Let’s talk Pride and Potential

If everything you were doing right now paused; your career or role, your home or relationship, your health and fitness and, most profoundly, your life, would you feel you’d reached your potential? Would you be proud?

I was asked that or a similar question recently and it made me think. 

What is pride and how does it help us fulfill our potential? Is pride a good thing and if so, how can it be best experienced? How do we navigate life so to reach our potential? Is there an end point to personal potential and fulfillment?

My first instinct was to say “No”.  I know I can and want to achieve more, however on reflection I now want to say “Yes”.

Or rather, “Yes, I am OK with where I am right now”. The fact that I know I have done all I could do, with what life has thrown at me, with the tools I have learnt, and the awareness I have. I have become the person who I presently am. I have done the best I could do. We all do all the time. We are all doing the best we can with the capability, tools, and self-awareness we have. It may not be the best and it may even not be that good, it is simply where we are. And I am proud too that this step of my potential is reached, and that what got me here, will get me there!

That does not mean I am where I wish and aspire to be. No.
I have not achieved all I believe I am capable of.
I have not done some of the things that at the start of this year I planned to have done by now.
I have done some and then, as life does, other things (some good some not so good) have come along to impact the progression and course of these things and where they all fit now has moved on. New potential.

As a result, we can’t ever “reach” a potential fully but instead it’s a consistent “reaching for” that “best version of me” or “my optimum right now” that this thing called potential is all about.
In this way, we can then reach a potential milestone of one, that moves on, one step at a time, to another, and another and so on. It is what humans have a huge capacity for. Growth.
And that’s where I believe pride can come in, for building and supporting self-esteem, motivation, and self-validation.

What does having pride mean?

However, when we take a better look at the research done on pride it runs deeper than that.
I was brought up in the 60s and 70s at school where pride in ourselves’ was not seen as something to have all that often. Someone else to be proud in us maybe, but not for us to display. The well-known phrases like “pride come before a fall” or “don’t let your head grow too much” were common phrases.
In her book Positivity, Barbara Fredrickson describes pride as one of the positive emotions and in fact one of her essential top ten. So, when I read this a few years ago, it changed my whole opinion of pride to a positive one and how important it is in my own and my clients overall wellbeing and in human potential.
This is what she begins with when describing this positive emotion.

Along with your pride you must develop your sense of intuition, find out how here:

And as John C Maxwell puts so well

How can we understand our Pride and come to terms with it?

Humility and pride I would say is the key balance. To stay humble yet have pride in ourselves and our work to keep grounded yet reaching for the stars!

To achieve and reach potential.  Some positive connections with pride that could help would be, self-acknowledgement and pride, self-recognition and pride, self-celebration and pride, self-esteem and pride, self-Confidence and pride and self-compassion and pride. Maybe you can add more of your own!

Let’s become aware when pride becomes ‘bad’ yet allow ourselves the positive emotion of ‘good’ pride and all that it can bring. Let it kindle our dreams!

Reaching potential is done by taking these small and incremental steps, consistently taken over time, easy to do and easy not to do. Choose the Easy to DO option – always!

Bye for Now

Sue x