As we move into the new year and continue our journey to build and strengthen our character, an important topic to consider is how we work towards reaching our full 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 alignment. Many times, these important 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 need to be intentional about maintaining 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 100 meter 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 the adult manifestation of finding our self-worth relative to others.
In terms of determining our self-worth, John Wooden provides an important point in his 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 trying to drive home the point that 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 full 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 world that keeps pressuring us to compare ourselves to others.
In striving to reach our potential, here are a few points to consider:
- 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 requires a great deal of self-reflection, honest assessment by ourselves and others who genuinely care for us, 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 along our journey of trying to reach our potential.
When we spend time and effort on determining our true potential, I am reminded of my old high school pole vaulting coach who used to say to me before I would jump, “Espo, the sky is the limit!”
It has been my experience in working with individuals, teams and families over the years that we all have a great deal more potential in our roles 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.