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Bruce Lee once mentioned how the way martial arts were designed, you had to keep training or you lost your skill over a short time. As long as one trains, they can maintain their skill, but as soon as they quit, they immediately start to decline in their abilities.

And after two years of quitting, they are only a mere shadow of themselves.

For me, to stay on my A-game I need to constantly be pushing myself to learn new concepts and practicing those that I have already learned. This doesn’t mean I set aside time for practice like I use to do when I was a student of Kung-Fu, but it means my mind rarely rests.

The following are some techniques and good practices I use to maximize my potential. Many of them I don’t think about and thus my wife has pointed out to me that I do.

For most of them the key is, for me anyway, to learn and practice. After a while, you will find these good habits many times will become second nature and you don’t even need to think about doing them.

The First Thing You Need To Do

As an entrepreneur (or just someone trying to maximize their human potential) you need to know your feet are planted firmly on the ground – simply having them on the ground is not enough.

Have you ever thought about who the real you is? Why do you believe in what you believe? Is it because you were taught to believe that way?

Simply believing what others tell you to be true does not bring understanding.

So my first step to maximizing your potential is to question your belief system and bring yourself to a better understanding of who you are and why you believe in what you believe in.

This will be your starting-point from which you can maximize your potential and reach for the stars.

Drive

You need to figure out what your drive is. Here are some questions you should answer:

• What are you moving toward?
• What is your goal?
• Where do you want to be when you retire?
• What’s the reason for starting your business or doing your own thing?

Knowing the answers to questions like these and understanding what your driving force is will help build your road map to success. Understanding your drive will also allow you to laser focus in on where and what you need to concentrate your efforts in.

Set Up A To-Do List & Give Tasks Timeframes

Every night before you go to bed, make out a list of things you want to accomplish the next day. The mind is freshest shortly after you wake up, therefore, schedule the most difficult tasks first.

Also, give each task a timeframe. Chances are if you own a business it is unlikely you can spend an entire day on just one thing. And if you don’t own a business but would like to one day, you will already have this necessary practice in play.

Do not go over that designated amount of time set aside for each task. If it’s nearly finished, ok, I’ll give you a little leeway. But you still need to be able to have time each day for your life and not just your business. If you continually go over the amount of time that you have set aside you need to reevaluate your time management.

Believe In Yourself

If you don’t believe you can do it, why should anyone else believe in you? Have a winning attitude. Don’t approach someone with an offer or business idea with defeat already in your eyes – they’ll see right through you.

Like I mentioned in my post 8+ Ways To Train Yourself To Be Creative, if you doubt yourself or say you cannot do something, write that down and then immediately write down two or three reasons why you can do it.

What you will find by doing this is you are training your mind to think in a certain way. After awhile you will no longer need to write these things down because you will have trained your mind to automatically rebut negative thoughts with positive ones.

Believing in yourself is an absolute MUST for maximizing your potential.

Surround Yourself With The Right People

Learning is essential in just about anything you wish to accomplish. To learn and grow faster, find people with similar interests to your own who are successful. If they are successful, they probably have a winning attitude and have many experiences you can learn from.

Become a sponge and let their success and experience help you avoid the many pitfalls that lie ahead. In business and as an entrepreneur, you can be sure there will be no shortage of speed bumps. By being around and learning from others who have been there, done that, you can achieve your goals even faster and hopefully avoid some of those speed bumps others have already driven over.

Good Health

Maintaining good health keeps your mind, body, and spirit energized and gives you fuel to feed your drive. There are many diets out there and plenty of “good health” advice. A few of the basics to keep in mind are the following:

• Get a good night’s sleep
• Drink plenty of water
• Eat protein and find a good diet plan you can stick to
• Exercise at least 3 times a week

So there you go, a few tips on helping you to maximize your potential. I do pretty well with these, though I have to admit from time-to-time I fall a little short on the good health part.

What do you do that helps you maximize your potential?