Unlocking Your Potential

Unlocking Your Potential

The Keys to Discovering Your Hidden Treasure

Published by Wade D. Sadlier at Smashwords

Copyright 2010 Wade Sadlier all rights reserved

This book is available in print at:

http://www.unlockingyourpotentialbook.com

main website: http://www.WadeDSadlier.com

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Dedication

I am dedicating this book to the memory of two very special people in my life that have since passed on but have profoundly affected me by their life and death.

The first is my grandfather, Phil D. Sadlier, who lived a very full and satisfying life. He was born very prematurely in 1916 and was left at the hospital to die. Due to unfortunate circumstances with his biological parents, he was disowned and abandoned by them. He was consequently rescued by his aunt, his father’s sister, who happened to be a nurse at the hospital where he was born. She took him home in a shoebox, kept him warm on her oven door, and fed him with an eyedropper. She proceeded to adopt him and raised him as a widowed mother with eight children of her own. Despite being two pounds and two ounces when he was born, he grew up to be a large man with a commanding presence.

My grandfather was a man of skill and many talents who taught me how to do a lot of things. Having lived through the Depression, he learned persistence, tenacity, people skills, and how to make do with almost anything. What he couldn’t buy he made from salvaged materials with a few very basic tools. He was truly a jack-of-all-trades; someone who could go into the jungle with a pocketknife, string, and a q-tip and build a shopping mall.

He certainly reached much of his potential in life. Refusing to sit around even in his declining years, he spent countless hours in his garage building things for his children and grandchildren. He lived to be eighty-one. I modestly admit that of all my siblings, I have been told that I take after Grandfather the most in talent and personal habits. Grandpa, your potential still lives on.

The other special person is our son, Charles D. Sadlier. Even though he tragically passed away at the tender age of four, he left a real impact on me. I learned not to take myself so seriously, to have fun, and look at the bright side of life. His disposition was to take life and circumstances in stride and just keep going. When he had his broken leg in a cast for four weeks, I don’t remember him complaining. In fact I think he enjoyed the attention, but for someone like him with so much energy to expend and nowhere to go with it, he could have been irritable and no one would have blamed him for it.

Did Charles have a lot of potential? Yes. Did he reach it all? No. Not yet. It still lives on in his family and those who were affected by his brief life. Because I have been positively affected by his life and death, I carry his potential onward. It seems to our finite ways of thinking that he should have been the one who carried on my potential, not the other way around. But I have learned to take the circumstances of my life in stride too and make the best of them.

Because of these two people, and numerous others, I am not the person I otherwise could have been. With the positive lessons and examples of them, I approach life having received value in order to give value away to others. Their potential lives on vicariously through me to everyone I meet and touch.

Acknowledgments

There are several people I want to publicly and personally thank for helping me make this book possible. First of all, my wife, Kathy, who was very encouraging and supportive, and who spent a lot of time proofreading and making suggestions. My children, Starla, Carl, Karla, and Arla entered into the enthusiasm of the possibilities this book would open up, and put up with my need to be sequestered in my office for many hours at a time. All of you make the journey rewarding.

My brother-in-law, Paul LaRochelle, was invaluable to me in sharing perspective on the many issues that I addressed, both while I was writing as well as the many times I have conversed with him the last number of years. He has a unique ability to see issues from several different angles, to draw pertinent conclusions from them, and then articulate his thoughts and ideas. Paul, you have been an inspiration.

I couldn’t have turned out this work without the excellent input of my friend, Ted Byler. He spent many hours proofreading, editing, and making keen suggestions. Ted has a genius with words, sentence structures, and concise thoughts. Thanks for being a friend, Ted.

My friends, Lowell Reimer, Lance Silljer, and brother, Ivan Sadlier, also kindly and generously read through my rough and incomplete manuscript, giving me encouragement to keep writing. Many others whom I confided in also rejoiced with me, encouraged, and supported me. To them all I say, Thank you.

I have been personally influenced by many great people who I have either met or become acquainted with through the written page and audio recordings. Thanks to John Maxwell, Bruce Wilkinson, Chris Brady, Mark Crawford, Orrin Woodward, and many others for teaching me so many principles of life and helping me reach for my own potential. I owe them much and will always be grateful to them. Reading is my life.

I will be eternally grateful to God my Creator for the unique endowments he has given me and the desire I have to define, develop, sharpen, and use them for his honor and glory. He is my source.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 What Is Potential?

Chapter 2 Multiplied Talents

Chapter 3 Good to Great

Chapter 4 What Do You Think?

Chapter 5 Having a Healthy Discontent

Chapter 6 Obstacles or Opportunity

Chapter 7 Leadership and Teamwork

Chapter 8 Pursuing Your Dream

Chapter 9 Invest; Don’t Spend

Chapter 10 Serving Others

Chapter 11 Attaining Personal Excellence

Introduction

For a number of years, I have felt a need for a book of this type on potential. In my years of searching for a book that dealt specifically with this subject, I found that in many cases the title looked promising, but the subject matter itself left me feeling a little disappointed. Most of the books were great to be sure, but they portrayed potential as something that’s only for achievers to strive for. That’s true in the sense that only those that want to find and reach their potential are achievers in life, but I believe that potential is something that is inherent within everyone, and it’s incumbent upon every person to reach for his or her attainment of it. It’s not a take-or-leave-it kind of proposition, although by one’s personal choices they certainly can either reach for it, or let it lie dormant and eventually die unrealized.

Those that let their potential go to the grave with them many times didn’t have the proper motivation and encouragement to capitalize on it. Other times it seems that some people die prematurely before they could accomplish all that they were capable of in their potential. We can only wonder what their potential was and why they had it if it wasn’t to be anyway. Through writing this book, I have been made much more aware of my own mortality, and I wondered what will happen to my own unused potential.

My goal is to motivate you to use every moment of your days in becoming more than you are, by discovering the person you are meant to be in your potential. Don’t let life pass you by without getting everything you can possibly get out of it so that you can give all that you can possibly give to it. We are given innumerable opportunities in our lives to discover our potential, but many times we miss them because we don’t recognize them as opportunities.

Many times when potential is referred to in writings, the idea I get is that the authors are sharing some insights on reaching for potential, but only if the reader wants to. In other words, if you don’t have a desire to discover it, that’s not really important; it seems to be okay if you don’t want to fulfill your capabilities and follow the dreams of your heart. I think we need a book that raises the level of desire, responsibility, as well as accountability toward potential, whetting peoples’ appetite for achieving and becoming all they can.

I have tried in this writing to make the reader aware that everyone has a responsibility toward his or her attainment of potential; if it’s within us to be realized, then it’s our responsibility to do so. And so, it’s not enough to share insights into how to go about discovering and actualizing it without starting from the premise that it’s our mission to accomplish and our hill to charge. This book is meant to be an encouragement to you, the reader, to do just that. No one can make you; you can only do that yourself.

Thank you for the initiative you have taken in obtaining this book, the courage you are showing in embarking on the journey of discovering your potential (or for some of you the continuation of that journey), and for your commitment to personal progress.

To your success in Unlocking Your Potential, Wade D. Sadlier

What Is Potential?

The awakening of potentialities of human beings is the most important thing in life.

Anne Frank made the statement, Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be. How much you can love. What you can accomplish. And what your potential is. Isn’t it great that you and I have the wonderful privilege of discovering just who we are, what and who we can become, and what we can accomplish with our lives? It is good news indeed that we aren’t locked into a mold that imprisons us and restricts our lives, but that each one of us is uniquely gifted to be a special person unlike any other. And we are given the keys that we need to unlock the potential within our person.

Our society attempts to put us in a mold and to keep us there by subtle programming, advertisements, and the latest fads. Many people place self-imposed restrictions on themselves in an attempt to fit in and be like everyone else. Most people don’t like to stand out and be different, so they blend into the crowd and copy the masses. Many institutions, including churches, impose rules that encourage group uniformity, which isn’t necessarily bad, but all too often they ignore the fact that everyone is uniquely different than everyone else, and for good reason. Each one of us has a potential that is unique to us and will never be equaled or copied by anyone else; that goes beyond the visible. We need to realize how special we are and become secure within our special uniqueness. Let me share with you how unique you are even though I have never met you and don’t know you.

Originality consists in trying to be like everybody else…and failing. -Raymond Radiguet

Just on a physical and biological level alone, there is no one quite like you. Look at your thumbprint. No one has or will ever have a thumbprint just like that, to say nothing of the likeness of your other nine fingers. Experts say that the eyes are even more diverse and individualistic than fingerprints, and in some places, photos of the eyes are used to identify people. Ears are also uniquely personal, and I know from personal experience that pictures of ears are used for identification.

There are thousands of other physical features that we could mention such as hair color, facial features, skin pigment, eye color, blood type, body size, weight, and shape. When you factor all of these things into the equation, you come up with literally billions if not trillions of different combinations. Then there’s DNA. Your DNA spells out all the variations mentioned above and millions more. The odds of having the same DNA as someone else is simply impossible because of the staggering number of combinations.

Now let’s look at personalities. Even though there are only