Rousing Your Awareness
As I woke this morning, the phrase “Enormous Potential” came to my mind like a presentation of an upcoming movie. It was emotionally provocative. “Enormous Potential” continued to echo back and forth between the walls of my sleepy mind before the saying slowly seeped into, then excitedly resonated throughout my waking body.
I wrote it down as soon as I could. Hours later, after spending most of the day with my eight-year-old nephew and two nieces of four and six, it occurred to me that one of the best ways to tap into our potential is to extend ourselves for others.
Aiming Your Energy
Perhaps this is easier for some of us to do with our kids, and for others, it’s easier to do at work. But, what if the purpose of life was for each of us to exert our effort towards extending ourselves where it is most challenging? What if personal growth, professional development, and real happiness were all waiting for us, right here? This could be enormous potential, right?
After allowing my mind to linger on and around “enormous potential,” I first thought about this from a cultural perspective. Our culture’s greatest potential – as is commonly considered – might lie within our children. But I know that some of us can’t and won’t wait for someone else. We need to tap into our own greatest potential. How?
Accessing Your Creativity
Consider this. I remember – vaguely – reading about an interview with a great musical composer. When asked about where his most famous compositions came from, he said that they came to him through a creative process. He allowed his mind to “imagine himself” remembering a movement.
That would have had to be a creative experience since no one could remember something that they hadn’t yet created. But don’t give up before you’ve even attempted this. One of the easiest ways to remember something is to first see it as a video, image, or to hear it for yourself. Once you’ve experienced it in this way, then, you can easily access the conscious awareness and your experience of the memory. But sometimes because it’s been such a long time ago, you have to be patient before you can recall or access a memory you’ve had before. Similarly, you might imagine in a creative way, that you’ve experienced the future in another time dimension – as a wild example – and now you just might be able to access something of value from your imagination, if you’re patient.
Utilize Your Imagination
The key here is the utilization of your “imagination.” Try it on now for yourself. Imagine yourself many years from now, totally satisfied, and accomplished. Then answer this question. “In this imagined future of success, what have you achieved that you are so satisfied with?” Seriously now, write it down.
After giving yourself an adequate amount of time to “imagine” and answer the question, you can move on. Whatever your achievements, allow yourself to move them along a timeline, moving closer and closer to today, until you experience a new level of satisfaction because you’re achieving what you only thought you could do in a lifetime. But you’re able to clearly see yourself achieving them today.
This is a creative exercise. This is merely tapping into and utilizing the power of your imagination. The objective was to enhance your awareness of precisely what is so important to you that you’d spend the rest of your life working to achieve. Once you know this, you can deliberately work at achieving it today.
Aesthetic Attunement
Personally, aesthetics pierced my personal consciousness when I just 14 or 15 years of age. I didn’t understand what I was experiencing but it was overwhelming for most of my life, and only upon reflection can I honestly admit that beauty has profoundly impacted me and my life.
As I’ve been maturing, hopefully, I’ve expanded my aesthetic appreciations beyond a superficial external beauty to capture and savor a more profound, inner “emotional experience” that we all understand on some level. When I allow myself to do this and to combine my natural affinity for creativity with this previously recognized potential of aesthetic appreciation, I land on a platform of “Enormous Potential.” This enormous potential lives as awareness in me. It’s as if giving my aesthetic attention to things in a creative manner infuses those very things with emotional transformation. I call this combination a “power move” because of the powerful impact it has upon all things to which I spend my attention.
Calgary Psychologists International
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