7 sure ways to live up to your full potentials

Do you ever feel as though you have all this untapped potential? You just know you have what it takes to achieve your dreams, but for one reason or another, you are holding yourself back. You may even know what to do, but still, nothing happens. Maximizing your potential essentially means getting more out of yourself in every situation. It’s basically all about results. However, to attain higher level results, you need to first upgrade yourself. Raising your personal standards to higher levels naturally, helps you perform at higher levels. When you raise your standards, you are no longer settling for mediocrity. You are instead shooting for the stars and pursuing higher level actions that will get you better results.

1. Cultivating a Risk-Taker Mentality

To maximize your full potential, you need to feel comfortable taking risks. Yes, life is uncertain. The choices we make do not always pan out as expected. Sometimes we make choices, and things do not play out in our favour. However, high achievers the world-over are where they are in life because they were willing to make tough decisions. Moreover, they took the risks that provided them with the opportunities to achieve their goals. This does not mean that you should take reckless risks. Risk-taking is not something that you should rush into. Before taking a risk, you must weigh up the pros and cons. Ultimately, your objective is to make a decision that involves the lowest amount of risk for the highest returns or opportunities. This, of course, isn’t easy to calculate at times. Sometimes you just don’t know how things will pan out.

Having a good level of knowledge, understanding, and awareness about your situation can be very helpful. This will help you to develop the foresight you need to make calculated decision despite the uncertainties. You will only get the most out of yourself and from your ability when you show the willingness to step outside your comfort zone and take the necessary risks to achieve your goals.

2. Developing Physical Drive to Fuel Motivation

To maximize your full potential, you need to develop the physical drive that will fuel your motivation. Physical drive is a hunger and energy that comes from within. It helps carry you forward when the going gets though. It also helps keep you motivated and interested when doing tedious and repetitive tasks that stop other people in their tracks. To develop the necessary physical drive, you will need to have a definitive life purpose. Your purpose needs to be something that is bigger than you and your goals. It’s something that makes life truly worth living. It also needs to be backed by a solid plan of action that can help carry you forward each day. Your physical drive needs to be backed by boldness, confidence, and determination to fight through your struggles.

3. Challenging Yourself Through a Competitive Spirit

Having a competitive spirit does not mean that you are always challenging other people to a fight. It rather means challenging your best-self each and every day. Your objective should always be the pursuit of excellence in everything you do. It should be all about making progressive, consistent, and incremental improvements each day. Your competition is, therefore, you. To maximize your full potential, you must challenge yourself to outperform your very best self. Raise your standards and make an effort to do better, and be better in small ways each and every day.

4. Creating a Compelling Vision that Drives You Forward

Your vision essentially comes down to your long-term view of success. It is about how you envision yourself and your life in the coming years. This is something that must propel you forward each day. Having a compelling vision of the future helps divert your focus away from problems and the numerous setbacks you will inevitably face along your journey. It helps keep your eyes focused on the big picture, and not on the plethora of problems that may arise along your journey. Your vision is however not exclusively yours. You must involve other people to get on board your vision for mutual benefit. You must, therefore, garner their support to help you accomplish your vision and goals.

5. Holding Yourself Accountable Through Self-Criticism

This basically means taking full responsibility for what you do and the outcomes you produce. Honest self-criticism or assessment is, of course, the key here. You need, to be frank with yourself and critically assess your progress. Only in this way will you put yourself in a position to make changes that can help you move forward. When these struggles arise, it is important that you avoid blaming people or circumstances for your predicament. Instead, take full responsibility, assess what worked and what did not, and how you could do better the next time around. High achievers are often more critical and harder on themselves than anybody else. They hold themselves to the highest of standards and pursue excellence in everything they do.

6. Igniting Your Ambition for Goal Achievement

Your ambition is tied to your vision of the future and to your physical drive. It is, in essence, the fuel that drives you forward each day. However, your ambition is also tied to a sense of urgency. People who have a high degree of ambition also work with urgency. They set concrete stretch goals that are time specific. The time specific element makes these goals very challenging. Many times high achievers aim for impossible goals. Ambition is something that you need to cultivate each day. It is something that requires constant effort and application. Whether you reach your lofty goals or not, ambition just keeps pushing you forward beyond the limits of what you previously thought was possible.

7. Finding the Self-Confidence to Overcome Setbacks

Feeling self-confident for most people has little to do with them, and has more to do with what’s happening around them. When things are going well, and people are on your side, then it’s easy to feel confident. However, when facing adversity and criticism, confidence is not so easy to find. High achievers get their own self-confidence from their own self-worth. No matter what is going on around them, they feel confident that they will get through it because they have a high level of self-worth, which protects them from life’s obstacles and people’s criticism. Maximizing your full potential is therefore heavily reliant on your level of self-confidence. When you feel confident, you are more likely to take risks and to step outside your comfort zone to achieve your desired aim. With it, anything becomes possible. Without it, life will continue to be an endless struggle.

The process of maximizing our potential therefore never actually ends because there is always more to know, to learn, and to do that can help move our lives forward in a better way. It’s about having a willingness to learn, grow, and develop ourselves in a multitude of ways that supports our purpose and vision for life. This, however, takes work. It takes constant vigilance and consistent action on your part to become a better version of yourself today than you were yesterday.