Many of us struggle each day to achieve even a small portion of our full potential. We look at successful people and wonder how they accomplish so much—people like Liz Strauss.
Liz Strauss, strategist, CEO and founder of SOBCon, author of the popular Successful-Blog.com, and keynote speaker, has been named among the The Top Influencers Alive: 10 Breakout Influencers of 2011 and was on Forbes list of Top 10 Women Social Media Influencers in the same week. She also was named Top 100 Social Media & Internet Marketing Bloggers Top 100 Most Influential Marketers of 2008 and 2009, the 50 of the Most Powerful and Influential Women of Social Media, NxE’s Fifty Most Influential ‘Female’ Bloggers and her blog is listed on Alltop Social Media and Alltop Twitterati.
Those are some major achievements, but that's not all. Additionally, Liz is the author of The Secret to Writing a Successful and Outstanding Blog: An Insider’s Guide to How Conversation Is Changing the Way that Business Works and a social web strategist and community builder who works with businesses, universities, and individuals to help them understand how text, words, and images work in the culture of the social web. Plus, Liz is a founder of the highly successful business event– SOBCon — which has gained the partnership of companies such as Citrix – GotoMeeting, GMC, Intuit, Glam Media, IZEA, ReveNews, Walmart, Colgate, Allstate, and Klondike Frozen Treats, as well as the attention of BusinessWeek, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Innovation Initiative of the Kellogg School of Business.
Phew. Would you like to have a list of credits even half that long? Woud you like to achieve your most cherished dream or goal? Would you like to finish all the items on your to-do list consistently?
I had the honor of interviewing Liz at BlogWorld and New Media Expo 2011 in Los Angeles, CA, in November. I asked her the following question about how she achieves so much, and she offered advice you can put to use today to fulfill your own potential.
What are the three things you have done and that you think are important for people to do to achieve their potential?
First, decide who you are. Figure out what is your best true story about you, and let go of the ones that don’t make any difference.
There’s a woman who lives in the building where our favorite pub is, and she’s 86 years old. She looks like she could be on the cover of a magazine. She looks like she could be Eileen Fisher or someone. Just beautiful white hair, and she dresses impeccably. And at 86 years old, she and her husband come down and drink champagne, and we talk. She is still angry that at six years old somebody forced her to quit writing with her left hand. I talk to her about it and I say, “Marge, the people who did that, obviously they were your teachers or your parents. They were all grown-ups when you were six years old, but they’re all dead now. You being mad at them doesn’t harm them in any way, doesn’t change any history, doesn’t do anything except fill you full of anger. The story can stay true, but make it irrelevant. You no longer need to define yourself by that story.” We all have stories like that, stories we allow to define us. We need to let them go.
Second, don’t be afraid.In other words, look at your fear, recognize it, and say, “Oh yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of,” and then set it aside and say, “I can protect myself.”
I was talking to someone yesterday, and he was telling me the reasons he was afraid to do something. He was talking about what he was afraid of and explaining other reasons in his childhood for his fear and other things about why he was afraid. I said, “You know, you’re just arguing for your fear and for all those people who put those voices in your head.”
Third: Decide how to live your own life. Those people who put those voices in your head that make you afraid now don’t have to live your life. They don’t have to spend the minutes living inside your head, and they’re not going to die on the day you die. They were free to tell you all kinds of things about how to live your life, but they don’t have to live it. They don’t have to spend the minutes of your time, and you don’t get those minutes back if you decide you don’t want to do what they said you should do.
No one in the world can decide that you don’t belong here. The world can’t hold a meeting to do that. I’m pretty cool, but quite frankly, even if the world could I’m not worth the time and resources for the whole world to get together and decide if I belong here, so the only person left to decide whether I belong here is me. That leaves me back to deciding if I should be here and what I should be afraid of.
Look at the stories that don’t support you, and let them go. Hang onto the stories that do.
Utilize these strategies and you might accomplish as much as Liz Strauss. What do you want to achieve? Are you ready to begin trying to achieving your full potential?
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