How to achieve your potential.

This week two moments made me ‘pause’ to reflect. At our event on emotional intelligence for business success. The speaker tried to cover lots of things on emotional intelligence but it’s such a huge topic she could only provide key insights.

One of these was on confidence. Not on the confidence we can gain – she mentioned how our individual reaction to something as simple as accepting a compliment can impact the compliment giver as much as the receiver of the compliment.

If someone says “What a great outfit/speech/ meal you cooked” How do you respond? Most people would mumble or shrug. How many would smile and confidently say “Thank you” straight out? Very few it would seem. This was from a room full of confident assertive business men and women who have achieved phenomenal success in their own chosen professions.

Why is this?

As a parent myself with a son and daughter under 10 it would be amazing to inspire each of them to achieve their full potential. I’m an aunty to nieces and nephews again in their formative years. I’m also a mentor and part of various networking groups. How can I, as an adult, help all of these people achieve their potential? What underpins the success achieved by the most prodigious entrepreneurs? These questions leapt to my mind during the business breakfast and embedded themselves in my subconscious so that I’m now putting pen to paper. I want to share a very powerful simple secret that I learned that Thursday morning.

Every one of us CAN achieve our potential. Yes, that’s right. The “How” lies in the way we train our brains to respond to life’s quirks, including something as simple as a compliment. Let us think about that.

If we stumble, mumble and yes even apologise to a compliment we’re given, we are not only sending a negative message to the compliment giver, we are also re-affirming and internalising a message to our own brain that we are not ‘worth’ that compliment. This is like a seed of doubt, an acorn of worthlessness that will grow into a sapling every time we shrug off or fail to acknowledge that compliment. What we need to do is stop and imagine that sapling in our head and visualise snapping it into two, before it becomes a towering oak tree in our mind.  The effort to break that tree will require more than just our hands and fingers, it would need an axe at the very least.

So how to snap that sapling? We need to first say to ourselves EVERY DAY I am ok. I am fine. I am enough. From repeating this and allowing yourself just five minutes of ‘me time’ each day. Look at yourself in the mirror and say these words: – “I am a good person and I’m going to have a great day”.

This simple action, if allowed to become a habit, means your subconscious brain will eventually pour weed killer on that sapling of doubt in your mind. Picture that in your head. The sapling slowly withering then disappearing altogether. Got that? Good.

Back to compliments…

The next time you have someone say “well done” or “great work”, pause, smile and say “thank you”. I can just imagine that sapling withering as I write.

Have a great day!

I’ll be exploring this in further posts but would love to hear your comments. A journey to anywhere starts with a simple small step. I hope this post has given you that simple first step to achieving your true potential. Please let me know your thoughts as I always appreciate feedback.