This blog explores what’s meant by ‘potential’.
As for ‘high developmental potential’ which is often linked with giftedness, I’ll side-step it for now. It’s a complicated subject that’s a mix of dynamisms, overexitabilities, special traits and ability, developmental instincts, the third factor of free will and choice, and other variables to do with education, socialisation, gender, race and probably much more!
Some of my dear readers will know far more about developmental potential than me and for that I salute you.
Let’s begin with an awesome article from The Weekend Australian Magazine August 24-25, 2024, which is relevant to our theme…
Alex Noble became a quadriplegic at the age of sixteen – a result of a freak accident on the rugby field. Now twenty-one years old, he currently enjoys a successful life as a public speaker, traveller, university student, and business owner. He also works in a law firm.
After admitting that he wasn’t just scared of dying, he was ‘scared of dying young’ he worked up the courage to google his life expectancy as a quadriplegic male. Far from finding the answer traumatic, the opposite happened. He writes, ‘In that very moment my life changed. I became completely liberated. In learning about my own death, I learned to live – and I figured out exactly how I wanted to do it.’
Here's the kicker… he writes, ‘I knew, in that moment, that I would rather spend forty years on Earth lived to the absolute fullest than eighty years tiptoeing through life trying to make it to the end comfortably and safely.’
Then an even more powerful paragraph follows, ‘Nowadays it’s not death that I’m afraid of. It’s not even the thought of dying young that scares me either. Rather it’s the thought of getting to the end of my life and realising that I could have done more. Realising that I had untapped potential.’
Okay, now we’re cooking… there’s that word ‘potential’. Alex then writes, ‘Dying doesn’t scare me, but not reaching my full potential absolutely terrifies me.’
Wow. The top of my head nearly blew off when I read that.
For Alex, the fear of death has been eclipsed by a fear of not reaching his full potential. Even when the odds are physically stacked against him, he’s still aiming to live life at full capacity. He’s not bypassed the facts of his circumstances, nor avoided painful emotions. He’s squarely eyeballed his worst fears and changed the whole trajectory of his life as a result.
Without question, fear can hold us back in so many damaging ways. It can keep us locked up in a prison of the comfortable and predictable. Suzanne Heyn writes in her blog, ‘The Most Powerful way to Become Courageous’: ‘Too many people avoid what they fear. Instead of following their dreams, speaking their actual mind or trying new things to find fulfilment and meaning, they let the fear of judgement, failure, lack of self-trust or belief stop them from becoming who they’re uniquely meant to be.’
She writes that this is tragic… ‘Let’s be clear on the cost: not just unfulfilled potential, but also an ever-growing gnawing at your soul that you’re too afraid to do the things you’re called to do.’
Like Alex Noble, Suzanne describes how she directly eyeballed her worst fears during months of exhausting cancer treatment. After a ‘lot of meditation and journaling’ she changed her inner voice and learned to believe in herself. She writes, ‘Ten years of writing online, following my purpose, and I still experience frustration and self-doubt, but now my inner dialogue mostly wonders: “why not me? I’m smart, talented, capable and have a lot to offer. I deserve success.”’
While I take umbrage at the word ‘deserve’ – I don’t believe anyone deserves anything in life, good or bad – I agree that facing our fears can be a spiritual practice, a goal. Realising the stakes is a significant step forward. Suzanne writes, ‘… you won’t fully experience your life or your own potential if you continue to let fear control you.’ Start small and make a commitment for consistent action. Feel the fear and do it anyway.
This reminds me of a powerful quote from one of my all-time favourite movies, Strictly Ballroom, directed by Baz Luhrmann: ‘A life lived in fear is a life half-lived.’
Please find a link below of a YouTube video that will whet your appetite for this lovely, wildly off-beat comedy.
Before we go much further, it needs to be said that giftedness is often associated with high levels of achievement. But, like many things, it’s not that simple.
To quote Mary-Elaine Jacobsen (1999), ‘In fact, the gifted person is as likely to be the high school rebel as she is the valedictorian, the CEO, or the Nobel prize winner.’
According to P. Susan Jackson from The Daimon Institute, what we do share is a common psychology – our mental characteristics and aptitudes – and this is often ‘misconstrued and tangled in misinformation.’
Jackson writes that the activation of innate potential depends ‘on deep interests, on chance, on available resources, on personal history, on cuing and miscuing variables (in our families, especially in education and, broadly, in society), on opportunities and on recognition.’
I couldn’t agree more. ‘Recognition’ strikes me as critically important.
As Jackson points out, ‘We can be missed.’
Oh yes, I feel that one.
Even more poignantly, Jackson writes, ‘We can be so deeply out-of-step with our own potential (and deep interests) that we are truly missing-in-action, even to ourselves…’
This is what my last blog intimated… amid the frenetic activity, running myself ragged as a full-time university student, part-time fashion model and truth be told, part-time music teacher as well, I was out-of-step with my own potential. I was ‘missing-in-action’. Other labels could be applied to this state, as in ‘dissociation’. Dissociation is a mental process where a person disconnects from their thoughts, feelings, memories or sense of identity. I’ll put a link in the resources below if you’d like to explore this further.
At the time, I was meeting some of my seventeen-year-old needs. I was rarely bored. Although I was starving myself, sensual enjoyment came in the form of wearing beautiful clothes, refining beauty, and finding some pleasure in taking the limelight on a catwalk. I obscurely enjoyed the puzzle of figuring stuff out in a variety of settings: fashion modelling work required a lot of new locations, new people and a new set of challenges that needed quick solutions. I inhabited a dream life, if only for the duration of a fashion parade. I temporarily embodied an ‘alter ego’ who was no longer shy, anxious, lonely, different, an outsider. While it was a bit fraught, I attempted to work out who I was and how I fit into the world.
However, my ‘rage to master’ as Jackson describes it may have undermined my teenage life. It never occurred to me to stop and assess if what I was mastering really had meaning and value for me. Did the conventional avenues I found myself inhabiting excite me? Not once the novelty wore off.
It’s one thing to maximise one’s abilities and talents but if they don’t align with one’s heartfelt purpose and passions then that’s a problem. Not tomorrow or next month or even next year but eventually. There’s nothing quite like discovering that the ladder you’re climbing is resting against the wrong wall.
If I’d been engaging with my deep interests, at the age of seventeen I’d have studied literature, creative writing, and psychology. In a previous blog I’ve mentioned why that road wasn’t taken. However, if I’d been clear about my values, needs and priorities and created a realistic schedule honouring what really mattered, my life would have looked very different.
‘Coherence seeking’ was challenging, if not impossible, given my diverse trajectories. My complex emotional life was buried. My intuition had been hijacked. My inner life wasn’t wildly soul-affirming. My sensual appetites were hardly being met. My need for autonomy was given limited room to move. Intensity did feature in terms of having to perform on stages – facing massive self-doubt and anxiety – to meet high expectations, deadlines, and a plethora of commitments. But I was following a false course in life probably because, growing up, I’d invented a false self.
I needed recognition, not for being an achiever, but for my unique inner characteristics and aptitudes. Not receiving recognition or validation of my inner life pushed me away from who I was. My worth was defined by the currency of accomplishments. Jackson writes, ‘In so doing, we squander their internal motivation. We relegate their sense of Self to a bit part in a theatre of achievement.’
At the base of this is fear. Jackson writes, ‘Perhaps we fear that our children will be unsuccessful. Perhaps we fear that we are inadequate parents of these exceptional children.’
Jackson calls for a pivot from an ‘achievement-centric model of child-rearing to a child-centric model.’ Jackson quotes Piechowski and Grant: ‘We must allow our children their route to self-actualisation; otherwise, no self-actualisation is possible.’
Indeed, what hope has potential when it’s thwarted by fear?
Instead of fearing my ‘too muchness’ – my sensitivities, intensities, intuitions, deep feelings and complexities – I needed support, resources, attuned guidance to accept these aspects of myself. All that I’d grown up believing was wrong with me was exactly where my gifted potential lay.
Jacobsen writes, ‘My purpose is to show gifted adults how they can bring their gifts to fruition by fully expressing the very qualities that are the foundation of their personality.’
As for what those underlying components are, Jacobsen identifies two of them and calls them First Nature traits: ‘heightened receptivity and the urge to perfect’. These give rise to the ‘intensity, complexity, and drive that are the visible characteristics of giftedness.’
Over the years, Jacobsen has observed that gifted adults learn they ‘can’t express their First Nature traits without censure. As a result, they modify their behaviour in one or two ways – by either collapsing it or exaggerating it.’
In an earlier blog I describe internally collapsing under the weight of labels such as ‘too sensitive’, ‘too much’, ‘too selfish’, ‘too shy’, ‘too introverted’, etc. Outwardly, this led to an exaggeration of the urge to perfect to compensate for all my ‘not good enough’ traits. To cope, to survive, fragmentation can occur and a ‘false self’ and a ‘false course in life’ can result. While one foot is firmly suppressing the inner life of sensitivity, emotionality, and feelings of ‘wrongness’, the other foot is firmly accelerating the outer life of action and achievement and so-called ‘rightness’.
Perhaps a natural consequence of this is exhaustion or burn out. Amid the ‘drivenness’ or ‘hyperactivity’ – that familiar trait of pushing through things with great gusts of energy – and without the recovery time, it stands to reason that we can run ourselves into the ground. The ‘crash and burn’ sabotages potential. A crisis may result. On Substack, gifted Australian therapist and researcher, Caitlin Hughes, describes this as a ‘deep, often invisible, emotional and cognitive collapse. Our heightened sensitivity and unique stress responses can lead to burnout in ways that others might not fully grasp. We can’t simply “push through”, we need deep rest and respite…’
Then there’s the pressure to figure out one’s life and this can ‘ruin your potential if you’re not careful,’ Suzanne Heyn writes. ‘Before I found my purpose, I felt like I was failing. One day I made a choice that changed my life: temporarily, I released the need to figure it out.’
Heyn writes that she learned that there’s nothing to figure out, ‘Instead of planning, I followed my curiosity. Instead of resisting my life, I found peace in the present moment.’
On that note I’ll leave you to ponder how curiosity and mindfulness may have shaped your life. What are your thoughts about potential and how you may or may not have developed it? What factors have been important influencers in exploring your ‘first nature personality traits’? On a scale of one to ten, ten being totally reaching your full potential, where do you sit? Can potential ever be fully realised or is there always scope to grow, to perfect, to explore and innovate more deeply and expansively… that the potential within you is limitless?
Thank you so much for travelling with me on this exploration of potential. It’s wonderful to have your company. Thanks so much for being here. It means the world!
With love,
Lil X
Resources:
Suzanne Heyn:
Alex Noble:
https://alexnoble.com.au
Dissociation: https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/dissociation-and-dissociative-disorders#
‘Strictly Ballroom’ (Movie) YouTube Video Link:
Gifted Potential (Part Three)