on the way reach some of the outcomes we want to achieve.
If we see potential, and what our best can be, as unlimited, reflection opens our eyes to the possibilities of what we can be and are when we simply are.
Working towards and focusing on being our best - the possibility
In focusing on being our best, letting go of focusing on outcomes and interferences there are many potential impacts in our lives and even the lives of others.
We go beyond our own limits - as soon as we have an outcome we are limiting what we could achieve. It is very rare that we don’t stop at the finish line. Stopping here means we never get to see what else may lie beyond that finish line.
We perform better - Gallwey found that as soon as we focused on the process we were less tense and far more intuitive, we could follow what felt right and in doing so often perform better than we expected
We live more fully - our judgement is less on the outcome as a measure of our success or failure, we an experience more than just the sense of accomplishment at having got something done, and we can learn more easily exploring how effective what we are doing is in getting us there, adapting and refining
We inspire others - in being our best, being us wholeheartedly and showing up as we are we act as role models to others, empowering them to simply focus on being their best.
An ongoing process
Fulfilling our potential then is an ongoing process of being our best in each moment.
What it looks like and means is unique to us.
Ultimately, it is a chance to live more fully as ourselves through a process of exploring, growing and being.
