Coaches, bloggers and other teachers tell us: “You can do anything.” And we try our best, and when it doesn’t work out, we begin to blame ourselves. How is it that everyone can, but we can’t? But is it necessary to strive for the impossible? What limits us and is it so bad to see the limits of our capabilities?
Today it is fashionable to say that everyone can achieve whatever they want. But in this statement lies a delusion, not always useful and sometimes even harmful. Why?
“Abraham Maslow wrote that the main human need in the process of life is the realization of one’s own potential and the disclosure of one’s abilities,” explains psychologist Nina Bocharova. — In other words, true success lies in self-realization, the manifestation of your unique qualities and individual characteristics that are given to you. Everyone is endowed with temperament, physical and mental characteristics — innate characteristics. We have our own individual nature, which needs to be revealed and applied.
In real life, far from the glossy pictures of Instagram (an extremist organization banned in Russia), we are limited by many factors. In particular, height, weight, joint flexibility, way of thinking, nervous constitution and other individual characteristics.
For example, not everyone can run like the world-famous Kenyan marathon runner Kipchoge. Someone generally has contraindications to this type of activity. We are limited by our own body. And, recognizing the limits of its capabilities, we can understand what is ours and what is not given to us.
However, sometimes we strive for goals that are initially unattainable for us. “Often we try to seem like who we are not, we start to “break” ourselves in order to meet someone’s expectations, some social standards of success. Or we simply try to copy other people’s achievements, but in doing so we ignore our own potential, says Nina Bocharova. “In this case, the loud phrase “You can do anything” can only confuse.”
We learn to understand ourselves from childhood, through communication with the most important people — parents
After all, one is really ready to train at the stadium all day long, but is not adapted to sit out for 8 hours in the office. Another easily manages to negotiate, and concentrated work with numbers causes resistance in him, which, of course, affects the result. And there is an explanation for this.
Not only height and weight matter. Each person has their own type of nervous system. The ability to concentrate and stability, the ratio of the processes of excitation and inhibition, and much more — these are individual factors. It depends on the totality of mental traits and personality traits whether we have an inclination to certain types of activity, the expert explains.
So it turns out that far from everything works out for us, and if we achieve the goal in the end, then we pay a disproportionate price. But you can find your own way, within which we will really be able to work miracles. Why then are we minding our own business?
“This can often be found in creative people whose talent was not recognized and not noticed by their parents, and they went the wrong way,” Nina Bocharova comments. “And as adults, they realized their nature and discovered their potential. Such people always note that they lived as if not their own life, not feeling themselves.
We learn to understand ourselves from childhood, including through communication with the most important people — parents. If they accept our nature, it is easier for us to choose our path.
“Often the unwillingness to help the child to know himself, rejection, condemnation, depreciation of his true, natural talents, the desire to impose his ideas without taking into account the possibilities take him too far away from himself,” says the psychologist. “As a result, he resigns himself, does not go his own way, not striving for anything, just following the given program.”
And so a person can live his whole life, if at some point he does not discover something that is really close to him. And sometimes it happens that people already at a conscious age understand who they want to be, but do not dare to realize it, comparing themselves with more successful individuals. That’s when you can say to yourself: «You can do anything!» — and strive towards the goal. This is our individual path of self-realization.
“It is important not to neglect your set of individual mental characteristics and natural potential, because when a person realizes himself, he satisfies his highest need,” the psychologist explains.
If there is talent, it must be developed, but if it is not there, and this is obvious, is it worth spending years perfecting a skill that is simply not yours? Hardly. It will most likely be a waste of time.
It is quite obvious that we cannot do everything, this is normal and natural. Everyone has their own limits. We are what we were born into the world
Oddly enough, when we try to go the wrong way, we meet quite obvious resistance. You just need to listen and look. But when we choose the right path, we feel support that we did not expect to find.
Dancer Martha Graham said: “There is a life force, an energy that comes into play through you, and only you can properly express it in all its uniqueness. If you block this power, no other medium can transmit it as you can, and it will be lost forever. The world will be deprived of it. And it’s not up to you to determine how good or valuable it is, or how comparable it is to others. All you need is to be open, to be aware of those impulses and internal shocks that motivate you…”
If you feel that you still don’t know yourself, then take the time to explore your personality, listen to your true needs and desires, pay attention to your uniqueness and human nature. And then the answers will begin to come by themselves, the psychologist suggests.
It is quite obvious that we cannot do everything: this is normal and natural. Everyone has their own limits. We are what we were born into the world. It is better to learn to see your possibilities and succeed where our nature can reveal itself to the fullest and brightest.