What’s stopping you Achieving Your Full Potential?

One of the commonest things encountered by people working in developing human potential is individuals who have low self-esteem.

This can be manifest in a number of different ways but one of the commonest is a tendency to view potential outcomes with an unrealistic degree of pessimism or to engage in self-deprecation with an associated “can’t do” mentality.

Why is this so regularly encountered, particularly in programmes designed to assist in Aboriginal and Torres Islander leadership development?

Well, there is no one single answer because these problems can arise in people due to a number of different causes, though what is often found is that they have their origin back in childhood, adolescence or teenage years.

Just a sample of some the things that can introduce such self-inflicted negativism about your capabilities include:

1.    Body image problems

2.  Parental and/or social conditioning encouraging you to “recognise your place” in the world

3.    Failing to see your own strengths and to deploy them accordingly

4.    Being forced to participate in activities based upon somebody else’s terms of reference rather than your own

5.   Having tried and failed in the past, leading to assumptions that failure is an inevitable outcome of your activities

6.    A media culture that portrays beauty and universal high achievement as being the norm for all, which creates feelings of inferiority.

7.    Personal relationship challenges and failures

8.    Etc.

The difficulty is that we live in a prevailing culture which glorifies competition and achievement.  On a day-to-day basis, we are all conditioned by the electronic environment surrounding us into believing that success in all things is constantly achievable for large numbers of people who society sees as ‘winning material’.

Some people are able to see through the fallacy of such views and they refuse to allow themselves to be constrained by them.

Other individuals seem to find that more challenging but they can be helped to throw off the oppressive weight of these constraints with appropriate coaching. The difference such development can make to individuals with low self-esteem can be phenomenal.