Working With Soul:
Place of Most Potential

The past two columns offered some lessons learned by professional photographer Dewitt Jones, for creating, living and celebrating your best life.

To review: Visions are a dime a dozen. It’s what you do with them that counts. Although others may cheer and help you along, bringing your vision to life requires your directed action.

Jones knows (to capture his “best shot”) putting himself in his place of most potential is paramount. With photo challenges one can only fathom, he tenaciously reframes every problem into an opportunity. He knows that doing so leads him one step closer to his “place of most potential.” With vigor and passion, he encourages his audiences to “Be willing to press against the edge of your comfortable environment. Transform the ordinary into the extra ordinary. That, and nothing more, is what creating is all about. Transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary releases your passion and creativity. Discipline and commitment become non-issues. You know that. I know that.”

Intellectually we may know that, but most of us don’t do what it takes to release it.

This is the toughest one for me. I’m great at vision and great at training my technique; but it’s putting myself in my place of most potential, the place of paramount importance, the place that makes all the difference between a “so-so shot” and a “best shot” that presents my greatest daily challenge.

For instance, in our printing business (or any business I suppose) three foundational principles apply. Enterprise Printing has to: get it in (the printing order); get it out; and get paid. Each part demands wholeheartedness. Let’s say my best shot is “getting it in” and my “place of most potential” is when I’m connecting with print-buyer decision makers; when I’m listening to their needs, frustrations and annoyances; when I’m offering resources and options; when I’m a catalyst to help launch scribbles and dreams into print-perfect flight.

Yet (and here’s the rub) I’m prone to spend my days proofreading, processing work orders, filing, or answering random phone calls––habitual comfort zone work. It’s important work, necessary work, but it’s not my “place of most potential” work. Do you relate? When I fail to press against the edge of my comfort zone, sadly, no one wins: no in, no out, no pay.

So there you have it, the simple hard truth: you and I can choose to retain our ordinary habitual lives; we can squawk, smirk, even wail that life is not fair and that no one understands (and often it’s not, and they don’t)–––or we can choose to risk reframing and transforming our life into an extraordinary vista of potent possibilities too vast to dream of or imagine, according to Jones.

This week, consider how you can put yourself in your place of most potential. We humans tend to think we can keep on doing what we’ve always done, and eventually a different result will occur. It won’t happen. Dare to begin risking and moving, even if ever so slowly, in the direction of “your place.” When you do, everybody has a chance to win.

Next time I’ll share Jones’s thoughts on The Possibility Curve.