Shownotes
Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 684 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
How to Live to Your Full Potential – Mindshift Monday
Thank you for joining us for our 5 days per week wisdom and legacy building podcast. This is Day 684 of our trek, and it is time for our Mindshift Monday series.
Wisdom-Trek’s primary focus is to assist you in creating your living legacy. Creating your living legacy can only be accomplished by gaining wisdom in many areas of life. You can only gain wisdom by changing what you allow to go into your mind, which is a result of changing the way you think.
In other words, to create your living legacy, you must choose to be in a continual mode of Mindshift. It is easy to get stuck in a mindset that your current circumstances cannot be changed. This is not true, but you must understand this fundamental principle, “In order to change your life, you must change how you think and what you think about.” Our Mindshift Monday podcast and journal will provide you practical ways to make a mindshift to a rich and satisfying life.
We are broadcasting from our studio at The Big House in Marietta, Ohio. Paula and I had an enjoyable and productive previous two weeks. We invested 10 days in Arizona working with our partners on our construction projects and five days in Anaheim, California attending the annual Podcast Movement Conference. It was great to learn and visit with our friends within the podcast community. I had the opportunity to speak at the conference as one of 12 speakers in the PMx speaker competition.
All speakers were excellent, and while I did not win the competition, it was an honor to be able to participate. I spoke on The Art of Captivating Story Telling through Podcasting. While I have room for improvement in my public speaking, I do enjoy the opportunity. I choose to take advantage of those opportunities when they become available.
It is also our choosing to have the mindset to live up to our God-given potential. God desires us to soar to our greatest heights possible. When we choose otherwise, we minimize what God has planned for us. So on our trek today, we will explore…
How To Live To Your Full Potential
Very few, if any person lives up to his or her God-given potential. From the beginning of creation, this has been the fact. Adam failed to become all that his Creator, God, intended him to be. A perfect relationship between God and humanity became imperfect. A life of discovery and joy became a life of drudgery. Beauty was replaced by ashes. Serenity was washed away by sweat. Thorns and weeds displaced flowers and sin placed its ugly mark on humanity. Why? Because Adam and Eve failed to become all that God intended them to be.
The greatest waste of energy in our world is not that of electricity or fuel. The greatest energy waste shortage today is the unused potential within the lives of people. How about you? If each of us would raise our potential level by 25 percent, just think about how different our world would be for the better.
Let’s explore three waypoints on our trek today that will enable you to become more of the person God desires you to be.
1. Discover Your Potential
I read a story about a young farm boy whose father raised chickens in the mountains of Colorado. One day this adventuresome boy climbed to a high place in the mountains and found an eagle’s nest. Discovering an unhatched egg, he brought it back with him to the farm and slipped it under a setting hen.
The hen didn’t know the difference and instinctively sat on her eggs until they hatched. So out came the eaglet with the chicks and they all lived together as a family of chickens. The young eaglet did not know the difference and assumed he looked like all the other chicks. For a while, he was content scratching the ground for worms and other food as he saw his mother do.
Just like the eaglet, when you remain with a small crowd, you remain small yourself. If you live with critical people, you tend to become critical. If you associate with negative, defeated people, you are more likely to be negative and defeated also. Even if you are an eagle, if you live with chickens, you become like the chickens.
As the eaglet grew, he felt strange stirrings within himself. When he flapped his wings, it would cause much more disturbance than when his siblings did it. He began to think that maybe there was more for him than being a chicken, but he did not know anything else. That is until one day, an eagle flew over the chicken yard, and the little eaglet thought, “I’m like that eagle.”
As the weeks went on, the eaglet felt the strength in his wings and thought, “This chicken yard is not for me, I want to see the sky and the mountain peaks.” Although he had never flown, as he flapped his wings he began to lift from the ground, and his instincts took over. He soared to a high hill, and then into the blue sky where he landed on a mountain crag as he discovered that indeed he could fly.
One of the greatest days of your life will be as you begin to realize your true potential. You are special in God’s eyes. You have distinct gifts and talents. You have shoes to fill that no one else can wear.
2. Dedicate Your Potential
Allow God to fully develop you by dedicating yourself to Him. Since God created you for a purpose, it’s only with God that you can become all that He intends for you. The Apostle Paul recognized this fact when he wrote Philippians 4:13, “For I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength.”
3. Develop Your Potential
God’s gift to you is your potential. What you do with that potential is your gift to God. God is not only concerned with what you are today but what you can become. To develop your potential to its fullest capacity, it will be necessary to focus on the following four areas:
- Develop a positive self-image. – When your self-image improves your performance improves. Your actions and results are a direct result of how you see yourself. When you feel good about yourself, you’ll begin to feel good towards others. The better your self-image becomes, the greater the development of your potential.
- Realize that you are responsible for developing your potential. – It is important to understand and realize that God is more concerned about what you can become than what you are today. Jesus taught in Luke 12:48, “When someone has been given much, much will be required in return; and when someone has been entrusted with much, even more will be required.”
- Development of your potential is more important than the mistakes you may make. – God does not have a club in His hand waiting to beat down your desire to live an effective life. He has His hand outstretched to help you develop a life that is rich and satisfying, which can only happen when we fulfill our God-given potential.
- Learn from others who are successful in developing their potential. – Throughout recorded history, we have seen where a once unimaginable goal or record is achieved, then many more people will achieve that same record. What is your capacity? That is hard for others to say, but it is probably greater than you can imagine.
With these thoughts in mind, let me challenge you to discover your full potential. Dedicate it to God, then have a mindshift to become all that you are capable of. Change your self-image, realize your responsibility, and acknowledge that God will help you to reach the potential that He has planned for you.
Next week we will continue our trek of Mindshift Monday. On tomorrow’s trek, we will explore another wisdom quote. This 3-minute wisdom supplement will assist you in becoming healthy, wealthy, and wise each day. Thank you for joining me on this trek called life. Encourage your friends and family to join us and then come along tomorrow for another day of our Wisdom-Trek, Creating a Legacy.
If you would like to listen to any of the past daily treks or read the associated journals, they are all available at Wisdom-Trek.com. You can also subscribe through iTunes or Google Play so that each day’s trek will be downloaded automatically.
Thank you so much for allowing me to be your guide, mentor, and most of all your friend as I serve you through the Wisdom-Trek podcast and journal.
As we take this trek of life together, let us always:
- Live Abundantly (Fully)
- Love Unconditionally
- Listen Intentionally
- Learn Continuously
- Lend to others Generously
- Lead with Integrity
- Leave a Living Legacy Each Day
This is Guthrie Chamberlain reminding you to Keep Moving Forward, Enjoy Your Journey, and Create a Great Day Every Day! See you tomorrow!