March 2018

What would it mean for you if you had unlimited potential at your disposal? What would you do? Who would you be? How would you make a difference on this world? I have an even more important question for you: What makes you think you don’t have unlimited potential?

In our life, we limit ourselves by our thoughts, co-designed by our environment. From the age of 0-7 we don’t have a critical mind, which means everything we experience seems normal to us. We are not limited in our thoughts and we do not question anything. A chair can be a rocket, a race car, a stair case to reach for the candy, a hiding place, a house, anything we wish it to be. As we grow older, a chair becomes only a chair and we cannot see the other options any more.  We are limiting ourselves.

What’s your comfort zone

The same goes for our comfort zone. We all have our own comfort zone and we tend to stay in it. But how and why did we create a comfort zone? Why is it so hard to get out of it?When we are young, we don’t think consciously. I still remember that my mother told me that when I was young and we were on vacation, I could speak with foreign children. She told me that little friend told me he couldn’t play, because he needed to go to the “tandarts” and I understood he needed to go to the dentist. It is like children speak a universal language. And again, as we grow older, we tend to limit ourselves to our mother language.  Just think a moment about your childhood. Were you afraid to approach kids you’ve never seen before? And maybe even further, the moment you started to stand up as a baby. The very first time you pulled yourself up, you probably fell back on your behind, because nobody told you how to use your leg muscles, joints and how to keep your balance. I bet there was never a moment that you thought “okay, so standing is not for me”. You continued standing up, learning from your mistakes, found better ways to keep your balance and eventually you could stand on your own two feet, without holding anything.

Challenge yourself

So when did we start to limit ourselves? Are they our limits, or taken over from our parents? I bet you can do more than you give yourself credit for. Can we do a little thought experiment? Let’s start with a little question to set the stage:

Can you lift a cow?

I wonder what your first reaction is. Most of the people I ask this question, answer “No” or start laughing. Then I ask them the following:

1. A newborn calf weighs around 40 kilos. Could you put such a calf on your shoulders and lift it? Maybe even do some squats?
2. Could you do that every day with the same calf?
3. When you would commit yourself to do that each and every day, could you keep that going?
4. Did you know that that same calf will be a full grown cow in 6 years? So, what are your thoughts now with regards to the question “can you lift a cow”? What seemed to be impossible at first sounds like you could have a reasonable shot at it, doesn’t it?

Mental filtering

This is just a physical challenge. Now consider your mental potential. Did you know that on average we receive 11 million bits of information per second that our subconscious processes, and that we only process 60 bits of information per second consciously? And yet, we use those 60 bits per second to build our reality. So what you see is not the real; it’s your interpretation of the real.  They once did research why certain people seemed to be born for luck and others never had any. One of the exercises was to count all pictures in a newspaper, with a time limit of 2 minutes. Almost all the unlucky ones failed to get the number right within the time limit, the lucky ones were finished within 30 seconds. Because on page 2 an add said ”this paper contains 76 pictures”.  It is like the unlucky ones were wearing blinkers, while the others kept an open mind (and view). IT isn’t the case that the lucky ones get more lucky breaks, they just notice more.

Where attention goes, energy flows

You probably heard this quote before “Where attention goes, energy flows”. So what’s part of your 60 bits, will be stimulated and enforced. That’s why Henri ford said “Whether you say you can or you say you cannot, you’re right”. For instance, your skin is a giant receptor of information. Whether you’re standing, sitting or lying down, the surface that you’re on puts pressure onto your body and input is part of the 11 million bits of information that enters your brain each and every second. I’ll bet you suddenly became aware of that input, feeling the pressure, but just before you read it, you weren’t consciously aware of it, were you? But now that I have guided your attention to it…… You see the point? Just imagine how your world would change if you would get another 60 bits of information each second from the set of 11 million bits of available information. Wouldn’t that create a whole “new” world for you?

Tap into your own potential

You could say that your current status is the result of present filtering mechanism in your subconscious, designed by your values, beliefs and thoughts. We are habitual beings by nature. What worked in the past, will be repeated. The best way to change is to change your habits. It takes about 30 days to change one habit. If you do it on your own that is. I know some shortcuts that have the potential to change habits under one hour. It all depends on your readiness and openness to transform. So when you’re ready to tap into your own unlimited potential, get in touch. Take action now, because sometimes later becomes never. Don’t do it for me, do it for you. Like one of my coaches said “An opportunity never gets lost, it just goes to another person”. When you’re interested, click here to explore the ways we can work together and leave your details, so  I can get in touch with you.