Unlocking your potential: instructions, methods and exercises

October 17, 2018
Psychology of Personality
Valentina Buravleva

It often happens that a person lives as if at half capacity. On the one hand, he is no better or worse than others. But at the same time, something is sorely missing in his life. Sometimes old dreams come to mind, the desires of childhood and youth remind us of themselves. Even as adults, many people think about how they could realize their talents.

Useful questions

Unlocking potential is a difficult task. After all, adults have a lot of troubles that constantly distract them from realizing their talents. Life often turns out to be so difficult that a person himself forgets what his dreams are. The following questions will help you get to know yourself better. They will help you figure out how to unlock your potential:

What hobbies, games, and hobbies did you like most as a child? What subjects seemed the most interesting in the school curriculum?
Who were the most interesting people as a teenager? What did you want to do then? Why did this seem interesting?
Which of your youth dreams were realized? Which ones are not? For what reasons?
What did you want to become a few years ago? Which of these expectations can be considered relevant today?
In what direction would you like to transform your image? Perhaps there is a desire to see yourself more sociable, smiling, or, conversely, reserved and serious?
What abilities have remained unrealized until now?
What can realizing your potential give to other people? If you manage to reveal your talent, how will it benefit society?

Types of personality potential

Every person has abilities. But for different people, some of them dominate, while others are less pronounced.

Life potential is something that exists in everyone. It gives you the energy to move through life at a certain speed. How brightly a person manifests himself in different situations depends on the amount of life potential. It can change throughout life - it is at its maximum level in childhood, adolescence, and high in adulthood. During the aging period, most people's life potential decreases, but there are also those who retain a sufficient amount of it until the end of their days.

Another type of personality potential is private in nature and determines the ability for active development. It manifests itself to its maximum in young years. Then it is aimed at learning, mastering the necessary skills, achieving career and creative goals. Being at a high level, creative potential opens up broad life prospects for a person.

If life potential is inherent from birth, then the private one largely depends on the genetic prerequisites and the social environment in which the personality develops. So, having good physical data and playing sports, a person gets a chance to become an outstanding athlete. If you do not have the necessary anthropological data or the opportunity to train, then you will not be able to realize your full potential and achieve great success in sports. A person with good hearing, who has been learning to play musical instruments since childhood, reveals his potential as a maestro. provided that musical education is not at all accessible to him, he will not be able to become a virtuoso.

Potential can be directed to any of the areas - career, science, creativity and personal life. It is ideal if a person manages to develop in such a way that they are all in balance.

Processing information received about yourself

You can reflect on these questions for several days. After this, you can conduct a kind of “audit” of your own strengths and weaknesses. This will make it possible to understand exactly why the actual state differs from the desired one and what character traits need to be developed in oneself to reveal personal potential. It is important to supplement this practice with an action plan. For example, if social phobia turns out to be an obstacle to realizing your talents, you need to think through a strategy to combat this deficiency - for example, add a visit to a psychologist to your daily schedule.

Keep a diary

Diary entries are a good way to understand yourself. Sometimes a person himself does not understand the nature of his psyche, is not aware of the desires he has. To do this, you need to observe yourself for some time.

Notes can be a good help with this. For example, on a certain day a woman had to babysit a relative’s child, and this brought joy. It is possible that in this case she can think about her desires - perhaps she has an inclination to work with children? Regular observations and recordings will allow you to track your own preferences.

Take real steps

Unlocking potential sometimes requires not only great desire, but also courage. To realize the abilities that are inherent in a person by nature, it is often necessary to take steps into the unknown. However, there are no guarantees that the efforts invested will be justified and that the familiar and safe territory was not left in vain. Unlocking a person’s potential is often accompanied by doubts:

“What if I don’t succeed?” - This is not excluded.
“Suddenly everything will become even worse than it is now.” – And no one is immune from this.
“All normal people live like this, why should I change my field of activity.” – It’s difficult to argue with this statement.

The human mind constantly presents dozens of reasons why there is no need to unlock potential. But what happens if you nevertheless step over these doubts and start doing unusual things? Yes, no one can guarantee success if a woman comes to a festive event not in clothes of the usual dark colors, but in a bright yellow dress. However, risk itself is of particular value. A person gets used to leaving his comfort zone. If you do this over and over again, it becomes easier for him to unlock his potential - start performing publicly, start learning dance or a new language, or retrain.

How to realize your potential

Self-actualization, unlocking potential is a process that takes more than one year. Some people devote their entire lives to this - learning, improving, discovering new facets of themselves.

Potential development occurs through the transformation of existing explicit or hidden abilities into ones that will be relevant in real life. Hidden potential (if identified) is what gives the maximum effect.

To form and develop potential it is necessary:

determine your main goal in life. It will make it clear what abilities need to be developed, what skills and knowledge need to be mastered;
highlight intermediate goals, determine the actions necessary to achieve them, and deadlines. Make a detailed step-by-step plan to achieve them, and begin to implement it.
decide on the main direction of activity in the chosen field. Analyze how well it meets your current needs;
start acting in the chosen direction - take courses to gain new knowledge or refresh existing knowledge, to acquire the necessary contacts;
write in your diary every day. Describe your emotions, talk about your failures and victories;
learn how to properly organize your time. Do not waste precious minutes and hours on unnecessary things, focus on activities that are useful for your future;
don't be afraid to make mistakes. Admit your mistakes and draw conclusions from them. Accept difficulties as a point of growth. In problematic situations, look for additional solutions.

A person realizes his integrity and worth. He learns to think in a positive way, notices all the good things that happen inside him and around him.

In the process of revealing potential, a person ceases to be dependent on others, because all the necessary resources are hidden within himself. This gives you the opportunity to be alone without feeling lonely. And, at the same time, it gives the ability to appreciate the wealth and completeness of friendship.

Another metamorphosis that occurs in the process of self-actualization is the ability to remain calm and unperturbed in the face of failures and personal misfortunes. A person forms his own view of the situation, he no longer has to listen to the opinions of others and focus on other people’s feelings.

Honor status and popularity lose their former value, and instead, internal growth and self-development come first. New creative projects arise and are implemented, a person achieves harmony in his personal life, and becomes a professional in his field.

A person who has managed to open up to the maximum is not ideal. But he knows exactly what he wants and how to achieve it. He accepts himself with all his weaknesses and strengths. He is not afraid to face unconscious limitations, so he successfully overcomes them and achieves great results in areas that are important to him.

Irina Sherbul

Feelings of uncertainty are a constant companion to development

Feeling unsure is completely normal. No one has the necessary experience and knowledge from birth. A person has to accumulate the necessary information and master skills for years before he enters a new field of activity or receives a professional diploma. And even after the first obstacle has been overcome, many more will follow. After all, everyone knows that a university graduate is far from being a full-fledged specialist. It takes years of practice before becoming one. That is why unlocking your potential should be based on the inner confidence that it is quite possible to gain the necessary experience. If you don’t have self-confidence and your strengths now, this does not mean that it won’t come with the acquisition of the necessary skills.

How to do a personality unpacking yourself

With an understanding of his own personality and determination of his expert level, it will be more clear to the blogger how to interact with the audience. Perhaps he will discover new levers of influence on subscribers with the prospect of expanding his audience.

Personality unpacking is an individually compiled table, the analysis of which will help you come to new solutions to improve your profile.

However, such a table by itself is unlikely to help the user. You need to be able to apply it correctly, and most importantly, don’t even try to compose it if you’re just starting to blog and publish when you have to, and not according to a specific schedule, and in general don’t take the social network seriously.

If you nevertheless decide to go further and take a more professional approach to the blog, then unpacking your personality is just what you need. You can do it yourself or with the help of a more experienced user. The second option, of course, will be more productive. Below we will look at how to “unpack” yourself.

Additional recommendations

To fully realize their talent, a person needs to work not only on a specific area of life - for example, on becoming better in a chosen field of activity. In addition, you should transform your lifestyle. After all, everyday life is the basis on which a person realizes himself as an individual. Psychologists recommend adhering to the following rules:

Refuse to judge anyone. Starting right from today, you should stop judging people and events, completely abandon critical perception or censure.
Communicate regularly with wildlife. It cleanses a person of negative energy. The beauty of nature reflects the spiritual world of a person, making his soul more harmonious.
Silence. This practice was promoted by philosophers and sages in ancient times. When a person talks too much, he wastes personal resources that could be used to unlock his potential. It is recommended to remain silent for one to two hours a day. Sometimes you can devote the whole day to this practice.

These rules will allow you to concentrate internal resources and direct them to achieve your goals. Compliance with them allows you to make a person more holistic, strong, and collected.

How to become an individual

Every person, even if secretly, dreams of becoming an interesting personality, an interesting person, capable of arousing people’s curiosity and attracting the attention of an audience.
Anyone wants to catch the admiring glances of their acquaintances and friends at your eloquence and wit. It’s nice to feel the pride of your loved ones for your active, healthy lifestyle, your special interesting opinion on issues that concern your audience.

But how to become such an interesting person, how to become an individual?

How to turn from an “ugly duckling” in communication into a “beautiful swan”?

Exercise “Morning Pages”

This technique was proposed by writer and screenwriter Julia Cameron. The technique makes it possible to find and restore creativity in a person and helps to reveal inner potential.

Morning Pages are a stream of consciousness that a person places on three sheets of handwritten text. The exercise is performed in the morning. After drinking a cup of coffee, you can begin the technique. You should write whatever comes to mind - morning pages, by definition, cannot be wrong. Even if it’s a boring entry like: “I don’t want to do anything. The kids are still sleeping, but I have so much to do. The whole kitchen is full of dishes."

The technique can also be used by those people whose activities are in no way related to writing. Morning pages can be absurd and don't involve much thought about grammar rules. The process of writing them is comparable to a musician performing scales. Scales are not included in the repertoire, but their implementation is mandatory for every professional.

Morning Pages do not need to be discussed or shown to other people. Even the most practitioner of this exercise is not recommended to re-read them earlier than a few weeks after writing. This technique, with long-term practice, allows you to build a reliable bridge to the depths of your own unconscious. With the help of morning pages, you can learn a lot about yourself, get more inspiration, reveal your inner resources, and gain wisdom. By performing practice, a person establishes contact with his creative part - the inner demiurge.

Exercise “Creative date”

The technique is useful for unlocking creative potential, and with its help you can learn to take care of yourself. After all, the process of creation involves the expenditure of internal resources, which must be replenished. Creative dates are also useful during times of emotional decline, when a person thinks that what they are doing is complete nonsense.

The point of the method is that at least once a week you need to devote time to yourself, to be alone with your thoughts. You can go to nature to enjoy the silence. Or go to an art exhibition, museum or cinema. In the end, go to a cafe and order your favorite dish, then leisurely enjoy every bite. After performing this technique, much more inspiration and creative strength appears.

How to develop your personality

Personality is associated with freedom. Without freedom there is no personality.

Nikolay Berdyaev

It is generally accepted that every person is an individual, regardless of what qualities and character traits he or she possesses. It’s hard to disagree with this, but we can and should add to this that a person, in order to remain a person, must necessarily develop. After all, we call a person, first of all, a unique, special, interesting person, unlike other people, who has rare abilities and a rich inner world. But without development, without working on oneself, a person will not go far from other people, he will be the same as everyone else. And if a person does not differ from other people, if he does not have special qualities inherent only to him, then we can call him a person with a very big stretch. However, the question arises: why does each of us need to be different from other people, why become an individual, for what purpose, for what benefit? This is what I will tell you, dear readers, in this article. I will tell you about how to develop your personality and why it should be developed. Believe me, there are great benefits from such development.

Why develop your personality?

To understand why a person needs to develop a personality, it is enough to take a closer look at what is happening in our lives. What is highly valued in this world? It is obvious that it values everything that, firstly, you and I need, and secondly, everything that is in short supply. What is in short supply is valuable. Do you agree? Moreover, what’s interesting is that sometimes we don’t really need what is in short supply, but we are still drawn to it. We love everything rare and exceptional because we ourselves want to be like that. But we don’t particularly value what we have in abundance, even if it is something very useful for us, and sometimes we don’t value it at all. An interesting trait of human personality, isn't it? Someday I will explain to you why we behave this way. For now, let's return to the essence of our question. So, how can you become a valuable, and at the same time, a sought-after person, so that other people need you, so that they pay attention to you and love you? To do this, you need to become special, not like everyone else. You need to become more interesting, more useful, of better quality, and even, let’s say, more unusual than other people. This can be achieved in different ways, you can work on your outer appearance, that is, on your appearance, or you can set yourself a more complex and serious task - to change, or rather, develop your inner content. This is not an easy job, to be honest. But it needs to be done so that you are valued, so that you are needed, so that you are difficult to replace, and so on. Don't forget - what is rare is valuable. And what is valuable is loved and protected.

People will begin to pay more attention to you, and you will enjoy greater respect if you can develop rare and useful qualities for people, if you become an interesting, bright and even a little mysterious person. Good prospect? That's the point, it's good. After all, we all want to be valued, loved, respected, to be given attention, to be admired, to be needed, and so on and so forth. It's nice and useful. But let's think about what we should be valued, loved, respected for? Why should other people give us their precious attention, for what benefits? What's so special about us? What personal qualities of ours can people around us admire? This, friends, is something each of us should think carefully about on our own. Many of us may have a very good opinion of ourselves and think that there are no others like them. And this is good - you need to have a high opinion of yourself, without any doubt. This increases our self-esteem. But believe me, other people may think differently. They may see us as a completely different person, not the same as we see. How important this is for us is another question. We live in a society that, whether we like it or not, must accept us, or rather, we must be able to become part of it, because we depend on this society. We all depend on each other. And the point here is what place each of us will take in society. So, for this place to be as good as possible, a person needs to become an individual not only for himself, but also for other people. Let's now find out what we need to do with ourselves in order to develop our personality.

How to develop your personality

So, if you agree with all of the above, then I believe you are interested in learning about how you can develop your personality. Friends, if I tell you that personal development is a simple matter, I will be lying. And I don't want to lie. And I will not. So, no, it’s not easy. And I think that, not unfortunately, but fortunately, this is not easy to do. After all, if the development of a person’s personality were a simple matter, such a thing as working on oneself would simply not exist. Work is not the most pleasant word, you will agree. We associate it with tension, with workload, with stress, sometimes with pain, and not with pleasure and joy, unless you love your job, like me, for example. Be that as it may, any job has its own pleasure, there is its own joy, and those of you who do what you love know this very well. Working on ourselves is a special pleasure that we experience when we understand how our efforts bring us benefit. Therefore, working on yourself to develop your personality is pleasant, interesting, and fun. You can get a thrill from this. Therefore, it’s not so scary that this is not an easy job, the main thing is to understand how interesting and useful it is.

What should be done? Study, gain new skills, play sports, as well as interesting and creative activities, make your life and the lives of other people better. Here's what you need to do to develop your personality. It is your work on your body and mind that makes you a more perfect person, and of course, different from others. The main question here is not what to do, but how to do it. And a huge number of books and articles have been written about how to do this - how to work on yourself, how to develop yourself. And each of these books and articles offers its own recipe for personal development, although many of them are similar to each other. The more accurate and effective this recipe is, the faster you will be able to develop in yourself a personality whose analogue will be impossible to find. And the quality of your personality can and certainly must be such that society as a whole or individual people value you very highly. To do this, you must be useful to people, society, interesting and unique. What is rare is valuable, remember, right?

I will give you my recipe for how you can develop your personality, so that you keep it in mind when deciding exactly how you should work on yourself. Who knows, maybe he is the best of all existing ones. Why not, I have been dealing with this issue, essentially, my entire adult life. I believe, friends, that you need to start with psychology. Yes, yes, I understand, this is not the first time I’ve talked about this, or rather, written about it. And you, in turn, can say that again this sandpiper praises his swamp, as if nothing else exists in the world except this psychology. Of course, there is, but, friends, I praise what I praise, namely, such a science as psychology, not because I study it, but because it really gives us a lot - it allows us to develop valuable values in ourselves. qualities for ourselves and for other people, thanks to what points us to them. That’s why I started studying it myself, because I saw how valuable it is for a person, both from the point of view of knowing himself and from the point of view of knowing other people. You can't improve yourself without understanding exactly how you're made, right? How will you know about this? Well, okay, there is biology, anatomy, medicine, anthropology and a host of other human sciences that study his body and mind. There are many of them, these sciences. But if we narrow our view of this issue, we can reduce everything to those sciences that study the human body and those that study his soul and mind. And these are the things we need to develop in order to make ourselves better. Here, psychology mainly studies the human soul and mind. And this, as you can, is not even so much to know as to feel - very important elements of a human being. And since they are important, we need to work on them in order to develop our personality - that’s exactly what we need, right?

Therefore, when I say that you need to study in order to develop your personality, you must understand what exactly you need to learn first. If you want to improve, say, some technical device or come up with a new one, you can start studying physics, mathematics, engineering, and so on. If you have a goal - to come up with, say, a new medicine for humanity, you should start studying chemistry and biology, and other sciences related to medicine. Well, if you want to understand yourself and other people and want to develop the best, strongest, most valuable qualities in yourself, then what, if not psychology, can I offer you for study. The question here is: what kind of person do you want to become, what do you want to be valued and respected for, for what knowledge and skills? To understand this, take a closer look at our life and answer the question - which people in it are the most popular, who are loved, appreciated and respected most, and for what? And then think about how you can become one of these people - what do you need to study for this? Maybe you don't want to follow my path, okay, I don't insist. Then choose your path - find, invent, choose your calling, as it suits you. After all, you still need to study in order to become a valuable person, and for this you need to study well, very well. And to study well, you need to have a great desire to achieve something. What do you want to succeed in, what do you want to achieve? Don’t rush to answer this question, think about it – this is a difficult choice.

In general, the more you can do that you can’t do, or can do but other people do much worse than you, the better. After all, being a person does not mean, for example, having your own opinion, as many of us are told today, since it may well turn out to be incorrect and even absurd. Why then have it, if you can borrow someone else’s, more correct, more accurate and much more useful opinion for us? To be a person means to be a useful person, useful both for yourself and for others. Even if you are different from other people and have charisma, you will not necessarily be a person to other people. After all, not every personality is valuable, even if it is unique. A person can be quite unusual, unique, interesting, but at the same time harmful. We can accept such a person, and even partly admire him as a person, but at the same time, if he causes us harm rather than benefit, then we will inevitably wish that this person was not in our life. Therefore, I believe that you need to work on yourself in such a way that you ultimately become a very useful person for society and be in demand by it. This will significantly simplify and improve our lives. Therefore, we should approach our development from the perspective of our own interests and the interests of the society in which we live.

Let's now talk about our shortcomings - after all, we all have them. We need to eliminate our shortcomings, if possible, and, if necessary, skillfully hide them. You see, a person with a bunch of shortcomings does not seem unique. Whereas the image of an ideal person, whom you can admire, whom you can and should look up to, whom you can love and appreciate, lives in the head of each of us. We want to see someone as an ideal person, someone other than ourselves. Is the ideal unattainable? Maybe. But you need to strive for it in order to at least seem like an ideal person, and therefore rare, and therefore valuable, and therefore someone who needs to be loved, valued, respected, and protected. An ideal person is without a doubt a person, even if he is ideal in the heads of only a few people, or even in the head of one single person, but very valuable to him. Therefore, our shortcomings are, to some extent, our enemies, with whom we must constantly fight, raising our cultural and intellectual level. Let other people behave naturally, the way they want. And you behave as you should in order to make a positive impression on people, and at the same time on yourself. You will begin to respect yourself more, and people will respect you more, if your behavior meets the highest standards. Therefore, be sure to develop self-discipline, because for personal development this is necessary work. It is not circumstances, not other people, who must control your behavior so that it is acceptable - you have to do it. Personality is not an object, but a subject. Therefore, the individual himself determines the norms of his behavior, based on the characteristics of the society in which this individual lives.

And finally, the last thing you need to develop the right attitude towards in order to develop your personality is responsibility and independence. A lot has been said and written about this, so much that it’s somehow even inconvenient for me to repeat it. But, either it is said in the wrong way, or it is written in the wrong way, or people simply do not listen to what is said and written, but for some reason there are no more independent and responsible people in our society. Therefore, it would be a shame not to discuss this issue again. I am sure that my work will also make its contribution to the development of individual people and society as a whole. What else can be said about responsibility and independence? But we can say this: it is absolutely obvious, at least for me, that a person himself determines his life path, because he is a person, and not a statistical unit and not something that can be generalized. Therefore, a person who wants to become an individual must be free in his soul, in his head and in general within himself in order to do what a free person can do - choose. When you have a choice, and you always have it, you just can’t always see it and don’t always want to see it, you can consider yourself a free person, but on the condition that you make your choice yourself and take full responsibility for it . So true freedom is within us, and this is the only freedom that no one will ever take away from us without our consent. But in order to have it, or rather, to use it, you need to take responsibility for your life yourself. There is nothing complicated about this, just as there is nothing terrible, but you need to tune in to such an attitude towards life, having understood all the benefits that you can get from such a life. And believe me, there are a lot of benefits from being a responsible and independent person. And the most important of these advantages is the freedom of choice I have already mentioned. You will always have the opportunity to get out of any absolutely dead end in which you may, by the will of fate or because of your own decisions, find yourself, because you will have a choice - a choice of what to do. People who are not free in their souls do not have such a choice, because other people decide everything for them. And you will have it if you do not refuse to take responsibility for yourself and your life. In life you will have everything - successes, failures, joy, suffering, victories, defeats, and much more that will make you happy and upset. You need to accept all this as a result of your choices, your decisions, your activities. Even if this is not the case, even if we depend to a large extent on circumstances and other people - we, you, friends, do not need to refer to this. Do not convince yourself that someone else in your life plays a more important role than yourself, because this is weakness, this is dependence, this is lack of freedom that kills your personality.

Take responsibility for everything that happens in your life and for yourself first of all. Don’t do this for other people, for them you can put on any performances you want, but for yourself. Be responsible and independent for yourself in order to be free, because only a person who is free at heart can become a person capable of doing what most other people, who shift responsibility for their lives to everything and everyone, are not capable of. If you shift responsibility to others, you will give them power over you, which means you will lose freedom, and therefore you will not become an individual. And I think that you deserve to become one! You are already a person, since you have read this article to the end, since you have made the necessary efforts to start moving in the right direction. Therefore, I can only wish you one thing - do not stray from your chosen path, continue moving, develop your personality - this is work for life, but, believe me, it is very generously rewarded. Determine for yourself the purpose for which you should do this work and let it inspire you.

A way to unlock intellectual potential: computer games

There are a large number of ways to stimulate the development of a person’s mental abilities. One of the most modern areas is special computer games and simulators. Scientists once believed that the human brain develops only up to a certain age, and then inevitably declines.

However, the scientific paradigm has now changed. Now it has become clear that in the presence of mental stress, the human brain can develop not only in children, but also in adults. Educational games and exercise equipment are now available online or can be purchased in specialty stores. Systematic work with these programs allows you to train cognitive functions such as memory, attention, and logic.

Components of personality potential

Personal potential is a complex education. It is formed from several components.

Cognitive (cognitive) abilities. They are different for all people. That is why the personal potential of not all people is realized equally successfully. An important role in the development of abilities and talents is played by the perception of events, the ability to memorize new information, and the ability to preserve and use acquired experience.
Values. This category includes conviction, morality - values that are laid down from the first days of life, as well as in the process of growing up and socialization.
Creative. The ability to find non-standard solutions, invent, think critically, come up with new ideas and implement them.
Creativity, the ability to see beauty, create beautiful things, paint pictures, compose music - create something that makes other people admire.
Communication. The ability to communicate effectively and understand others, associated with a high level of social and emotional intelligence.

In order for each of the components of personal potential to develop, active action and courage are required to face two powerful barriers - the need for respect and security. It is these obstacles that prevent you from moving quickly, without fear, towards your goals. Unable to cope with his fears, a person will talk a lot about his abilities and dreams, but will never realize them.