Finding, Developing and Expressing Our Potential

Economic and social opportunities have sustainably increased over the past 50 years. Yet, happiness, life satisfaction and even overall well-being seem to be locked at the same level.

Why is it that our happiness and well-being are locked and not responding to economic and social opportunities? Work takes a big chunk of our time and energy (on average, 50 hours per week). Thus, if we are working more hours, it is necessary to look at our professional work lives in order to understand our overall well-being. In particular, we need to look at the fact that the existing design of the workplace is not creating opportunities for people to find, develop and express their potential. And that has a profound impact in happiness and well-being.

This is not a small thing. Employee disengagement and dissatisfaction are up to a whopping 70%. The actively disengaged segment, which accounts for 16% of the total, represents economic loses in productivity of up to $350 billion dollars a year. But, what about the personal and professional costs for each individual who comes every day to work wishing not to be there or to be doing something else? More importantly, why is this happening?

I sustain that the main reason behind personal unhappiness and professional disengagement is the lack of opportunities to find, develop and express our potential. Unfortunately, many organizations are intrinsically design to make people produce more, and work in meaningless tasks more efficiently, at the expense of personal and job satisfaction.  

There is a perverse cycle going on here. Organizations don’t provide the opportunities for people to thrive in their potential. This creates dissatisfaction that contributes to lock and increase personal unhappiness and professional disengagement. An unhappy individual won’t be as productive as the organization wants, but at the same time will spiral to ever higher levels of disengagement.

Finding, developing and expressing our potential is therefore essential to increase happiness, engagement and productivity. Just as the negative cycle of disengagement-unhappiness spirals up, the same happens with the opposite. That is, the positive cycle of engagement-happiness-productivity. When people are engaged, their happiness and productivity increase. And when they are happy, it is more likely that satisfaction and engagement increase as well. So, how do we achieve this positive cycle in the workplace?

Unfortunately, many organizations and their leadership are too stubborn to see that they need a major shift in the way they promote engagement and satisfaction. However, I want to focus my recommendations on the personal and individual side of the equation. This means focusing on the things that we individually can do even if our workplaces don’t change.

So, here are a few ideas on how to increase our day to day happiness, engagement and satisfaction, based on our potential.

Finding our potential and defining who we are:

We need to work on finding our potential. Most people who research about the topic agree that potential is the combination of the things we love doing, the things we are passionate about and the things we are good at. I would also add that sometimes finding our potential means having a personal “identity” crisis. We might face the inconvenient challenge of finding that what we have done is not really fulfilling anymore (and maybe has never been), and that we need to move on.

Finding our potential is essential. Until we do, probably most of the activities we do in our jobs and even in our personal lives won’t make any sense.

For example, some people find what they want out of their lives, which is their potential. Yet, they have to suck it up for a while doing work they don’t like. But, isn’t it worse doing some work we don’t like, because we have no idea of what is it that we want out of our lives.

The difference is that the first case gives us the opportunity to find some enjoyment and learning in the things we don’t like. Whereas the second case, well, we can’t even understand what is going on.

Developing our potential

If we are able to identify our potential, it will be more likely that we will find the ways to develop it in our everyday lives. For example, let’s think that we’re doing some work that we find absolutely boring and meaningless, but we have no idea why. Once we find our potential, we understand that maybe 10% of that “boring and meaningless” job has some value to us.

Probably the type of job won’t change and we are not given the opportunities to do something else. And, does it really matter? Well, it always does. But it matters less when we are able to see and work more on the 10% that helps us become who we want to become, than when we see the 90% that doesn’t.

When we discover our potential, our work won’t be just a job anymore. Rather, we will eagerly be looking for the learning and growing opportunities in each task, regardless of how boring they seem to be. This will create personal satisfaction and engagement with the task at hand. And, if we want to be a little bit selfish here, we can say that we are doing it because of our own learning and growing experience rather than for the organization. Thus, develop our passions and see the opportunities even within the most boring and meaningless things is self-fulfilling, satisfying and help us increase our engagement and happiness.

Expressing our potential

Knowing and developing our potential is not enough. We need to use it and express it! For instance, let’s say that we want to be a professional coach, but we are not given the opportunities to do it in our jobs. Rather, our work is to prepare technical documents together with some internal clients. Well, we could do several things here, only after finding our potential.

We could initiate professional conversations with some of those internal clients. Instead of thinking of it as “going the extra mile”, we can see it as an opportunity to further develop and express our potential to become a professional coach. We could ask those clients what they need, how we can help them more and subtly begin the coaching conversation.

Now, are we going to get any reward, acknowledgement or a pat on the back from our boss for doing that informal coaching? Maybe not. Do we care? If we do, we’re going back to the stage of focusing on the organization’s side of the engagement and happiness equation. But if we see it as our own personal and professional development and potential, then we’ll be satisfied and engaged just by doing it. It will serve us as a way to build more knowledge that we can use in the future, when we move on.

Follow me on Twitter: @erubio_p
Visit my blog: www.innovationdev.org

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About the Author: Enrique Rubio is an Electronic Engineer and a Fulbright scholar with an Executive Master’s Degree in Public Administration from Syracuse University. Enrique is passionate about leadership, business and social entrepreneurship, curiosity, creativity and innovation. He is a blogger and podcaster, and also a competitive ultrarunner. Visit the blog: Innovation for Development and Podcast. Click here to follow Enrique on Twitter. 

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