How to Reach Your Full Potential

What if I told you that there's a path for you to walk on, for you to take, that would allow you to reach your full potential, that would allow you to become all that you're capable of becoming? This, for me, has been an absolute obsession. For years. I've constantly been looking at, reading, trying to understand what is it that separates the very, very best, those who reach the top of what they're capable of reaching from all the rest. My name is Eric Partaker and I coach CEOs, entrepreneurs and individuals exactly on this subject. How can I help them become all that they're capable of becoming? How can I help them reach their full potential? And today I want to take you through some of the critical things that you could be doing to close that gap between who you are and who you'd like to be. And today I'm going to be talking about some of the work from Abraham Maslow. Now, Abraham Maslow came up with his hierarchy of needs and, and he concluded in his research that our path to deepest fulfillment was through something he called self actualization, or realizing all that we're capable of becoming. He actually has a step beyond that, which is self transcendence. But let's just stay with self actualization, get there first, realizing all that we're capable of becoming. And Abraham actually created a path which flowed out of his research. He was a psychologist, researcher, flowed out of his research, which showed if you do these steps, if you proactively work on these things, you will become more deeply fulfilled in life. You will realize your full potential. And today I'm going to take you through exactly those steps. Number one is leading a life of full engagement. What does that mean? That means are you present in all that you're doing, whatever it is that you may be doing? You know, when you're with your family and friends, are you there just with them? When you're working on something, are you there just within work, within that specific project? Are you just working on that one piece, you know, that, that, that specific slide and that presentation? Are you working on building that, that, that, that deck or completing that analysis? Are you just focused on that? Are you fully engaged or do you tend to jump around? Is your mind constantly wandering, living a life of full focus, presence from moment to moment to moment, where, wherever we are, where we're completely there. That is what we mean about being fully engaged, fully present. So ask yourself, you know, where are you fully present in life? And then maybe ask yourself, well, where, where can you be improving? Where can you be turning on your presence, really focusing your attention on what's in front of you in that moment. The next thing is a growth mindset. So there's two mindsets that people typically have. I've done another piece on this that you'll find. You'll find an episode or a video, depending on whether you're listening to this as a podcast or.

As a video, where I talk about fixed mindset versus growth mindset. But in short, people tend to fall in one of these two camps. This is from the amazing research of over 30 years pulled together by Carol Dweck. A fixed mindset Persona is someone who believes that their abilities, their intelligence, is relatively capped, that there's not much room for improvement. They're kind of born with what. They have a little bit of room for improvement early on, but then they're kind of set in life. They don't respond well to challenges, to setbacks. They don't realize that it's just the effort that translates to success in the long run rather than any special gifts per se. They don't realize that the special gifts are actually the accumulation of effort. And so these people tend to plateau early. They don't realize their full potential. Whereas those with a growth mindset respond well to challenges. They see them as opportunities for growth. When they have a setback, they bounce back up and carry on. They realize that it's effort compounded over time that creates the big things. It's about taking these small actions on a daily basis, which may seem unremarkable, which, compounded over time, lead to big results. You know, a growth mindset person is somebody who replaces that word failure with learn, and they embrace that power of yet, right? So that power of, I may not know something yet. So being fully engaged, number one. Number two, having that growth mindset, number three, leading a life of congruence. So those that realize their full potential believe that the things that they're spending their energy and time and the things that they're focusing on are congruent with how they want to be in life, who they want to be, how they want to be. Ideally, showing up in the world. Have you ever asked yourself the question, what does the best version of you look like? Ask yourself right now, what does that version of you look like? What's the name of that person? What are the qualities of this person? How does that person act, show up, behave in the world? And how congruent are you on a daily basis, moment to moment, throughout your day with that best version of you? Because the more congruent you become, the more you close that gap between version of you without any intention, the version of you with more intentionality brought into it, and the more capable you'll become. You'll come in realizing your full potential. So congruence. We got full engagement, we've got a growth mindset. Congruent. The next thing that I wanted to talk about is 100% ownership. So again, those who self actualize realize their full potential are those who realize that everything that is going on in their life that they need to own. They need to own the things that haven't gone well. They need to own their mistakes. They need to not be passing that blame off to others. They need to accept that they, especially if you're leading a team or a group of people, you are ultimately responsible for the team's success, for the team's failure. You are ultimately responsible for making that success happen through them. You're ultimately responsible if they don't achieve it. You're also the CEO of your own life. So. So you're ultimately responsible for the things that are going well or at least how you're reacting or responding to those things, as well as the things that aren't going as well as you would like. If there's something not going well, take action. Own it. If there's something that's going well, how can you be doing more of it? How can you double down on it? Next thing is being egoless.

Take your ego, leave it at the door. Go to work. Be really, really careful with your need for seeking approval from others rather than just doing quality work for quality work sake. Be really, really careful. Notice any moments where you're tending to have to demonstrate your superiority to, you know, over someone else. You know, are you, are you someone who, when you meet somebody who's more capable than you, do you kind of shower, you know, or, sorry, you know, cower, shower. Wouldn't want you to just suddenly jump in the shower. Although that would be funny. But do you cower back? You know, do you, do you want to. Oh, I don't want to be in the spotlight right now because if I compete against that person or if I show my abilities versus theirs and if I don't win.

That'S not going to feel too good for the ego. So being egoless is a key thing that those who are reaching their full potential have in their repertoire. And of course, you can't eliminate this completely. We all have ego within us, but it's being conscious of that and understanding where it's showing up and then trying to more proactively repress that or at least step aside from that, separate ourselves from that. Those who are reaching their full potential write their own script. So they know, okay, what is it that I want to be achieving in my life? Where do I want to be going? Have you done that? Have you written your own script? Have you taken a moment, for example, to define where is it I want to be going in my life? What does that look like? What do I stand for? What do I stand against? Those who reach their full potential are taking the time to do this. They're taking the time to write that script. Next on the list, live and think differently. There's lots of ideas out there. Don't be copying someone else's, you know, ideas and using it as your own, but certainly learn from all those ideas. Extract all those, you know, wonderful concepts and see how you might combine them in different ways. How might you make them your own? How might you use your experience to perhaps put a different spin or perspective on these ideas or concepts that you might come across so that they take more root, more deeply in those that you're trying to spread your message to, or those that you're trying to lead, you know, live and think differently. You don't need to.

Let's take Apple as a fantastic example. They've constantly evolved their products. They're constantly thinking of, you know, what are different ways that we could be making things that are incongruent with our approach to simplicity and design, but maybe look and feel a little bit different from everything else that's out on the market?

Number eight, deliberate practice. So this is something that those who reach their full potential regularly engage in. Let me describe briefly what this means. This is all about identifying what is it that's going to make me really good at whatever I'm trying to become more skilled at. What are the things that I should be practicing? What are the things that I should be doing? Where do I sense the discomfort, the pain? Oh, that feels difficult. And then can I use that as a signal to step into whatever that may be and start practicing more? You know, deliberate practice is all about really focusing on what most needs improvement, what which is most critical for what you're trying to achieve or where you're trying to go, or what gap you're trying to close in this game of realizing your full potential and then stepping up to the plate and saying, here's how I'm scheduling this into my day. Here's where I'm going to be working on this. Here's the way in which I'm going to be getting feedback on whether or not I'm doing well on this. The ninth thing that I wanted to share with you from Abraham Maslow's work about closing that gap between who you are and who you're capable of being so that you can realize your full potential in the areas of life that matter most to you, is all about creating what he refers to as moments of ecstasy. And these are moments or experiences of peak performance.

Now for me, the way I translate this into my business in life is by having a peak performance routine. Again, I've talked about this in other pieces, but my simple peak performance routine, which can create these moments of ecstasy, these moments of peak performance in my day is making sure I have eight hours of sleep. I make sure I do a certain amount of deep work, fully focused, concentrated work before 7:30am every day. I'm an early riser. Make sure I get my exercise in between 7:30 and 8:30. That's my time, so that I really spike the energy for the rest of the day. And I have those good positive vibes flowing from, you know, all that exercise that I've just done. And then I make sure I shut down my day so that my workday isn't bleeding into my home life. There's a static appointment every day. I go through a checklist. I shut down that day and I transition from work mode to home mode or love mode, however you want to refer to it. And then last but not least, I have a digital sunset. So all these electronic devices emit blue light goes into our brains which tells our brain to lower the melatonin production which induces deep sleep. Why is the brain doing that? Because it thinks it's daylight. It's sunlight. So by having a digital sunset, I remind myself to shut off all those electronics in the hour before bed so that I sleep more deeply. That's an example of a little peak performance routine that I've installed to help create more moments of ecstasy or more of these peak performance moments in my days. So full engagement, growth, mindset, congruence, 100% ownership, egoless, writing your own script. Live and think differently. Deliberate practice and try to create these moments of ecstasy, these peak performance.

Behaviors or routines in your life. I hope you found that useful. And if you'd like more insights like this, please head over to my website@ericpartaker.com where you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter. Thank you.