1 Reaching your full potential – exploring what it truly means

Only read this post if you want to reach your full potential.

Most of you will hesitate after reading that line. That is because it gives you an option which is difficult to choose from, especially if you don’t know if you really want or should, “reach your full potential”. Here, I will try to help you answer this question.

The term “reaching your full potential” have been used again and again in speech and writing and yet very few are quite sure on what it truly means. You can ask people around you and will get different answers each time. Everybody has some kind of a vague idea on what it means but could not agree on a definition.

You see, the main reason most people could not quite grasp on a definition is because they perceive the term from afar. They felt disassociated from it – they write or talked about it as if it doesn’t concern them. This explains why there is a lack of a strong definition on the term, and because of this, the term has been conveniently used all over the place to describe and illustrate many things:

• In athletics and sports, reaching one's full potential means reaching one's maximum point of physical performance. Sometime before a sports competition, an athlete will train and condition his body up to until when the competition day comes his body would be able to produce out its best performance. Reaching one's full potential in sports is also often called "peaking".
• In religious or spiritual speeches or texts, reaching one's full potential could mean reaching a point of contentment in one's life. It also marks the point when you would feel satisfied with what you do in life, with your relations with others and with God.
• In Buddhism, reaching one's full potential may be interpreted as reaching the point of "enlightenment" or the highest level of consciousness. For a Yoga practitioner, reaching one's full potential may be interpreted as reaching the highest level of synchronization of the mind and the body.
• In certain professions like for example in dancing or acting, reaching your full potential means reaching the highest point of excellence in your ability to perform.

As described above, the term “reaching your full potential” is widely used by many and for quite a diverse type of communication. These many uses may confuse you and it will be quite impossible for you to reach your full potential if you do not have a strong hold on its true definition.

However, if you take into consideration of all the above uses you will notice a trend: the term is used again and again to motivate people to achieve a desirable result in them. This helps us to clearly define the true meaning of the term:

Reaching your full potential is achieving what you desire in yourself.

This is the ultimate definition to the term. Learn it and then learn it again until you truly understand.

The second part of this post, which will explain you why you would like to reach your full potential, will be published soon. In the meantime, feel free to drop me any related comments or questions.

Photo crédit : he(art)geek

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0 3 ways to deliver your work on time

Have you ever voluntarily delayed delivering your work only to later realize that you should have submitted it earlier? I have done this on numerous occasions and have regretted it each time.

Here, I am not referring to work that has an externally-imposed deadline, such as submitting homework, or paying bills, etc. These have really simple causality-effect: if you don't do these you will be punished in some kind of way - you will either have to pay interests, delay fees, or get into some serious trouble. So you don't really have much choice.

What I am referring to here is work with self-imposed deadlines, such as updating your resume, posting on your blog, watering your garden, etc. Because the deadlines are really up to you to fix, you will have the tendency not to respect your deadlines and delay doing or finishing these type of work.

Often enough, you actually have finished doing the required job but you delayed to deliver it. This is the worst kind of procrastination, one which must be avoided at all cost.

What made us delay delivering our work? So far I have managed to identify one simple main reason - overkill perfectionism.

Overkill perfectionism

You don't need to be a perfectionist all the time. You can try to do a perfect job if you really have the time, but in most cases, believe me, time is not on your side and you will just have to be satisfied with what you already have. Overkill perfectionism will lead to procrastination.

Below are three ways you can try to avoid overkill perfectionism and deliver your work on time:

Stop worrying on what others think of you and your work

When there is no deadline involved you will likely to worry if your work and you will be able to please others.

Just be yourself and do your part with whatever skills that you have at the moment. Stop worrying too much on the results of your work and of what others think of it - and you will improve on your delivery.

To illustrate, imagine yourself as an actor in a theatrical play. You will not be able to do your acting if you mind the people who are watching you and the play. You put them out of your mind and immerse yourself in your character and lines. Remember, you focus on your viewers/readers during the planning, but during the execution focus only on delivering what you planned.

Do not plan for too long

While planning is a must, it should never take too much of your time. Usually when there are no deadlines for your work, you will likely spend a lot of time planning.

Adopt the 20/80 rule - your planning should occupy 20% of your allotted time and 80% should be spent on delivering.

Do not worry if your plans did not work out later - just re-establish another plan. Remember that a plan is a guide and is not an unbreakable law. Just be flexible about it - bend it and change it to your whims along the way. And don't let people tell you that "this is the ultimate way to do something" - kick that mindset away and create your own ways of doing things.

Do not sit on your stuff

A lot of people did not deliver their work on time because they think that their work are not yet finished and ready to be delivered or that they themselves are not yet ready to deliver their work. This may likely happen to you when you are the one who fixes the deadlines.

The answer to this problem: actually, other people don't care much if your work is ready or if you are ready. They just want to see the thing done. Surely, they will form their opinions about it, but you can just never ever satisfy everybody. Just ignore the "readiness" of your work and go deliver it. Get it out there on time.

Remember: A masterpiece is never finished.

I hope that the three methods I've described above will be of some help to you to fight overkill perfectionism and deliver your work on time. Do you have any experiences or other methods you have been practicing that would also fight off overkill perfectionism?

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0 What you absolutely need to write well

Photo: Rita Banerji

Some people may tell you that you need passion to write. Others may want you to acquire some copywriting skills. There are also others who cannot write without their muse. While all these people could be speaking the truth, I would rather tell you that what you absolutely need to write well are words.

In form, words are strung together to make a sentence. A few sentences are group together to make a paragraph of an article, letter or a sonnet for a poem. This we all know.

But in essence, words are much more. They represent ideas, thoughts, emotions, personality, culture, beliefs and so many other things. Words can also be written or spoken, and can also be communicated to another with gestures or even with a simple look. Words are one's ultimate means of self expression.

Of course, it helps to be passionate, to have some copywriting skills and to have your muse around to be able to write. However, you still need words to write and they are the only thing you may ever need: words are inspiring all by themselves. They can give you passion, better your copywriting skill and tickle your muse - should you need these elements to write well.

To those who love writing and wish to excel in the craft I have only one advice for you: master your words!

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1 Failure is a part of life

I have not written a post in this blog for nearly two months. The reason is because I was too occupied redefining the blog's concept and design. If you have been visiting this blog regularly, you may have noticed the many of the changes.

It all started with envy

It started out two months ago when I visited a new blog belonging to a friend, and was surprised to find it to be very trendy and modern, or some may use the term very "web 2.0". There were interactive sliders, sleek navigation links, buttons, up-to-date widgets, the works. My blog looked dull and very boring compared to this.

Then I began to wonder if I am ever going to succeed in increasing my readership with a very "simplistic" looking blog. This is when I decided to totally change my blog's concept and design - a decision that illustrate well my conviction and devotion to the "SOMC spirit", stepping out of my cave and do something challenging.

I later went to several websites in search of a new Blogger template that would suit my blog's magazine concept and finaly settled for the Zinmag Primus 2.0 template. It was originally a Wordpress template created by Jinsona Designs and was converted into a Blogger template by Falcon Hive. It took me huge efforts and quite sometime to apply it on my blog. When I was finished my blog looked fantastic!

Short-lived success

However, I was not happy for long. After a week or so I've noticed some loading problems on my blog. Not only that it took longer for the blog to load altogether, sometimes a few of the images did not load at all. At first I thought that the problem may have been caused by my blog's image hosting site Photobucket. Later, it crossed my mind that it could probably be the Zinmag Primus template's fault - being originally designed for Wordpress, the template depended heavily on self-hosted images (most Wordpress blogs are self-hosted I believe). It could be that the template is just unsuitable for Blogger hosted blogs.

Whatever the reason that caused the problems, and after a very long and hard battle, I finally decided to call it a quits an reverted everything back to before.

Lesson learned

Why am I telling you all this? Why am I admitting to you here that I have failed my attempt to redesign my blog? And why am I not ashamed to tell you about it?

The very important lesson I've learned here is that, if we already tried hard enough but did not acheive the results we wanted, we must at some point of time admit to ourself that we have failed, close the book and move on. My point is that it is completely okay to fail. There is no shame in failure because success and failure are both equally important elements of life and of the SOMC spirit. If we are afraid of failure we will never going to be able to step out far enough from our cave and from the things that we are familiar with. How can we progress to our next level of potential in life if we are hindered by our fear of failure? I will go as far as telling you that failure is a must.

You must fail in order to succeed and you must be successful in order to fail.

Ponder upon this and tell me your thoughts.

Update: I am currently working on another design project on this blog and am trying to apply the Professional Template from Our Blogger Templates. Wish me luck!

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0 Dangers of high fat intake in our diet

Mmm... yummy!! (Photo credit : Zakkety3000)

Fat is essential to the human body. Other than shielding us from cold, fat helps nutrient absorption, nerve transmission and maintaining cell membrane integrity. However, when consumed in excess amount, fat contributes to weight gain and heart disease.

If we eat food containing a significant amount of fat daily, not only we are going to increase the amount of fats in our body and resulting to obesity, but also we are going to increase the amount of fat in our blood.

Excessive fat in blood may be the cause of tiredness and overweight

High levels of fat (triglycerides) in the blood decreases the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood. Triglycerides are naturally sticky and will cause the red blood cells to stick to one another thus reducing their capacity to carry oxygen throughout the body.

When our body lacks oxygen, we will often feel tired because our cells, muscles and organs which need a certain amount of oxygen to function in an optimum way may not be able to do so. A lack of oxygen may also make us gain unnecessary weight as our body will be unable to burn stored fat, which is a process requiring a considerable amount of oxygen.

Excessive fat in blood may also cause heart attack

More seriously than weight gain, when there is a significant amount of fat in the blood, you will have a higher risk of getting a heart attack:

• the thickening of the blood will cause platelets (blood clotting element) to become more active and to suddenly form clots. A clot in the heart artery will cause a heart attack,

• also, if you suddenly become active or stressed - a situation where your body needs a jumping dose of oxygen, your heart will be pumping like crazy to circulate the very little oxygen left in the blood and this will cause a heart attack.
  

Reducing our fat intake

Most people are currently in a high fat intake diet and should be very concerned of the above health related problems and cut back on their fat intake. Here are a few effective ways, as proposed by most experts, to reduce our fat intake :

• Use skim or low fat dairy products.
• Use less butter, margarine, salad dressing, sauces and gravies.
• Choose lean meat and trim all viable fat from meat and poultry prior to cooking or eating.
• Bake, grill, roast, boil, or broil foods instead of frying them. Fry very occasionally and use olive oil.
• Beware of the hidden fats in snacks : biscuits, cookies, cakes, doughnuts, chocolates and pastries.

While it is very beneficial for us to reduce our fat intake by doing all the above, in order to stay healthy we must also eat more vegetables and fruits, and exercise often.

Are you already doing some of the above to reduce your fat intake? Have you seen or feel any changes for doing so in your daily life? Send us your comments.

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