Reaching Your Potential

[5ft Diva]

What holds you back from reaching your full potential (in any given area or generally overall)? Do you know what that potential is? How did you come to find out what you are capable of doing/becoming? How are you overcoming your fears? Who are the defining people and/or what are the defining moments in your life that have helped you "punch through the wall" and move forward regardless of your circumstances?

[Dia Minha]

I talked a little bit about this in my post in the New Years Resolutions thread. What holds me back the most is giving up what I want the most, for the thing I want at the moment.

I don't know what my true potential is. I can only hope for what I want it to be.

I am striving to overcome my fears. I have discovered I have a fear of success or completion. While I was sewing Christmas PJs this year and realized I only had the hems on one more pair of pants to go, I had to fight the urge to quit. I didn't. I finished them.

Every time I go to a WW meeting I am able to remove one more brick. If I miss too many meetings the bricks get piled back on.

Dia

[Big_Sissy]

This is a good and tough question. I'm very interested to hear everyone's thoughts.

[Erudite]

hmmm...

Well, I think, like Dia, that we don't always know what our potential really is. And what we do know sometimes is scary, in the sense that either it's really hard to reach or it's all around us and picking it up means that we'll have to do or accomplish things that we just don't want to do at this moment. I wonder a lot if the latter isn't the thing holding us back...our potential is staring us in the face and we choose hold it back by sitting on our rears OR by being so busy in the NOW that we can't pick up the possibilities.

I guess I can say that because I've been so busy in the past that looking "potential" was just another check list item. Now I'm not busy at all and looking at potential is about all I do. I'm surprised to see that my potential is going to be reached without my health. I guess I've known that for a long time, but never really internalized it until now when my health is precarious. How did I come to know my potential? Study, prayer, God's guidance. And with those things, I have a firm foundation of patience, knowledge, and ability to get me through even though my body isn't coming along. And while standing on that foundation, fears seem far away.

For me, overcoming fear is a mental exercise. There have been many times in the past 2 months when I've found myself worried about all the things happening to my body and I've had to take myself firmly in control and one by one kick out the fears and replace it with faith that what is going on is for my good. God loves me too much to let all the things I THINK might go wrong, actually go wrong and be of no worth. What is happening is of worth, God will make it so, the Atonement will make it so, and so I am not afraid.

Defining moments? Many. Most happened before I got so sick, so that here, now I'm doing ok. My potential is there for me to see and reach for no matter what. I see and I reach....my circumstances only make that more possible, not less.

[5ft Diva]

I see and I reach....my circumstances only make that more possible, not less.

Amen to that!