How Unfulfilled Potential is Our Greatest Failure at the End Of Life

Has it ever occurred to you that if you do not tell your story or live up to your fullest potential, you are doing a disservice to those around you?

Most of us think to ourselves, including me. Who cares about my story, who is this Sara chick, and why should we care. I have felt this for so long.

I have always been one to shrink in the back, hideout in the bathroom to make sure that I do not get called on. I remember one time when I did not feel this way it was Anatomy and Physiology class.

I dreamed of taking this class, I knew the teacher was demanding, and I knew that I was obsessed with passing, and I wanted him to think I was smart, why who knows. I had heard that he made nursing students cry every day, and he did.

He also told us that if we did not study and pass his class, we would work in a dead-end job, not living up to our full potential. I thought, well, that is mean, and then I thought he would not win, I will win. I mean, who was winning in the end?

It was me; if I won, I passed his class.

I also loved the topic of his class; I loved two courses in school anatomy and physiology and O chem. That was it; they were also my two best subjects. Yet the O Chem teacher was not like Father G. I went to a catholic college, and he was one of the many priests I had for lessons.

I sat in the front row with my best friend. We studied, and we always had our hands up for the answer. We were always right, and we visited him on our days off to talk because, as every other student hated him, he taught us so much about life.

He would say I am not hard on the students because I think they are stupid; I am hard on them because they are not living up to their full potential.

He knew he had a reputation of being mean, and did not care, because he knew that his students learned and often had them coming back to him or writing him letters about how they knew their stuff when they were working because of him.

He made a direct impact on someone’s life.

We all want to change the world somehow. The best way is to change the one right in front of us. It might be our immediate circle, or our students, or in my case my patients, and now my readers.

We will not all be Mother Teresa or the Dalai Lama, but we all have an inner circle and potential. Father G. was also a churchman; he knew the Bible.

A section in the Bible talks about unrealized potential; most of us never dig deep enough or let fear stop us from this. Was my professor who had a reputation just getting us to dig deeper to realize that we had it in us to dig deep and pass his class?

That is what he was doing, and he wanted us to know the material when it counted in the real world. When we had to take care of patients, he was my favorite teacher in university, and we would visit him until we graduated and ask him how his nursing students were; it was always the same, awful.

He always told my friend and me that we were his favorite students, we knew our stuff, but we also visited him and saw him as a person, not just some mean teacher who wanted us to fail.

We realized what he was trying to do, and most didn’t even know it until they were already in the real world. Yet I can guarantee if you ask any nursing major from my university if they remember Father G, they will tell you yes.

He changed the world by changing those around him and laying down a foundation to tap into that unrealized potential.

I am sure there are thousands of people like Father G. We never think about it because he hasn’t written a book, and he worked at a university in a small town that no one has ever heard of, yet that does not matter to those that you touch.

So do you have a hidden potential that is waiting to come out?

Why are you waiting?

Most times, when most are ready to “fulfill their potential,” they fear they are too late. Fear will hold you back your whole life if you let it.

When we talk about regrets, most people always regret the things that they DID NOT DO, not the things that they did.

We all have regrets, whether you want to admit it or not. In this day and age, we find a way to use our intellectual brain and make it sound pretty and say, “I do not regret dropping out of school because I found my true calling of XYZ.”

That I call bullshit; if you did not regret it, you would never have to refer back to it.

Many of us are good at spiritual bypassing, which is not dealing with our shit, and putting it into a that only led me here. Yes and no, if you did not deal with that “shit,” it is still there; you ignore it.

I do the same; I have recently taken full responsibility for neglecting things right in front of my face.

Like most of us, we forget the unrealized potential that we have inside of us. I have so much fear in my life, I have fear every time I write an article, and I think, this one, I will get the hate.

Maybe people will think that I suck now. Yet if I do not look that fear in the face and say move over, this one article might also help someone else look fear in the face.

I would be doing a disservice to myself and those of you who might find one thing as a takeaway.

If I go into town and see a man lying on the ground, I keep walking. I did not harm this man, so I should not feel regret for not stopping, right?

However, I would regret not stopping; what if he needed help? What if he was dying?

We are not here to take the backseat while someone else is always driving. I am not saying you need to get aggressive and be a hero. If you feel that you will not do something because “it is not my place,” then that is taking the spiritual bypassing way out, aka not dealing with your shit.

No one wants this; no one wants to be passive; we all want to have an active part in life, don’t we?

Is it just me?

I started sharing my story on youtube three years ago, and many people say, “oh, you are still doing that?” yes, I am still doing “that.” Why? Because I feel that if I can help one person in the world to realize that they are not alone, then I have fulfilled my purpose in this life.

If I stopped, I would regret that at the end of my life. I have started and stopped so many things, and the only regret I have is that I stopped.

I also have regrets that I have not walked away from people sooner. If something is not serving my higher purpose, I must walk away. We all get stuck in real-life issues, is the thing, and then if we have been passive for so many years, one day we wake up, and we are 80 and wondering where our life went.

SO MANY OF US ARE JUST PASSENGERS OF OUR OWN LIFE; you want to be the driver.

It is your one, beautiful life; why are you holding yourself back.

I often think, I am not doing anything extraordinary with my life, who am I to talk, except I take action. I make moves; I look fear in the face and say F-YOU.

I am no longer the passive girl who used to hide out in the back not to get called on. I speak up.

Even though I get super anxious, I still do it.

I am reading this book, and it brings up the question, What is your greatest weakness? I instantly thought of binging Netflix and being a useless slug; the following line of the text was this exact sentence.

I was like, ok, I get this now. It was a light of awareness.

Having downtime and recovery is not a weakness, yet being lazy is a weakness.

We all need to recover and take care of ourselves; we do not need to check out of our lives. When I go down the hole of Netflix, I want to check out how I used alcohol in the past.

Inspiration for this article is from Down To Earth by Tom Hughes.

“Often our greatest fear is a failure, but our greatest pain is regret”- Tom Hughes.

So what is your greatest weakness?