Realizing Your Potential For Fulfillment and Happiness: A Guide to Personal Awareness and Understanding (edit title/settings)

You can enhance the quality of your life by increasing your actual fulfillment and happiness (termed "actual") through a succession of small but potentially significant changes that collectively move your well-being as close to your potential for fulfillment and happiness (termed "potential") as is possible. The ability to ascertain your potential for fulfillment and happiness, as discussed in the book, gives you an objective framework to strive toward. You are not deluding yourself to attempt to accomplish more than is realistically viable. Instead, you have a clearer vision of what you can become and a sense of priorities that makes tasks more focused and achievable.
You have nothing to lose and much to gain by developing a systematic, structured approach to self-awareness, culminating in increasing your actual. What has perhaps been missing is the framework and means to go about this. Formulating your “potential” helps delineate what’s important to you, by identifying the meaningful goals and objectives you want to strive toward. You will be able to perceive things from a more balanced perspective, not comparing yourself with others or envying what others have that you cannot achieve. Your potential is a prescription for what is doable, and increasing your actual is what you need to do to get there. Characterization of potential in conjunction with a rational set of evaluative criteria — what is really meaningful in life, afford powerful tools for measuring and evaluating the quality of our life and helping you to make constructive changes.
By this means:
- It is possible to more clearly discern those factors that are under your control, as opposed to those factors that you can do little about. With this understanding, your energies can be directed toward the most beneficial endeavors.
- The potential defines the impedance you encounter as a result of events beyond your control (your fate) and the defining events in your lives. This establishes a framework to appreciate what you can hope to achieve (actual) under the circumstances.
- Actual addresses the question, “How am I doing under the circumstances, given the hand that I have been dealt?” Your success can be more effectively gauged in the framework provided by potential. For example, identifying and pursuing an appropriate course of action is easier done when you understand what is realistically achievable. My hope for you is that you will be able to use this method to evaluate your life and change the way you view your world accordingly. Remember, you have the power to increase your actual level of fulfillment and happiness. It will take a certain degree of introspection, patience, and courage, but you will be much better off in the end.
Ultimately, what matters more than fulfillment and happiness? You are challenged to find means of achieving success, inner joy and new ways to view the world. You will increase your awareness to realize personal aspirations, enhancing your quality of life; and key goals and objectives you want to strive toward. You will perceive things from a more balanced perspective, not comparing yourself with others but understanding what is realistically achievable. You will have a prescription for what is doable, and what you need to do to get there.