Are You Ready to Unleash Your Full Potentials?

Here’s some very personal questions, questions sure to upset some people, trigger anger in some challenge others, and begin an unleashing process for those with the ego-strength to face them and let them work within us.

• — How much of your potential have you released to date?
• — How much more potential do you believe lies dormant within awaiting to be unleashed?
• — What would bring out your best and open up new possibilities?
• — What dreams lurk on the edge of your awareness inviting you forward?
• — What’s stopping your from releasing your highest and best?
• — What potentialities are now actualities in your life?

Several years ago I began working on the knowing-doing gap, the gap between all of our great ideas, insightful principles, and conceptual understandings and our ability to put those into action to make a profound difference in our lives. As a result the Mind-to-Muscle pattern and numerous other integrative patterns emerged.

Now there’s another gap that I’m working on —the Potential-Actual gap. This is the gap between the self-actualization potentialities and our current everyday actualities of capabilities, competencies, and achievements. We all know that every human being is born with all kinds of potentials, but how many of these potentials are fully tapped, activated, and unleashed? Ten percent? Fifty percent? Does anyone ever unleash all of his or her potentials?

When we think about mental and intellectual potentials, emotional potentials, creative potentials, interpersonal potentials, health potentials, innovative potentials, enjoyment potentials, and so on — is anyone even half way there? And what if the purpose and adventure of life in the world as we know it is nothing more than the adventure of unleashing our potentials so that we can make an ever-greater contribution?

Okay, so how does the unleashing process work? What takes off the leashes holding us back? First and foremost is the dream itself. If we don’t know, or believe, that there is vast potentiality within us, we wouldn’t even start the process. So awakening to the dream is the first step. Ironically, traditional psychology has been one of the biggest detriments to this.

How is that? Primarily because traditional psychology was invented to answer a very different question. Not, “What are the wonderful possibilities in human nature?” Not, “How great can average men and women become?” Not, “What are the potentials awaiting to be awakened within us?”

Those were not the questions that Freud and associates were asking at the end of the nineteenth century. They were asking a whole different set of questions: “What causes people to become hysterical?” “What are all of the ways that human nature can go wrong?” “What are the primitive urges pulsating within human nature that society and morals are trying to control?”

Traditional psychology arose as a way of trying to understand the aggressive, crazy, painful, destructive, and inexplicable urges of people. We could say that they were trying to understand the dark side. In that day, personality disorders, psychosomatic illnesses and acting out, regressive states of hypnotic pain, etc.—depression, dissociation, destructiveness, etc. were not understood at all and there were almost no cures or ways to manage such states. Fast forward a hundred years and psychology today has made tremendous advances in understanding abnormal psychology and psycho-pathology. Today there has been significant advance in helping people suffering from these distortions.

During that time psychology not only mapped out abnormal psychology, but also normal psychology as Developmental Psychology (Lifespan Psychology) became a discipline in its own right and numerous leaders pioneers the study of mental or cognitive development, emotional development, psycho-social development, sexual development, cultural, and so on.

Once this had been explored, then others began exploring The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (to quote the title of one of Maslow’s books). That is, they began to study the bright side. They began to ask, “What’s possible?” “What’s the most we can anticipate and facilitate in human development?” And that opened up a whole new adventure.

So now there is at least awareness, and perhaps awakening, to the fact of human potential. Yet is that enough? Will the mere awareness of having latent potentials enough to unleash them? We all know that it is not. Things can interfere.

So we ask the interference question, “What stops you? What holds you back from unleashing your talents, predispositions, capabilities, energies, dreams, etc.?” And here we discover that the biggest hindrance and interference to unleashing our potentials lies in the messages that are playing in the theater of our mind. In other words, how we are communicating to ourselves about our potentials.

• We question whether we really have the potential, “Can I do this? Maybe it’s too big.”
• We question our right, “Who am I to think that? This is selfishness, egotism, pride!”
• We fear the process, “It would take too much work, discipline, etc.”
• We feel insecure, “But what if I don’t succeed?”

In other words, we get into unresourceful states of mind and emotion about it. Of course, these are negative meta-state about the primary state of learning, developing, exploring, experimenting, trying, giving it a go, learning what doesn’t work, refining our skills, bouncing back from set backs, stretching, continuous learning and improvement, etc.

And, if we don’t know how to effectively and gracefully handle our meta-states, then transformational change of these states will either be a lot of work and “hard,” or we will only make things worse for ourselves. But (and here is the magic of Meta-States) if we do know how to meta-state ourselves with positive frames to neutralize the toxic ones and set potential- releasing frames in the matrix of our mind-body system — then, unleashing will occur.

Now, you know why we spend day two of APG clearing the path. We do that by slaying dragons, readjusting our matrix of frames, developing a good relationship to concepts, meta- stating our emotions. And we do that to eliminate the negative meta-stating that interferes with unleashing our inner genius.