P
Push your Potential
What type of potential do you see for yourself? Do you look to the future and see all the possibilities for you, if you work at them. Or do you just dream and then tell yourself it will never happen? Can you remember being a small child and being asked what you wanted to be when you grew up? What did you say? How did the person asking you react to
your answer? How did you feel when you went back to that small child with huge dreams. Apparently when I was four years old when Dana won the Eurovision Song Contest and for the next year I wanted to be Dana – A Nurse. It didn’t even enter my head that I couldn’t be Dana the singer, she already existed, but to my four-year-old mind anything was possible and I wanted the best of it for me. I remember wanting to be a nurse right through primary school and into secondary school. I only started to have second thoughts when we started dissecting things in biology class. It became much less appealing. Plus my mother’s elderly aunt came to live with us and I saw first hand how much hard work went into basic day-to-day nursing and I was already working part-time in a local grocery store and earning some money for myself in a much easier fashion. I saw lots of other potential career paths for myself then, but nursing stopped being one of them. Of course my well-wishing parents wanted me to get the good pensionable bank or civil service job if I didn’t go to university. I did neither.
By the time I was finishing my first set of exams, I’d learnt that to be intelligent and/or hard-working or both got you landed in the geeky group that got teased unmercifully, and I didn’t want to belong there, so I started to cut corners and not do half as well as I could have in school, simply to belong with the “in crowd”. Of course this never happened.
The exceptions to studying of course were the subjects that I was really interested in. I was an awkward, self-conscious, deliberately under-achieving teenager, who looked a good five years younger than her actual age! I couldn’t decide on the direction I wanted to go in, career wise. I did however see all the careers that I didn’t want to do and studied just enough to be able to avoid some of them. I certainly didn’t see the potential opportunities that going to university would have had, all I saw was three to four years of further bullying and studying to be endured, the end goal of having a diploma or degree just didn’t come into it Having said that I’ve never seen a lack of a diploma or degree as a handicap, partially as college or university just wasn’t on my radar at the time. I have gone back to night school and night college quite a few times since and some of the courses I’ve completed and others I have abandoned when I’ve realised that they were courses I’d let myself be persuaded to do, not because I had any desire to do them.
I’m a serious believer in Life-Long-Learning. In fact my belief is “The day a person stops learning is the day they die” simply because all through life we learn new things, not all of it book-learning, but learning none-the-less. All of this learning opens up new opportunities for us to push our potential to new heights and do new things, or look at old things with fresh eyes and make adjustments to the way we have been approaching things. It is only by pushing
through the boundaries of what we limit ourselves with, that we move forward. There are many people who are just happy to plod along with life and not make any significant changes to their development as a person. They finish school, get a job, turn up each day, work, go home and put their feet up for the evening. Day in day out and they don’t see any point in doing anything else with their lives. For some that is enough, for quite a few that is no longer enough, either by choice or because the job they once did is no longer there and they need to either up-skill or completely retrain, or they become dis-satisfied with the life they are living and want more for themselves and their families. These are the people who when they push just a little bit on their potential get the hint of a much brighter future for themselves because they dared to take that step and push.