Reflection and Potential
With 2018 fast approaching it is the perfect opportunity to reflect on 2017 and think about how you would like 2018 to be better. After all, we all want stuff to keep getting better right?
I think the first question to you all is; What is your potential?
Even if you have an idea what your potential is, you first should seek to find or establish your starting point. Many years ago, I was advised to read a poem to assist me in academic writing. The celebrated English poet and author, Rudyard Kipling, promoted his 'six honest men’ the use of six questions, as a guide for better thinking.
“I keep six honest serving men, they taught me all I knew.
Their names are What and Why and When
and How and Where and Who.”…(R Kipling)
Six honest serving men is an exercise that examines an issue from different viewpoints. It helped tremendously in my academic writing, but I got more use than that. I learned to use the ‘what, why, when, how, where and who’ to form the basis of analysis when problem solving.
What do I need to learn?
Why do I need to know this?
When can I use this?
How can I use this?
Where can I use this?
Who can I use this with?
What, Why and When, How and Where and Who do not necessarily need to be in this order. As this is a blog about self reflection I think we will major on the ‘who’. I asked in a previous blog; Do we know ourselves? I want to explore that a little more in depth here.
It’s very difficult to know how we come across to others. Some of us might think we do know ourselves. How many times have you heard somebody say; ’I know me’ or ‘what you see is what you get’? I think the these statements represents us knowing some of our likes and dislikes, thus confirming our limit of potential or settling for a version of ourselves.
Are you completely happy with who you are, or rather, who you believe you are? Are you content with where you are in life? Do you accept that; This is as good as it gets? Is change no longer possible? If yes then congratulations, you have reached your potential. But what I really believe is that you are accepting limits of your potential. I believe improvement is always possible, furthermore I believe that within improvement lies change and change is inevitable. In embracing change in the right way, we may just also be embracing improvement
There is a saying, I have no idea of the origin but I have heard this many times. ‘You cannot teach the young or the old anything’. My interpretation of this is, when someone is young they do not yet possess the complexity in thinking or maybe the wisdom to make sense of life’s lessons. As we get older we often get stuck in our ways, sometimes believing change is just too difficult now.
Where we are now is where we choose to be through a combination of decisions, thoughts, deeds, words, belief and attitude (disability and illness aside). We should not therefore lament our position, it is after all, exactly where we choose to be. If we want to be somewhere else in life then we might analyse; where are we now, why are we here, when did this chain of events that led me here start, how did they start, What do I want to be better, do I want to be a better person in any way?
How can we learn more about who we really are? The answer might possibly lie through the eyes of those that look upon us? Especially as we perform different roles in our lives which require us to access different facets of our personality. It is quite possible if not probable that we come across differently to different people all the time. There may be a number of reasons for this; role, how we feel, how they relate to us, our experiences etc…
It is said that life is a journey and it is the journey we should try to enjoy to its fullest extent. The destination is, by its very definition, the end of the journey. Why is it then, that at times we stop our journey prematurely? We have settled for being set in our ways, there is no more learning or change required, I am here, I have arrived.
When does our potential stop? It stops when we choose to stop it, either consciously or subconsciously. Do we one day wake up with a different mindset? Do we one day wake up lazy? Is it a life changing experience we have or is it the culmination of many smaller impacting experiences that make us decide, this is it. I have reached my zenith. I am the best I can ever be. I can’t be bothered anymore? Why should I change? Whatever your decision, it is a decision saying, ‘I will stop here - no more potential’.
This leads me onto another saying; ‘If in ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. I personally dislike this saying as it infers stagnation, and within stagnation lies decline. I used to hear this a lot at work, usually from people opposed to change or who had become set in their ways. I’ve said before, we humans are creatures of habit and stepping outside of our learned patterns of behaviour can be hard and uncomfortable. Self improvement or life improvement requires us to grow, evolve, it requires us to change. Therefore for us to improve it requires us to do some work, to do something different to what we have been doing.
It’s good to talk
I have some questions for you. What, more questions I hear you ask? I’m afraid so. I want you to think about all of your relationships, personal and professional. Do you have problems in any of them? What do you do about it?
Here are some common observations I have made;
Ignore them
Blame others
Acknowledge them
Wait it out (this is different from ignoring it as it requires acknowledgement)
Talk to a third party
Talk to many third parties
Search on the internet for some answers
Talk to the person concerned
Coach that person overtly
Coach that person covertly
Receive coaching from that person
Create distance
Give up and walk away
Which of these have we tried? What did we learn from our experience? What would we do if we had the chance of a ‘do over’? What will we do next time? These are purely rhetorical questions for us to ponder.
From the points above there are some golden opportunities for us to learn, and grow. These open the door to feedback. Feedback is a gift, it might sting at times, it be extremely hard to take and even easier to ignore, but it is a gift. When taken in the right way it will help us evolve as a person and therefore improve some aspect of our lives, perhaps reach greater potential. Feedback can help us grow exponentially, but there are some golden rules for us to bear in mind when receiving feedback.
Honesty is personal, the person giving us the feedback is doing so from their own perspective, respect that.
Do not dismiss it because we don’t like it.
Do not be defensive when receiving it.
Reflect on what has been given to us.
When reflecting on feed back, try going back to the questions derived from the six honest serving men poem;
What do I need to learn?
Why do I need to know this?
When can I use this?
How can I use this?
Where can I use this?
Who can I use this with?
How do you seek feedback? Do you seek feedback from others? Are you open to it? Does it matter to you? Can you reach your potential without feedback?