Twelve Steps to Realizing Your Ultimate Potential

How much of your full potential do you feel you have realized? Do you feel you are “behind schedule” for where you’d like to be? If so, good news… you can catch up quickly and go beyond what you even imagined!

But quick movement doesn’t mean magic… you’ll have to attend to a process that has a number of elements.  Here is a process of twelve steps that are completely doable, and just require persistence. 

1. Know Yourself

Build on what you already know of yourself, constantly going deeper and keeping up-to-date as you grow.  Actively let go of old self-concepts as you change.  Particularly if you are young, observe carefully how your traits and abilities are similar or different from those of others.  Learn to discern where you have special ability and interest… what comes naturally or not.  The Ultimate Destiny University resource, “Realizing Your Ultimate Potential,” contains a self-assessment quiz that is a short form of many similar tools that can help you focus in on key areas.     

2. Imagine Your Intended Result

You’ve probably, at some time if not presently, imagined what you’d like to eventually be doing in your career, social and family life, or retirement. I challenge you to look out at least 30 to 40 years, even if you are already 50 or older.  Be specific in creating detailed images, and purposely go “outside the box.”  

3. Practice Gratitude           

Spend time, daily at least, enjoying mental images of what you intend to BE as well as have, and how you will feel living it out.  As you do this, it will be easy and natural to feel grateful.  Let that feeling grow and express it, vocally, in writing, and however you can. 

4. Break Your Intention into Doable Goals

One way to do this is to follow the SMART system: Goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-Dated.  Some of your goals will not be tied to any timing, as they are ongoing, such as building elements of character.  However, even they can usually be given measurable steps, and in a certain time frames. 

5. Implement Action Plans

Action plans grow directly out of goals.  They answer the question, “What will it take to make this goal happen?” They, like goals, should be written down and reviewed daily.  At this stage, you may find you need to make social changes, perhaps letting some friends drop away while cultivating others who are headed where you are.

6. Use Visualization Tools

In this step you take the pictures created in step 2, and other more immediate intentions and spend time impressing them deeply on your mind.  They must seep into your subconscious, so repetition is important (at least daily, for several minutes or more).  So is engaging your feelings.  Post up pictures or collages where you see them often, as well as using internal imagery. 

7. State Intentions as Affirmation Statements

These are a natural part of our self-talk.  First “listen in” to yourself to find both limiting and supportive phrases you already say to yourself.  Eliminate the limiting, demeaning ones and expand and add to the positive ones--ones that state the potential in you that you ARE awakening.  So don’t be concerned if they seem untrue, at this moment.  You are MAKING them true. 

8. Nurture Your Desires

Like most of us, you may have learned to suppress rather than express and nurture the things you really desire.  Yes, we are wise to stay “detached” from specific outcomes beyond our control or we may “stress out” (counterproductive to nurturing)! Meditation, tuning in to your heart’s natural compassion and gratitude, is one powerful method to focus on the inward process we CAN control.    

9. Identify Your Support Team

There are many places to find the supporters who are vital to your success.  No one is truly “self-made,” and the most accomplished usually have many supporters. Start with our own circle.  Find who has knowledge, skills and the spirit to be an encouragement, challenge, etc.  Then look broader for more people. 

10. Enlist and Organize your Supporters

When any supporter or team member is identified, organize just HOW you intend to use them.  Put some specifics and regularity to it.  That may take the form of a mastermind group you can form, of as few as three like-minded people pursuing related goals in a spirit of mutual support.  

11. Actively Attract Results

This step involves the “background” that is always going on in your mind, not just when you consciously meditate or say affirmations.  It is keeping a positive, expectant attitude, a sense of awe, and appreciating the beauty and various pleasures in every moment.  It is learning to quickly catch yourself when you begin to focus on what you DON’T want, and switch that to what you DO want. 

12. Keep Adding to Living Skills 

We are lifelong learners.  The more we consciously direct our learning, focusing on self-development – new knowledge as well as skills for successful living, the more we fulfill our potential, both in outward accomplishments and inner peace. 

 Article by Howard Pepper

Excerpted from the Ultimate Destiny Success System

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