You have so much potential!

Hated to hear people tell me this because HAVING potential and actually USING it are worlds apart. And when you’re not using your potential YOU KNOW!

Knowing that you’re NOT using your full potential is one thing. DOING something about it is another.

On my walk last evening, I was listening to a Tony Robbins talk. Tony was saying that in order to effect change you had to do 3 things:

1. Raise your standards
2. Deal with your limiting beliefs
3. Employ a winning strategy

Basic. Simple. True

Easy? Depends.

When you think about it – unless you expect more from yourself (raise your standards) nothing is really going to change. You’d probably relax with the excuse or legitimate reason du jour and marinate in motionless bliss…but is it really blissful?

In a post titled “What Then?” Dan Waldschmidt describes what the pain of NOT tapping into and using your potential feels like:

You flail from scheme to scheme hoping that you’ll get lucky the next time — hoping that your circumstances change without you having to change how you live your life.

And you never become the person that you could have been. You never achieve what you were meant to achieve. You never change the world in the way that you were meant to leave an impact.

And you feel it in your bones. You wake up knowing you were meant to do something bigger. But instead of working towards that you pacify your guilt by finding someone to which you can compare yourself.

Frankly, it’s a whole lot easier to just compare yourself to someone else that you’re already slightly better than. It’s a lot easier to make excuses — to point out how you “need to be balanced.” To point out all the obstacles in your way.

And those are good excuses. Sometimes perfectly legitimate reasons.

But it still doesn’t change the fact that you’re not doing something that truly matters. It doesn’t earn you special credit. There isn’t an asterisk next to your life stating the reasons why you didn’t amount to more.

I’ve been focused on living my life with integrity. Being true to myself. Keeping agreements with myself. It’s tough. For me, once it’s inked in my journal – I’ve got to do it. NO EXCUSES.

This feels tons better than my paltry excuses and REAL reasons why I couldn’t or shouldn’t. I am holding myself accountable. I will no longer make myself feel horrible around my choices to take a path of least resistance that will ultimately lead me to nowhere.

So consider – in your own life – what if today you decided to raise your standards? What if you decided to become the person you were designed to be? What if you decided NO MORE and get on with the job of being YOU and doing YOU?

How would your life be different?