What’s your potential?  Are you living up to it?  How do you know when you are or you aren’t?  What can you do about it . . . either way? Do you use your potential only as a means of motivating you, or have you used it in the past as a way of punishing yourself when you’ve focused on not living up to it? Is your perception of your potential a moving target that has mirage-like qualities?

Potential means “the inherent capacity for coming into being.” Potential from an engineering perspective roughly means the capacity – or the ability – of a structure to bear a specific load.

For human beings, our potential is probably less a fixed number than a range of possibilities that can be impacted – positively or negatively – by a tremendous range of variables.

How much do you access or consult the idea of your potential with the intention of being motivated and inspired by it?  Less pleasantly, how frequently have you consulted your potential – and the difference between where you are and where you could be – as a means of beating yourself up?  What is the optimal relationship to potential?

What would the world be without poetry? Poets translate the world into infinite ways for us to experience it from the bittersweet, to the tragic, to the humorous. Poems were often sung in ancient times, and we are surrounded by song lyrics that often aspire to poetry.

Plato said, “Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.” This makes sense in that poetry at its best is an open window into the human condition. Whether or not you read poetry, if you sing along to songs, you are engaging in a form of human poetry that is as old as language.

How is poetry a part of your life? Do you remember song lyrics, and do you consider them poetry? Do you have a favorite poem, passage or line that speaks to you in some way?

I had the privilege last week of seeing the great poet and songwriter, Leonard Cohen, live in concert. He said many things that night, but among the most striking was, “There’s a crack in everything. That’s what lets the light in.”

Most of us have had issues with perfection. We live in a world where airbrushed models, celebrities, professional athletes and even business people are presented as glamorized role models and heroes because of their supposed perfection.

This week, as we explore perfection, let’s take some time to consider Cohen’s remark and look carefully to observe those facets of our lives that appear to be imperfect or “cracked,” but which, in fact, let the light in. We can revisit the state of “perfect imperfection” in which each human being continually lives as a dynamic and ever-changing work in progress.

Copyright 2009. E. B. Hutt Bush and Coaching for Results, Inc.