I am going to tell you a personal growth story that in some ways writes you into the plot. Now, you may wonder how a story about me leaving the game of golf could possibly read with you as the main character. But since this story has very little to do with golf and instead deals with peeling back the layers to find the greatness that lies within you, your own life and pursuit for personal growth has to be at the center of it.
A couple of years ago, I headed home after a round of golf like I had many times before, frustrated that the four-to-five hours I had just spent brought no improvement to my golf score. For some time I had been on a quest to conquer the game of golf. But without a natural, free flowing swing, and the talent to excel, my quest yielded nothing but one disappointing round after another. Eventually, my golf game arrived at a “give or go” point: either I had to give more time to practice, or go do something else. Funny, isn’t it, how when faced with an either or decision—a decision that gives us a fifty percent chance of making the right call—somehow we choose the hand life holds out empty. Well, as you might imagine, the choice I made grabbed onto nothing but air.
Investing all of my time and energy in pursuit of the perfect swing, I reached a point in my golf game that no amount of practice could take me further. In fact, practice or no practice, I shot the same score almost every round. A day on the links that began with hope always seemed to end the same—feeling frustrated. Do you know how boring it is to do something over and over again without experiencing any improvement?
My “failure to advance” in golf brought my life to another fork in the road—a second chance to advance my personal growth—and this time I took the path that offered something more. Instead of looking to what I wanted, I looked to who I was. I wondered what I might find by taking this new path, where it might lead, and how might my life be filled up in the process.
Not long into my journey, I found myself confronted with this single instruction: find your greatness. I know this sounds a bit like a cliché and borders on idealism, but those three words—“find your greatness”—sent me scurrying off to take personal inventory of who I really was. And do you know the first thing I discovered? My destiny was never in golf! (This is where you take out the word “golf” and replace it with a word or phrase that best describes your storyline). Trying to take the mediocre of life and make it less so, never ends in greatness.
We all possess an amount of greatness. To find it, though, requires that we first go through the times where life sloughs off the not so great. Yet, fortunately, all the friction created in the process just seems to polish the real essence of who we are. Like I mentioned earlier, for personal growth to occur, sometimes we have to give up on what or who we want to be in order to discover who we really are. That’s what happened to me when I let go of the image of being a “great golfer.”
What is it that you have a shot at finding greatness in? You’ll never take the first step toward your potential unless you first see yourself as reaching your potential. You must believe before you see. I don’t mean to imply that you can create your own reality, or that a once-a-day, positive pep-talk makes your life run any better. But I have discovered that a person sells out and gives his or her life to something only after first seeing that something happening within the imagination. So what is it that you see? What episode replays over and over on your mind’s TV?
Your greatness is not measured by the size of the feat tackled, nor by the judgments others make as to its importance. Greatness simply follows a great attempt, going for what it is you really and truly want in life.
So what’s holding you back? Perhaps a good starting point would be to jettison those things in your life that suck all your time and energy away without yielding much personal growth. Yes, I still play golf now and then, and whatever you give up, you too will occasionally return to. But to take hold of something new first requires that you let go of something old.
If the greatness that lies within you and awaits your discovery first lives within your dreams, why not release your dreams and quit holding back? Unshackled, where might they take you?
When you do dream, what do you see? What awaits you on the other side of the canyon that stands between you and fulfillment? Yes, a canyon separates you from your greatness, but I learned that once you can see where you want to go, you’ll find a way to get there, regardless of what gets in the way. And although I’ve not fulfilled my ultimate dreams, the daily pursuit deposits within my life the energy to move toward them.
Now, if all this talk about “finding your greatness” sounds a bit ambiguous and less than concrete, I guess it should because that’s how I intended this article to read. Personal growth and greatness are not something you can follow a how-to list and find. Greatness calls to the journey and not the specifics. That’s what dreams were made for! I’ve purposefully left a lot of fill in the blanks so you could write your own story, a story of a hero’s journey toward discovery. It’s your life. Now pick up the pen and begin living.
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