Reaching your fullest potential requires a dedication to your personal growth journey, not just one task. To stay dedicated and driven, it’s crucial to build a toolkit that will help you remain on pace to arrive at your full potential. For example, you’ll want to work on your mindset, develop a plan, set goals, and make time for self-reflection. If you do all of these things, you’ll be well on your way to reaching your full potential.
I’ve done years of creative self-work to help me reach my full potential. As a result of my personal experiences, I wrote a book, You Deserve This Sh!t, to help you get unstuck, find your path, and become the best version of yourself.Â
Purchase your copy or download chapter one for free below.
What Determines Your Potential?
Your potential is the amount of success and growth you give yourself permission to achieve. It’s not dictated by anyone else but yourself. This means you are in control of the height at which you can reach in life. If you flood your mind with self-limiting beliefs, you will create a ceiling to your potential. However, if you focus on reminding yourself you have the opportunity achieve everything you want in life, you create the greatest potential for your life.
7 Tips to Reach Your Full Potential
Self-discovery—the journey of stepping into your power—is a long winding road that involves consistent work. There’s no way you will find yourself or reach your full potential by doing sporadic work. Inconsistent work will possibly make you want to give up because you won’t see the results you want to achieve. If you’re ready to reach your full potential, create a plan and toolkit that guides you there.
You can achieve your full potential and create your toolkit with these seven tips.
1. Develop a Positive Mindset
A positive mindset allows you to manage your stress and have a positive expectation for how things will pan out in your life. You’ll find it easier to have the courage to face challenges, chase your biggest dreams, and make necessary lifestyle changes to push you toward your fullest potential.
Developing a positive mindset means switching your perspective on life from negative to positive. To do so, surround yourself with positive people, practice gratitude every day, find a positive in every situation, practice positive self-talk, and identify your areas of negativity so you can make an effort to turn them into positives.
2. Focus On Your Time Management
If you want to reach your full potential, you need to be able to use your time efficiently. While many of us live busy lives, you are always capable of making time for the things that are important—like reaching your full potential. There are different systems and tools you can use to perfect your time management, including:
- Time blocking:Â Through time blocking, you divide your day up into blocks of time, and each block of time focuses on one task. For example, you could set a one-hour block (time will vary depending on the task) for one task and work only on that task for the full hour. Once you complete it or the hour is up, you would move to your next time block. Set time blocks for tasks, breaks, and walks using your calendar on your phone or computer to stay on top of your time.
- Pomodoro Technique:Â The Pomodoro Technique requires you to work in intervals and set a timer. Twenty-five minutes on, five minutes off is the most popular interval. This means you’ll set a timer and work for 25 mins and then take a five minute break. Each 30 minute period is called a Pomodoro. After four Pomodoros, take a longer break, such as 15 or 20 minutes.
3. Develop a Plan
Planning how you want to live every day is crucial to reaching your full potential. If you don’t plan out your days in advance, it’s likely what you wanted to do for yourself will get pushed off to the side due to other tasks or activities that come up in the moment. To reach your full potential, you’ll need to make sure your days are aligned with the direction you want to go on your path.
Use these tips to develop your plan:
- Identify what’s important to you:Â Before drawing up your week, think about what’s important to you. What do you want to accomplish? What do you want to overcome? What impact do you want to make in your life and/or others? These questions can help identify the most important things in your life.
- Plan out your week on Sunday:Â Before Monday, sit down on Sunday to plan your week in advance. This will allow you to create a clear vision of what needs to be done in the coming days. This will help you stay on track every day, ensuring you’ll hit your full potential throughout the week.
- Use a to-do list:Â To make sure you accomplish all that you need to accomplish in one day, use a to-do list. I recommend only putting down six priority tasks to focus on each day. If you have any leftover tasks at the end of the day, they become your first tasks for the following day. Each day’s to-list should add up to six total tasks.
- Incentivize yourself:Â Rewarding yourself for your small victories is crucial. Identify an incentive or reward you can enjoy at the end of your week. This will help keep you motivated throughout the week and feel accomplished when you get to enjoy the reward.
4. Set Goals That Align With Your Visions
Similar to developing a plan, setting goals that align with your visions is a key part of reaching your full potential. When you set goals that align with where you want to go, you create a roadmap that helps you become the person you want to become. However, if you set goals in spite of your visions, it’s likely you’ll journey down a path that is not true to yourself.
So, first, identify the life you envision for yourself. Think about what you want to achieve, who you want to be around, the impact you want to create, and, most importantly, how you want to feel daily. Once you identify those factors, it’s time to set goals that align with that vision.
To make sure your goals are clear and reasonable, focus on SMART goals, which stands for:
- Specific: A clear and specific goal allows you to focus your efforts on achieving it. Think about what you want to accomplish, why the goal is important, who’s involved, and what resources you’ll need to complete it.
- Measurable: Measurable goals allow you to track your progress. A measurable goal should focus on questions like “How much?”, “How many?”, and “How will I know I achieved it?”.
- Achievable: Your goals need to be realistic to be successful. They should still push your limits to help you grow, but you still need to set the goal within reason.
- Relevant: This is exactly what we’re talking about in this section: Your goals need to be relevant to your visions. If you want to reach your full potential, your goals should direct you toward that destination.
- Time-bound: Choose a target date. This will motivate you to stay on track and focus on achieving the goal you set for yourself.
5. Consistently Take Action
Reaching your full potential requires daily work. Once you develop a plan and set goals for yourself, you need to consistently take action. Working on your self-discovery and personal growth one or two days out of the week isn’t going to catapult you on your journey. If you truly want to reach your full potential, you’ll need to take action on that mission every single day.
6. Simplify Your Life Where Possible
Something that has helped me reach my full potential is striving for simplicity. This means removing unwanted distractions, saving yourself time by preparing ahead, and becoming more efficient throughout your day.Â
When you simplify your life, you gift yourself with more time to focus on the things that matter, like reaching your full potential. If you are all over the place throughout the day, it’s highly unlikely you’ll have enough time to execute your to-do list and goals, and you may invite stress into your life.
Follow these tips to simplify your life:
- Turn off your phone in the morning
- Leave your phone outside of your office
- Become more efficient in your morning routine or follow a quick one
- Prepare for your day the day before, such as setting out your outfit so it’s ready in the morning
- Set monthly or quarterly goals and ditch the lofty New Year’s resolutions
- Plan your meals and workouts
- Write your to-do list at the end of the day
7. Make Self-reflection a Priority
At the end of the day, self-reflection is crucial along your journey of reaching your full potential. Self-reflection allows you to learn from your past experiences, challenges, failures, and successes. It gives you a bird’s eye view of what you want to keep doing moving forward and what you want to remove that’s taking you away from your full potential.
I use journaling to self-reflect. Journaling is an easy and free way to look back on your journey and see how far you’ve come. You don’t need to spend a lot of time either. Start with five to 10 minutes of free writing and reflect on your path. As you do more reflection exercises over time, you’ll be able to compare them side by side to give you an even more detailed look at your progress to reaching your full potential.
Bottom Line
This article is your first step toward your full potential. Begin to implement these seven tips into your life and see how your personal growth will unfold. If there’s one thing I want you to leave you with, it’s this: Results come from repeated action, not perfection. Put in the reps, and you’ll arrive at your destination.
