A common sentence I hear from clients is, “I must meet my potential.” I work with a lot of ambitious folks: people with big dreams, big visions, strivers, creative folks, smart people with a sense of what they’re capable of. They want to make the most of their gifts. Who can blame them?
But note the emphasis in that sentence. It’s not, “I want to meet my potential.” It’s, “I need to meet my potential.” When we start to discuss what meeting their potential means to them, and why not meeting it is unacceptable, the image is bleak. I had one client describe a vision of the future of lying on his deathbed, succumbing to intense grief over all the things he could have done but didn’t.
As we explored that image, we found that it didn’t matter what he accomplished in terms of family, relationships, beauty, creation. If he didn’t make the most of his career, if he didn’t specifically create a company that he was proud of, then he would face inescapable sorrow. This image matches that old definition of hell, where at the end of your life you meet the person you could have been. For the potential-seeker, that idea is torture.
This is a fearful attitude towards life. The stakes are immeasurably high. There’s only one path to success, only one path to escape that crushing failure. In the Greek Bible, the word for sin is hamartia, “missing the mark”. Falling short of your potential seems like a sin.
As with all fearful attitudes, this stance is associated with tension: tension in the body, tension in the psyche. If there is only one way to escape hell, then we naturally try to force ourselves towards that outcome. We try to make sure it happens just like we envision, which leads clenching and bracing, often in the jaw, in the throat, in the shoulders.
There’s a sense of, “I am not safe until I make this happen.” The body responds with a protective stance, shielding the vulnerable parts of the body: the heart, the throat. There’s a bit of a forward lean, the bracing of a body that needs to move forward and is terrified of what will happen if it doesn’t. In the extreme form, this “I must meet my potential” stance leads to analysis paralysis. If there’s only one right path, well, I better figure it out, right?
But reality is complex. The fog of war is a part of all of our lives; we can reveal part of the landscape, but not all of it. So there’s an accompanying despair. “I don’t know what to do and I need to know. I need to figure it out.” That’s a common refrain. I’ve heard that often from myself: “I need to figure it out or else.” The burden of correct analysis feels like a crushing weight.
I see this in my clients in the form of shiny object syndrome, a constant switching between projects, trying to discover the right thing to work on, what choice will lead to that one right path. The implicit idea here is, “Well, I would get to work if I find the right thing.” This is a rational attitude because if working on the wrong thing sends us towards hell, towards the missing of the mark, then it makes sense to wait for the right thing.
But how do we recognize the right thing? How do we have certainty that something will lead us to our potential: that vague, nebulous outcome? We know we want to start a company, but we don’t know what that company is. We know we want to write a book, but we don’t know what that book is about. So we delay. We wait. And as we delay, we know what we’re doing. We know we’re wasting time. The despair deepens.
What a knot. How do we find our way out?
potential as safety
The thing about “potential” is that even when it is relatively concrete, even when we know, “I want to start a company that serves this kind of person,” the idea of meeting our potential is still quite nebulous.
The question I like to ask my clients is, “How would you know that you’ve met your potential?” People often struggle to answer. Or, the answer shifts on a given day. That tells us something important here. Potential as a nebulous outcome becomes an easy thing for the psyche to project its longings onto.
“When I am finally this kind of person, then I’ll finally experience what I want to experience.” Potential usually signifies a specific identity that unlocks a felt experience. Meeting my potential is not just about achieving a certain external outcome in the world; it’s about being a certain type of person. Indeed, the external outcome is just a tool to access that identity. If I create the successful company, then I will be the kind of person who created the successful company - someone who is rich, confident, agentic, whatever words you want to attach to that.
So we have this vague future sense of the identity we want to inhabit, and then we project everything onto that. The identity matters because it gives us access to love, safety and belonging, and freedom. Here we can see the roots in our childhood: whatever we failed to receive as a kid, whether it was a lack of belonging, recognition, validation, or the freedom to be who we are. Ultimately, it comes down to a longing for a certain kind of love.
The child within us is trying to solve that absence (“how do I get the love I crave?”) and is trying to find a solution that will allow her to be who she wants to be. The natural thing for the child to conclude is that, “Oh, I have to earn it. It is not freely given in my family environment. Therefore, it’s something that I must achieve.”
“The love I seek is locked up and I must fit myself into the right shape to be the key, because only then will I get what I need.”
The achievement of the potential is the achievement of an identity which is the achievement of an experience. Potential → identity → experience. “When I become that successful founder, then people will admire me and want to be close to me, and then I can finally relax. I will no longer need to strive & work to earn connection with others.”
Another version of this is, “Then I won’t be small.” Smallness is the child’s condition. “I am small and I can’t get what I want.” Largeness is the fantasy. I will be large enough to have what I want. Reaching our potential signifies an expansion of the self, in order to get our needs met.
Meeting one’s potential thus becomes a prerequisite to getting what we want. You can start to see the paradox here. Achieving one’s potential is about expansion and freedom and relaxation. “When I’m finally XYZ, then I can finally relax.” And yet it is purchased through limitation and tension. There is only one road to getting it. When I believe there’s only one path for me to finally be free, then I am not free at all.
procrastination is avoidance
The biggest single symptom of potential-obsession is procrastination. Work makes the potential concrete. It transforms it out of potential energy into active energy. Why does the potential seeker avoid this? Because potential can never disappoint. The concrete & visceral can disappoint, and it often does.
Once you commit to a particular company, a particular book, a particular identity, then you start to see the limitations of it. It’s not as good as you imagine. You cannot create work at the quality that you feel you must. There’s a sense of desperation that comes with this. “What if I can’t actually be who I need to be?” That’s a scary place to inhabit. Maybe the most terrifying place in the world, because underneath that is the “I’m never going to get what I need.”
It’s easier to avoid that disappointing reality. That’s where we get things like perfectionism, shiny object syndrome, projects switching. It feels safer to not work. To create work is to come face to face with one’s own limitations, one’s own incapability. These are natural human things. But it’s uncomfortable, deeply uncomfortable.
Thus we have the perpetual return to the fantasy, to leaving potential where it is. One great escape for this is to work on creating the system that will allow one to meet one’s potential: to read the self-improvement articles, to read the books, to set up journaling software. All that feels like progress, but it doesn’t risk creating disappointing work. Anything to avoid the limitations of the work. So again, we have that bind: seeking to transcend limitations, but in doing so, making oneself more and more limited, for all the while time is passing.
an inability to accept limitation
As time passes, as the panic mounts, this knot gets worse. “I’ve wasted so much time, now I really must choose the right thing. I really must figure out exactly what to do.” More analysis, and therefore more paralysis.
It becomes more and more costly to be who you are, to have spontaneity of action, because when we are spontaneous in our actions, we don’t have control over outcomes. When we’re on a time crunch to become a certain type of person, we can’t afford that kind of slack. So performance permeates everything. We are trying to perform the role that we feel we must. And we double down on that performance over and over again.
Performance by its nature is the opposite of freedom, so we’re more and more estranged from the thing that we want. Performance doesn’t allow true connection. Performance doesn’t allow belonging. How can I belong if I’m performing? At best, my performance, the role I’m playing, gets accepted, gets to belong, but the true me doesn’t. Because I’m only accepted for my performance, I feel even lonelier.
The irony here is that real freedom is immediately accessible to this person if they simply give up the idea of their potential. If they gave up the idea of the narrow road, if they decided that they do not need to be a certain type of person, then they would immediately be free. But they don’t do it. Why not?
aspirations of godhood
To give up the idea of potential, to give up the idea of the one true path, means to give up control of life. It means giving up the idea that you can force life to be a certain thing. It means to accept our mortal limitations. Mortals must work for what they want. They must do dreary, disappointing work. The gods do not work. They simply will things into being. That is what the potential seeker most desires: godhood.
The childish trick of saying, “I would work if it were the right thing,” is one of the many self-delusions of the puer aeternus by which he stays within the mother realm and his megalomaniacal identification with the gods — for the gods do not work. Except for Hephaestus, who was despised by all the others, there are no gods who work in Greek mythology. Fields would also imply limitation. That is the drawback of getting in touch with reality: There are restrictions. One comes into the miserable human situation of having one’s hands tied as it is not possible to do as one would like, something particularly disagreeable to the puer aeternus. What one produces is always miserable compared with the fantasies one had lying in bed about what one would do if one could!
— Marie Louise Von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus
A human being must always live in uncertainty. But uncertainty feels unsafe. Our ego in particular dislikes it. An inflated ego wants to believe that it can control life, and thus control access to the things it thinks that you need. It is working on your behalf, but it overestimates its own abilities. It resists deflation. It is doing what it believes it must do, in order to protect you, but in doing so, it oversteps.
Embracing uncertainty is a sort of death for the ego, a shrinking, a deflation. So it resists it at all costs. Doing humble work that falls short of the grand vision, waking up on a dreary Tuesday morning and polishing something that is not quite what you want it to be—that is a grinding away at the ego. Which is painful. It’s uncomfortable. It is a constant reminder of our mortal condition, which is to say, it is a consistent relationship with death.
But what happens when you grind away at the ego? It shrinks. It takes a proper place. It doesn’t cease to exist, but it becomes more of a servant than a master. And thus we fulfill the paradox. By accepting limitations (that is, accepting reality), we gain the freedom to fully engage with life as it is.
When we accept our limitations, we don’t need things to be different than they are. We don’t need to meet some fantasy of our future potential. We can inhabit our life for the first time. When we are inhabiting our life, when we are fully engaging with it, then things actually start to grow. They don’t grow necessarily in a fixed direction, but they start to sprout & unfurl, because they are free.
Nothing is certain. But in that uncertainty, things can emerge on their own. We can be surprised by life, often in beautiful ways. We become a participant of reality rather than an aspiring god. It’s about stepping into the garden of earthly delights rather than imagining that we can hover above it. The gods do not work, but we do. In that work, we find beauty, we find freedom, we find joy.
Thanks for being here,
Scott