How Will You Maximize Your Potential This Year?

We all have many strengths what are yours? Do you know yourself well – really well to know where you are now and what you need to do to maximize your potential?

For us to maximize our potential we need to believe in ourselves. Believe we can. We need to have hope in our hearts and believe and act around that which is important for us. My entire life I have always known that I get a high out of helping others. This value of giving and helping has not always been in balance. When my value which was also a strength was out of sync then I was “a pleaser”. When I am a pleaser I forget to weigh up the consequences of saying yes to helping someone else. When we say yes to one thing we are saying no to another. What I am trying to describe though is that we can all be better people by discovering more about ourselves and making really small changes so that we can be at our best.

Yesterday evening I had the great fortune of being in Jerusalem for Slichot. Slichot is the Jewish way of forgiving yourself and especially others for any wrongdoings. We are on the eve of Yom Kippur (The Day of Atonement) which in my understanding is the holiest of holy days where we Atone for our sins. Yom Kippur is a day of fasting where we pray for forgiveness and ask to be inscribed in the book of life.

Rabbi Meir Goldwicht gave us a talk last night at Aish Torah in Jerusalem old city. Just to be in the old city you may be able to imagine the energy that was present there last night. Rav Goldwicht told a story of someone that was in great debt. Say a million dollars. This person didn’t know how to pay back this huge sum of money. His debt was weighing him down.

He had made mistakes and the money was now gone. He went to his bank manager. The bank manager sat with him and asked him: “Come back to me with a plan of how you will pay back the money. Perhaps you will commit to paying back only half and you will pay one cent every day for so many years but come back to me with a plan.”

I wish we all had such great bank managers and while this may be unrealistic, the idea around it is to say that we can find a way to move forward. G-d is like this bank manager, believing in us all that even if things look really grey (or black) we can find a way and this is what we can and need to do. We are in the period of Bereishit or Genesis in the Torah, It’s the period of new beginnings, of forgiving ourselves and others for things of the past. I understood that Rav Goldwicht was telling us that all that G-d wants of us is to try, to make the effort to maximize our potential as human beings.

To do this we need to be proactive, to make a plan – it can be even a modest one of paying one cent a day, we can succeed in achieving our goals and we can be better people this year.