Why Should You Unlock and Reach Your Full Potential?
Each action you take is a vote to become someone who reaches their full potential or someone who stays average.
At Breakaway Limit, we encourage everyone to be better than average.
Investing in yourself earns you unique opportunities that allow you to live the best life possible. That’s why our mission is to “Equalize Opportunities, Maximize Possibilities.”
Keep in mind that unlocking your full potential requires a lot of work upfront. However, making the investment early on will pay for itself many times over.
If you instead decide to settle for average, it will doom you to mediocrity and make life much harder.
What It Means to Unlock and Reach Your Full Potential
Reaching your full potential means you’re able to get the most value out of your life. Even with finite time and resources, we have the potential to create infinite possibilities.
To unlock and reach your full potential, you must prepare your mind, body, and resources to live your best life.
Unless you meet all three requirements, there will always be something negatively affecting your life and holding you back.
Let’s break down each of these requirements into bite-sized pieces so you can easily set actionable goals and unlock your full potential.
Disclaimer: Work through this list at your own pace and don’t feel overwhelmed. If you bookmark this page and refer to it as needed, you’ll start living your best life before you know it.
[outline]
1. Figure Out Your Purpose
Before you can reach your full potential, you need to figure out your purpose first. That is, why do you want to actualize your best self?
Is it to increase your earning potential and give your loved ones a comfortable life? Do you want to make a difference in the world, instead of working a dead-end job?
Having a purpose helps you persevere in the face of obstacles. Without a purpose that keeps you on the path to your goals, you’ll give up when times get tough (and it will get tough).
Write down your purpose and put it somewhere in plain sight so you can review it every day. It’ll remind you why you want to achieve your full potential and guide you towards a better life.
2. Visualize Your Best Self
What if you could trick your brain to help you realize your full potential?
The good news is that you may be able to manifest your thoughts into reality! One small study shows that it may be possible to manifest your thoughts into reality. Study participants who didn’t exercise but visualized the exercise instead, were able to increase their physical strength![ref link= https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14998709]
This shows that there may be a hint of truth to the advice, “fake it until you make it.” Now try visualizing what you’ll look like when you reach your full potential.
Ask yourself:
- What does the best version of me look like?
- What would I say or do differently at my best?
- How would others perceive me at my full potential?
The better you can visualize what your best self looks like, the closer you’ll get to developing the right mindset and behaviors to reach your full potential.
3. Focus on Solutions, Not Problems
Those who work towards solutions will go much further in life than those who simply find problems for the sake of criticizing.
Think about what type of friend, coworker, or business partner you want. Is it someone who continuously points out the flaws, or someone who helps you work towards fixing those problems?
Solution-oriented individuals add value to others and businesses, while complainers promote negativity and diminish their value.
Simply changing your mindset to become solution-oriented will get you into the habit of fixing problems your life, which is much more productive than finding problems to complain about.
4. Stay Positive
A positive mindset gives you the confidence to create and seize opportunities that will enable you to reach your full potential.
In the words of Henry Ford (creator of the first mass-produced car), “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”
Staying positive gives you confidence to take the first step in transforming your life. You’ll always find a way even with obstacles in your way.
Having a negative mindset means you don’t believe in yourself, dooming yourself to failure before you try. Someone without confidence will say “That’s impossible” or “I can’t” instead of trying to figure out a solution.
When we find reasons to support our positive beliefs and discard negative limiting beliefs, we start to believe in ourselves. Simply developing confidence can make the difference between making the leap to a life-changing decision or staying complacent.
5. Accept Yourself and Your Mistakes
Self-acceptance is another critical step in your journey to maximize your potential. Nothing you do will work out if you don’t believe you deserve it.
Even if you’ve made mistakes that led you to this point in your life, don’t let them hold you back from achieving your goals. Learn from them and forgive yourself, even if you feel like nobody else will.
Let the past be a lesson, not a life sentence.
The actions you’ve taken yesterday led you to the person you are today. If you’re not happy with that, move on and do something today that will help you become a better person tomorrow.
Life waits for no one, so don’t waste another second thinking about yesterday when you can think about the bright future you want to work towards.
6. Don’t Worry What Others Think
If you set your mind to becoming your best self and living your best life, you will achieve it. However, it’s easy to get distracted when other people’s opinions cast self-doubt into your mind.
Most people only think about what you can do for them, not what’s best for you. It’s not in their best interest for you to grow as a person, because that means they lose their control over you.
We spend too much time trying to get approval from our parents, bosses, and even strangers. Why are our goals are often based on their expectations and not our own? Are you living life for them, or yourself?
Therefore, it’s important to stop listening to those same people who try to keep your from reaching your full potential. Instead, start paying attention to the ones who want to help you further yourself.
It’s okay to seek guidance and get someone’s point of view, but you’re the only one who can create the life you want to live. Take responsibility for all your decisions and make the best choice for yourself.
7. Develop a Growth Mindset
There are two types of mindsets: a growth mindset and fixed mindset.
Those with a growth mindset believe that anything is possible if they put in the effort. They assume responsibility and control over their futures.
Meanwhile, someone with a fixed mindset believes their circumstances result from their innate abilities (smart, lazy, unskilled, etc.) and circumstances. They neglect responsibility and relinquish control of their lives.
Depending on which mindset you have, you can live a vastly different life.
Someone with a fixed mindset lets failure define their worth and will give up on themselves. Meanwhile someone with a growth mindset believes their potential is limitless and will gladly fail until they succeed.
8. Never Stop Improving
The journey to reach your full potential never stops until your last breath.
Although we discussed the importance of accepting yourself, self-acceptance should never come at the cost of progress. It is merely the start of your journey so you can start moving forward.
No matter how far you get in life, you can continue to learn, grow, and make the most of your time with those you cherish.
If you become complacent, you’ll fall behind those who are continuously working on themselves, their skills, or their businesses. Eventually, your skills will be obsolete, no matter how good you are.
That’s why it’s essential to diversify our skills and go beyond our careers, even if we happen to struggle in these areas.
For example, Breakaway Limit wouldn’t exist if I decided to focus solely on my pharmacist career. My early investments into the stock market and thousands of hours self-studying personal finance, programming, and web development allowed me to leave my job and focus on my goals full-time.
Pursuing those skills allowed me to create a new opportunity for myself and live life my way. The mental health improvement alone was worth quitting a six-figure job.
9. Focus on Your Potential, Not Others’
To reach your best self, you need to focus on yourself and stop worrying about what others are doing.
There are many ways we unknowingly harm our progress by paying too much attention from others:
- Help undeserving individuals
- Try to please everyone to make them like us
- Compare ourselves on social media
- Sabotage others for our personal gain
- Gossip about people or promote negativity
- Get upset over someone’s opinion
Instead, invest your energy into your top priority: yourself! What can you do today to improve your life and be productive, instead of remaining fixated on things and people beyond your control?
10. Take Care of Your Body
How well you take care of your body affects your ability to fulfill your purpose and maximize your potential.
A healthy body performs better, providing you with energy and a longer life to reach your goals. However, creating a poor environment for productivity will impede your progress.
Where will your energy come from if you have a poor diet from filling your desk with junk food? How productive can you be if you work 80 hours a week in a chaotic environment and sleep 4 hours a night?
Not taking care of yourself won’t just wreck your productivity, but cause pain, stress, sickness, and an early death.
11. Practice Self-care
Taking care of yourself can make you more successful. So why is it that while we’ve learned to help others and be kind to them, we rarely learn to be kind to and take care of ourselves.
Putting yourself first doesn’t make you selfish. On the contrary, being at your best allows you to serve others to the best of your ability.
Consider a scenario where you fall into the ocean between a drowning child and a life raft. Neither of you can swim well, but the life raft is floating within your arm’s reach.
Suppose you grab the life raft first before you make your way to the child; you’ve just saved two lives. But if you decided to grab the child first, you both could end up sinking before you make your way back to the raft.
Yes, it’s great to want to help people in need. But if you don’t have the ability to do so, you won’t make be able to make a difference.
I learned this lesson firsthand when I was working 12-13 hour shifts as a pharmacist without rest or food. Not only was I too exhausted to give patients the best care they deserved, but I endangered them by not being at my best to catch medication errors.
Because of these working conditions, I learned that I had to take care of myself. If I wanted to help others, I owed it to them to be at my best to perform at my peak.
12. Focus on Your Fitness
Exercise is not only good for the body, but for the mind as well. If you want to reach your full potential, having a healthy body will help immensely.
Not only will exercise help you lose weight, but it will also improve your brain function and slow down aging.
Investing in your body yields quality of life benefits like increased productivity and allow you to enjoy a longer lifespan.
13. Have a Balanced Diet
Give your body the nutrition it needs so that it can work at peak physical and mental performance.
Like with all things, you take out what you put in. A good diet will nurture your body and mind.
Consume nutrient dense vegetables and brain-boosting foods so you can stay healthy and productive.
Stuffing yourself with low-quality junk food will only grant you low quality performance.
14. Set Up the Right Goals and Environment
We’ve all set goals before and failed at them, but how do we succeed at them?
We fail because we don’t set ourselves up for success, not because we’re not good enough.
To set goals effectively, you must be specific. Define every step, the exact numbers, and a strict deadline. The difference between simply ‘losing weight’ and ‘performing a high-intensity exercise routine to lose ten pounds in 30 days can produce drastically different results.
To create the right environment, you need to make it easy to fulfill your goals. How much more likely are you going to lose those ten pounds by keeping a fruit basket on your desk instead of a cookie jar?
When you know what to expect, you will go much further to achieve it. Make your success inevitable by setting goals properly and creating the best environment to reach them.
15. Maximize Your Resources
Abundant resources give you the freedom and ability to do what’s important to you, such as unlocking your potential.
Whether it’s money, time, or supportive allies, every action you take requires at least one of these three resources.
Without sufficient time, money, or support from others, you’ll barely have enough for basic needs like food, water, and shelter.
Therefore, learning to make the most of your time/money and developing meaningful relationships is vital to realizing your full potential.
16. Surround Yourself with Successful People
You may have heard the saying, “You are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with”. Studies confirm this, such as how spending time with obese friends increases your risk for obesity.[ref link=https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17652652/]
On the bright side, you can use this to your advantage. By surrounding yourself with others who have a positive mentality, you adopt similar mindsets and set yourself up for success.
Just look at the most successful people you know. See which aspects of their lifestyle contribute to their success and model your habits after theirs.
If you don’t know any, you can find role models and study their habits and mentality. My personal favorites are Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, two of the most successful and generous philanthropists in the world.
17. Pay Off Your Debt
A debt that eats away at your life savings will increase stress, which may also reduce your productivity [ref link= https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21983810/].
Financial stress may contribute to poor decisions like substance abuse[ref link= https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11797055/], falling victim to pyramid and get-rich-quick schemes.
Don’t let financial pressure push you into making irrational decisions.
Pay off your debt for a peace of mind and regain your productivity. That way, you can invest your mental energy into reaching your full potential.
18. Have Emergency Savings
Just like with debt, not having emergency funds is another source of stress that will hinder you from reaching your full potential.
You’ll always stress about your bills, but that’s just the beginning. If you end up missing mortgage/rent payments and face eviction, you may end up losing months (or years) of your life trying to get back on your feet!
An emergency fund will help you get through challenging times until you get back on your feet. It can also give you a peace of mind to pursue your goals if you need to quit your job to do so.
I’ve saved up about 10 years’ worth of living expenses so I could pursue entrepreneurial ventures. Consider investing any extra money more than six months of living expenses to increase your savings further.
The compound interest will multiply your earnings, allowing you to pursue your goals for longer or simply get closer to retirement.
19. Increase Your Income
Increasing your income will allow you to pay for your essential needs and give you more to invest in yourself.
Although people may argue about how to go about it, you can get a raise or develop sources of passive income.
Many people will opt to get a side-hustle or freelance, but I only recommend it if it pays significantly more than your job. A second job that pays less can help in the short-term but can affect your wellbeing in the long-term. Making more money shouldn’t come at the expense of destroying your health.
While passive income may be slower to start up, it will pay for itself eventually because it doesn’t require you to actively invest time to continue receiving a paycheck.
A raise may be more plausible for most people, although it’s only a short-term fix.
20. Take Risks to Reduce Risk
Not taking risks is the biggest risk you can take, especially when it concerns your future. If you never get out of your comfort zone, you’ll always have all your eggs in one basket.
The risk I took to start Breakaway Limit was a small price to pay, allowing me to reclaim my life from my former job. It gave me the opportunity to take better care of myself and the freedom to diversify my income!
Suppose I had stayed for another 10-20 years, only to lose my job to a new graduate getting 30% less pay. Without a backup plan, I could easily default on a potential mortgage, lose my house, and end up homeless.
According to my calculations, being unable to pay my bills has far greater consequences than failing at an attempt to diversify my income. I can always find another method while I’m financially secure. In the worst case, I could also go back to my job if things don’t go as planned.
In short, don’t be afraid to take chances because you’re scared of failure or rejection. If you don’t even try, you have no chance of success.
Will you tackle challenges fearlessly, even with a risk of failure? Or will you give up when you eventually hit a roadblock, condemning yourself to a life of mediocrity?
On the Path to Unlocking and Reaching Your Full Potential
Becoming the best version of yourself will be the greatest accomplishment in your lifetime.
While we all have the power to reach our full potential, circumstances out of our control may sometimes hinder our progress. What’s important is that we make the choice to get back on that path even when it’s not always convenient.
Now go back to the purpose you wrote down earlier as the reason becoming your best self. Share it with us in the comments, and officially mark the start of your journey to unlocking and reaching your full potential.
Remember, that your potential is limitless, so focus on yourself and the people that bring out the best in you. Stay positive and stay on your path to your Breakaway Limit.
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