Has anyone ever told you that you are not working up to your potential? Perhaps you have said it to yourself. Some of us have heard it from other people – bosses, spouses, or our parents, and some of us say it to ourselves. It does not really matter where you get the idea that you are underachieving from, as long as you have that thought in your mind, it affects you. Kenneth Christian, the author of “Your Own Worst Enemy”, estimates that one in four adults is an underachiever.
Underachieving is, simply put, falling short of one’s potential and understanding how it affects your inner experience may be more important than simply learning how to achieve more. The inner experience of “falling short of potential” affects our identity, esteem, and mental health. Many gifted and talented people that have enormous potential develop self-defeating tendencies, and never quite reach the full extent of what they are capable of.
What are these self-defeating tendencies, and why do people develop them? Things like procrastination, dismissing or discounting one’s abilities (I do this in a major way), and the like help us to stay comfortably small. Criticizing ourselves and setting impossibly high standards can lead us to stop striving, because we feel that we cannot possibly achieve that which we aim for. We all know smart people who do really, really dumb things from time to time. This is also a way in which we cut ourselves short and limit our success. The same can be said for not clearly identifying what it is that we want so we get stuck drifting along with no particular destination. In fact, it seems as if there are endless ways in which people can prevent themselves from reaching their potential.
If you are reading this and it touches a nerve, take heart. Underachieving is not a permanent condition. It is a state of mind that you have the ability to change if you choose to do so.