Feeling like you’ve never fulfilled your potential can be an incredibly hard place to be. There’s the knowledge that you are focused, you work hard and are committed to understanding yourself but the success you believe you are capable of remains elusive. It doesn’t seem to matter how hard you try, the results you want always seem out of reach.
What this actually feels like
It’s quite common for this feeling to have been around for some time. Perhaps it started in your school days when you didn’t achieve the grades you wanted. Or when you set out on your career and had to battle for your first job.
It can feel like you have a goal and ambition, but there’s a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle you can never put your hand on however much you search for it. If you can relate to this, I’m guessing you know people who have plum opportunities simply fall into their laps. Those family members, friends or associates for whom life seems kind of effortless and you can’t help but feel envious of.
The continual search and quest for your potential can be a lonely place to be. Whilst others around you change jobs, have families or create their dreams, you may still be questioning what you’ve missed out on and how much further you have to go. This pushes someone beyond sheer frustration. It can feel like you are helpless even when you are busy looking for answers and keeping up your efforts to move forward.
Why your North Star is hard to find
Despite your best endeavours, your North Star can be hard to find. I’ve seen how clients have spent years working hard both personally and professionally to crack the code.
This search might have taken you into new roles, new places, through coaching, therapy, endless Ted talks, reading and personal development. Whilst you’re seemingly doing everything right, you still don’t feel like you’re going to arrive at your destination any time soon.
But what might be the case is that this approach is actually disconnecting you from your intuition and in fact, from figuring out what you actually want in life. So many of these kinds of tactics are rooted in getting answers from an external source. Using that speaker’s journey as inspiration for your roadmap. Comparing your success to someone who has had a completely different background to your own. The issue is that whilst you are focused on others and not yourself, you keep outsourcing your identity.
The striving trap
The word that comes to mind when I think of this journey is striving. Striving conveys the reality of what it’s like to keep pushing on, driving yourself forwards. But I think that striving can also become isolating because often it means going alone. As you travel further along your search for fulfilment, the chances are you are becoming more alone in this journey. This is usually because feelings of shame and embarrassment about the fact you haven’t achieved success show up.
And it’s easy to become blind to the reasons why you are not achieving your quest. Because striving in isolation can feed your inner critic, keep you repeating a cycle of self-criticism and judgement about your capabilities. It creates a sense of a stylus being stuck in the same groove on a record. And however much you keep trying to change the track, it always ends up back in that groove again.
The reframe
The lesson is actually that the pressure you put on yourself is a key part of the problem. Because all that criticism and judgement usually run counter to the ease and relief I bet you hope to find in fulfilling your potential. The energy is too contrasting. It actually causes inertia rather than movement.
Being able to recognise this can be helpful in itself. Simply, understanding that the patterns and the cycle of repetition are happening can create a beneficial shift. It can let some light shine on what’s been holding you back and the possibility of a more beneficial way forward.
Your striving has brought you here and it speaks to how deeply you care about your own life and your capacity for backing yourself. But the way forward might ask something different of you. Less pressure, more curiosity. Less pushing alone, more being open to letting others see what’s been going on underneath and creating the ease that might invite more serendipity.
