When I sat down to write the article on potential I felt the inner conviction of my spirit turning inside me.  Those of us that walk according to the spirit know what that means.  Here I am writing about potential when in fact my potential is not being used.  Excuse me HYPOCRITE.  After not sleeping for about a week and wondering about it I decided to do something about it then talk about it.  There is at least one area of my life where I feel I haven’t allowed myself to reach my full potential.  This is in the area of fiction.

I am no Stephen King or Hemmingway but I have the potential to be a great writer.  How do I know this?  It’s in me.  You must know what you are good at.  I have that potential.  What I have in the writing area is a natural passion and the talent to do it.  So, I am launching back into it this week and having a go.  Then I will finish the article on potential. When I can say within myself that my potential as a writer is being developed.

I have heard it said that: those who can’t do teach.  I prefer to do then teach.  I am a pragmatist I can’t help it.  Stay tuned.

Yesterday I spoke about the four stages of learning.  Today, I want to point out the missing element of learning that often is overlooked by many people.  This is the part of learning that refers to your natural talent.

Your natural talent

People who excel in their area, such as Elvis, were not just hardworkers. They had a special something that made them different from everyone else around them. They had a natural inclination or gifting that guided them to the target. If you look into the history of successful people you will find somewhere in their story a natural desire to follow a certain path. You have this too and so do I.

How can I know my natural talent?

I can’t answer this with a one line answer except to add this: what you don’t have to work hard to achieve and find very easy to learn could be your natural talent. For me, it’s writing. I don’t have to think beyond writing the next word to know what I am going to say. As a matter of fact as I am writing this… it’s just flowing out of me. No planning, no forward thinking, no nothing. Just a natural flow of creativity inside me. That’s God given. Finding it, is not as easy as simply letting it flow however and that’s where yesterdays post comes in handy. You have to develop your natural talent. You may find like I did as you were developing your natural talent in one area you discovered it was actually in another area! But that’s what makes life so interesting… we all have so much potential (that’s tomorrow’s topic…).

An example of natural talent

Say you like organising people. You love to file things away, be organised and structure things. That’s a natural talent. You may be creative and ideas are always flowing out of you… that’s a natural talent. You may be drawn to cooking, sailing, fishing, running or whatever. It’s that drawing you need to develop and master on the road of life.

There are many reasons why people never realise their natural talent… none of which are important right now. What is important is that you make a committment to begin looking for that talent and start developing it. In the next post in this bunch I am talking about what potential is and how to use it. You must come back and read that if you are stuggling with your own personal development.

I was watching something the other day when I thought about what our potential really is. Some people might say, ‘Well he had such great potential,’ (not about me - just in general!). What’s to say they even know you had potential in the first place? I mean by definition potential is energy that is stored up but not used. I submit to you that potential energy is ‘energy’ that may not exist until it is reached to be used.  That is, how do you know that you have potential until you try?   Like most of Australia my family are subjecting me to so you can think you dance (Australia)?  The one thing that strikes me is how a natural talent is not enough.  You still need to put in the hard work.  No natural talent and hard work will get you there but it will not give you the creativity you need to be a ’stand out’.  It’s a combination of both.  The key is to find out what you have a natural talent in and work hard to develop it.  If you knew that already … what are you doing to make it happen?  Brain Freeze Challenge is on!