Anxious About Realizing Your Life’s Potential? How to Take Responsibility

It can be easy to avoid thinking about what we really want out of life. We often claim we’re too busy and distracted to even have time to consider such goals.

Being able to take steps to make those goals happen might feel even more impossible. After all, there are bills to pay, which require long hours of work. There are kids to tend to and homes to maintain. Daily life in and of itself shoves countless tasks down our throats.

Once we’re beyond the relatively carefree years of young adulthood, the idea of maximizing our potential might even sound frivolous or impossible.

What’s behind these excuses?

We’re really being honest, deep down we may actually be afraid to think about what it would take to maximize our life’s potential. Busyness can be a convenient excuse to help us avoid cognitive discomfort. After all, if we never set goals, then we don’t have to feel bad if we fail to meet them.

Slowing down long enough to reflect upon what it would take to make the most of our life, however, offers huge dividends.

Create a Vision

A good first place to begin is to think about what maximizing your life’s potential would look like for you. The answer will be different for everybody, and that’s ok. You don’t have to want the same thing for your life that your neighbors, co-workers, or family want for their lives. It’s alright to let go of long-ago expectations of teachers and parents.

Indeed, part of taking responsibility for maximizing your own potential is making the step to identify what you want. Take your time—brainstorm, mind map, review past successes and failures.

No One Else Can Do It for You

Once you’ve identified this vision, you might need to admit to yourself that no one else can do it for you. You, and only you, can maximize your life’s potential. This can be a hard thing to swallow. But it also opens you up to enormous personal growth.

Holding onto the belief that other people can make us happy or fulfill our entire life’s meaning is known as co-dependency. It makes us live our own lives trying to make others happy or avoid getting anyone upset. We worry more about what others think and how they might react than we do about taking responsibility for ourselves.

If you recognize yourself in any of these concepts, take the time to work on these behaviors.

Believe You Can

You’ve probably heard this idea so often that it sounds cliché. But it really is true. The brain is a powerful organism. The thoughts and beliefs that we hold onto create neural networks and pathways. Repeated beliefs (self-talk) can even trickle down into negative behavioral patterns that seem like self-fulfilling prophecies.

If we give ourselves negative messages, we’ll start believing them. But amazingly, we can learn to change our thought patterns and self-talk. With time, this transforms the way we think about our capabilities and potential.

Fall and Get Back Up Again

Part of the human journey toward self-fulfillment includes acknowledging that we will make mistakes. In the pursuit of maximizing our potential, we can get off track.

We might make decisions that we know will hold us back instead of moving us forward. Maybe we get lazy about our priorities and give in to despondency or the allure of the sofa and television for too long. Negative thoughts can be triggered by what seem like small things. Then, we find ourselves spiraling back into destructive self-talk.

But if any of this happens, you don’t have to beat yourself up or feel like all your efforts have been wasted. Because they haven’t been. Part of learning to maximize your potential means also learning to keep getting back up. It’s like learning anything new: just keep trying.

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Are you struggling with figuring out how to realize and maximize your potential? Sometimes, mental health issues like anxiety and depression can create roadblocks. Once they have been addressed, living your life to the full can be much more straightforward. I encourage you to find out more about how we can help. Read more about anxiety counseling and reach out to my office soon.