Blog Category: Potential
How To Convert Your Potential Energy Into Kinetic Energy
Kinetic energy is energy in motion – anything moving. However, when a person or object is at rest, it has potential energy. For example, a rock on top of a cliff that could fall: before it falls, it has potential energy. During its fall, it has kinetic energy.
Think about you as a human being. Each of us has tremendous potential energy – both in terms of physics and metaphorically. Your energy – the potential to literally “move” your life – is phenomenal and, at least theoretically – virtually unlimited.
What is your potential energy as a person who improves your life? As a contributor to others? As a provider of useful goods and services? As a teacher or a student whether in or out of formal school? Think about your potential as energy like all the rocks on top of a cliff and how vast that potential energy is.
How can you convert your potential energy into the best possible motion? Where have you been limiting your potential energy? What are the rewards for releasing it?
What About Damaged Or Reduced Potential?
Often, the word “potential” is tied with superlatives like “unlimited” or “huge” or “fantastic” to inspire or motivate us. POTENTIAL in capital letters with exclamation points!!!
But how much do we think about “limited potential”? Talents and skills vary among human beings. How about potential? Does it vary similarly? Can it be diminished by life circumstances? Does potential stay the same over a lifetime or can it be damaged and reduced?
While everyone may theoretically have an unlimited potential for greatness, for example, greatness still seems to be in short supply. The same for common sense: limitless potential for it, yet common sense is not common. So if potential is limited, what is the source of the limitation?
Let’s look inward. Have you limited your potential for impeccable health, tremendous success, off-the-charts happiness? Do you really have the potential for the world’s greatest relationship, or have you allowed that potential to be damaged or diminished?
Today, please consider places where you may have been a party to diminished or reduced potential. Perhaps think about how and why that came to be. You might want to make sure that the choice to live below a superlative level of potential is a knowing choice. Perhaps you’ll want to restore your potential?
What Is Your Optimal Relationship To Your Financial Potential?
Among the stickiest places for dealing with potential has been numbers – and particularly financial numbers. Money has been a highly-charged topic for many of us. As a culture, we’ve often been more open about our romantic lives than our financial lives.
It’s likely that a key reason for historic difficulty in relating with financial potential is that our culture teaches us that we are to be measured by our financial achievements. If we’re earning under our potential, the tendency for many has been to experience that as some sort of failure as a person rather than simply a measure of relative performance.
What is your relationship to your financial potential? Is it easier to explore your potential for financial mastery at work rather than in your own personal balance sheet? Have you been among those persons who ignores your financial potential altogether? What is the optimal relationship to that potential for you?
“Potential” Comes From The Latin Word “Potentia” Meaning “Power”
Fascinating, isn’t it, that the modern word “potential” derives from the Latin word “potentia” meaning “power”? Yet, it makes sense that when we speak of the potential of someone or something, we are really speaking of power and / or possibility.
Interchanging the words is an interesting exercise. How does it feel to say, “I have the power to (fill in the blank)” as compared to “I have the potential to (fill in the blank)”?
The word “power” conveys more certainty and, most likely, means a greater likelihood of something’s happening. Try using the words synonymously and see what occurs.