Developing your human potential is the promise of a growing personal growth industry. However, this is more complex than you may think. More than a quick course or training, or even life-long learning programs, is required. Developing your human potential takes time. Although many helpful approaches exist to start your self-actualization journey, profound transformational change comes from something other than a book or podcast.
Human potential, or any attempt at personal improvement, is frequently perceived as linear and goal-oriented. The journey is as important, if not more than the destination. In other words, there is nothing to “get to” and no “end goal to achieve.” The aim is to live authentically in a way consistent with your values, to continue growing and learning to be and become the more fantastic version of yourself. To be who you can be proud of every day.
Abraham Maslow founded the field of self-actualization and human potential. He proposed that everyone aspires to self-actualize in his well-known ‘hierarchy of needs.’ But if some fundamental needs aren’t satisfied, it can be challenging to progress toward our better selves. These include our sense of security, interpersonal relationships, and safety.
Humans tend to categorize objects and concepts. That implies that humans frequently adopt linear thinking and desire predictability. The perception that specific ways of living are superior to others is reinforced using terms like “limit” and “potential.”
The truth is we have no limit to our potential. Practically, our minds can continue to develop and evolve our entire lives. Awakening human potential, however, is different from the process of development or neuroplasticity. Human potential is about actualizing the possibilities of consciousness within you by becoming increasingly self-aware and growing in your capacities to create positive impacts in the world around you.
How do we unlock our human potential, and how do you know you’re on the right path? Your sense of well-being is a powerful clue.
To get more clarity on this topic, we gave our readers a reference of someone who embodies this journey and empowers others to unlock and actualize their potential. Through her projects, courses, and books, she has worked for decades to empower people and organizations to actualize their potential for contributing to a better world and a thriving future. Guiding people in how to align our actions with the possibility of our Earth.
This person is Dr. Anneloes Smitsman (Ph.D., LLM), CEO and Founder of EARTHwise Centre. She is an award-winning pioneer in human development and systems change who has relentlessly delved into new revolutionary ideas and brought radical new scientific truths to light for designing the new systems in education, governance, business, and economics needed for an increasingly complex world.
Her background as a creative force of systemic transformation in education, economics, governance, and ecology has resulted from a marriage between her scientific originality and her extensive experience in indigenous wisdom and consciousness. She is well known for her powerful consciousness-shifting practices to catalyze people’s inner development.
Her books and educational programs offer profound hope during these tumultuous times by providing a robust new definition of ourselves with tools and practices everyone can work with. She wrote extensively about the power of our future human potential in her award-winning bestsellers of the Future Humans Trilogy, which she co-authored with Dr. Jean Houston—acclaimed by luminaries such as Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. Caroline Myss and Lynne McTaggart as books that profoundly change your life.
Anneloes has also architected a Constitution for a Planetary Civilization to help us actualize our future human potential through 5 future archetypes. Based on her groundbreaking Transition Plan for a Thrivable Civilization outlines the steps and changes necessary for shifting the trajectory from collapse to regeneration and thrivability.
Anneloes brings complex ideas to practical realization and puts this to use for organizations, individuals, networks, movements, and communities. She can work fluidly from vision to action. She has dedicated her life to developing capacities and systems that can make a critical difference in our world’s transformation.
Her books and courses explain how our future human potential is the key to profound new capacities and a more expanded vision of who we can become. She compares our future human potential to an imaginal stem cell for accelerating our evolutionary development.
In this video, she explains how the future human potential of higher-order possibilities exists in each of us. Discover how you can enhance your capacities by connecting with your future human potential, life’s potential for a more evolved humanity.