Unashamedly Superhuman: Harness Your Inner Power and Achieve Your Greatest Professional and Personal Goals

Jim Steele is a speaker, coach, leadership facilitator and one of the world’s top business performance pioneers. He helps build high-performing teams and inspires next-generation candidates to get to the next levels of their careers. He excels at improving the mental, physical, and emotional well-being of managers, executives, and other business leaders.

Jim has spent more than two decades helping clients such as Google and Deloitte in the UK, Europe, Middle East and US to grow and develop practical strategies to blend high performance with well‐being, to improve his clients’ resilience and deliver demonstrable results.

Here is an excerpt from Jim’s new book, Unashamedly Superhuman: Harness Your Inner Power and Achieve Your Greatest Professional and Personal Goals.

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Potential. What is it?

Try this. Take your arm and lift it as high as you can. Point your index finger into the air and push it as high as you can. That’s it. Now look at how high you can lift it up. For the sake of the demonstration let’s call that your best performance. Your highest. Hold it there for a moment and watch what happens when I now direct you to lift it a bit higher. Ready? GO! That’s it, raise your arm higher. Excellent!
Here’s the question. Where did that extra bit come from? You’d lifted it as high as you could: “That’s my highest.” “That’s my best.” And then I asked you to raise it a bit more.”

“What, that bit?!

That bit represents potential. It was always there. Always available, but something had to happen before it revealed itself.

The objective here is to take what can be a vague and somewhat abstract concept of tapping potential and demystify it to the point where you not only recognise yourself in the description, but you also have a repeatable strategy for its achievement.

Jordan B. Peterson is a psychology professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and a clinical psychologist. His take on what it takes to successfully tap into untapped resources for me is nothing short of inspired.

He starts by saying that we already know from a clinical perspective that we need to set out a path towards a goal, the reason being that an aspiration triggers a positive emotion. It would seem that by choosing a goal it implies a hierarchy in terms of how we make decisions.

You decide that you’re going to prioritise your goal over and above other things. Applying your focus and energy in the direction of a specific goal typically results in you experiencing a positive emotion as you watch yourself move towards your goal.

The more important the goal, the more enriched your experience. If it genuinely stretches you and takes you outside your comfort zone, what you’ll find is that as you move towards the goal, there are certain things that you have to accomplish that frighten you. Maybe you have to learn to be a better communicator, a better manager, a better thinker. However, doing something new is not only challenging, it also provides new information. Then we can incorporate that information and turn it into a new skill.

Then he dives into genetic codes. If you put yourself into a new situation, new gene codes and new neural structures are formed. For example, imagine you’re working out. You push against heavy resistance. Your muscles are responding to the load. It’s the same with your nervous system.

Imagine there’s potential locked into your genetic code. You then put yourself in a new situation and it turns out the situational stress unlocks those genes and then builds new parts of you. So, the question is: How much potential is locked inside of you?

Well, let’s assume that scale’s-up. You take on heavier and heavier loads. You get more informed because you’re doing more difficult things and, as a result, more of you gets unlocked. The more we take on, the more we gain access to what’s available to us.

The question is, what would you dare to aspire towards if you believed this to be true?

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