Your ability to perform in life is determined by a number of factors:

(1)The package you received when you were born (i.e. whether you are in a male or female body, whether you have all the right bits in all the right places etc. Not much you can do about that, other than accept it (unless, of course, you spend a fortune on plastic surgery)

(2)The information you have available to you. You don't necessarily need to have that information at your finger tips, just the ability to know where to find it and being able to access it.

(3)How motivated you are. Anthony Robbins argues, quite convincingly that the two basic motivators in life are avoidance of pain and the attraction of pleasure. I agree with him

So, we can create some sort of formula:

POTENTIAL = ORIGINAL PACKAGE + INFORMATION + MOTIVATION.

However, if you are honest with yourself your achievements does not equal the potential you have. That is because of the emotional factor.

What you know about something (information) is very important. What is even more important is how you feel about it.

To realise how your potential is affected by your feelings, you need to divide the potential you have by the blocking forces of our emotions in order to get a figure that is closer to the mark when it comes to achievement.

So the formula for achievement goes something like this:

ACHIEVEMENT = POTENTIAL divided by EMOTIONS.

Let's play with a few number to get a better idea of how this works. (You might need a piece of paper and a pen or pencil to make sense of this) I will try to keep it simple.

Now although its not possible to reduce the dimensions of the human system to numbers, stick with me here, because hopefully we will actually get somewhere with this.

Let's give each of the first dimensions a value of 6 and the blocking feelings a value of 3. So we have six plus six plus six equals a potential of 18 divided by 3 = an actual output of 6.

What happens if we increase the information and motivation dimensions? Now we have already said that we can't do anything about our original package, so that stays at 6. But what if we increase our information dimension and our motivation dimension by 50% so we have 6 plus 9 plus 9 equal a potential of 24 divided by three equals an achievement level of 8 So by increasing our knowledge by 50% and our getting really motivated we have managed to slightly improve our achievement from a level of 6 to 8. Not bad, but I certainly would not be satisified with such a small increase for so much extra work.

Now, here comes the real cruncher. Instead of increasing our information and motivation,what if we reduce the blocking effect of the emotional dimension?

Let's go back to our original numbers, 6 plus 6 plus 6 but decrease our blocking feelings by 50%, so it becomes 1.5 instead of 3. So a potential of 18 divided the emotional blockages of 1.5 gives an achievement score of?.12! Double the original achievement and 50% better than increasing the information and motivation factors.

The point of that little play with numbers is to show that based on our formula,(and this is so important I think it deserves, emphasising as much as possible...

TO BECOME MORE EFFECTIVE IN YOUR ACHIEVEMENTS YOU WILL ACHIEVE BETTER RESULTS BY REDUCING THOSE FEELINGS THAT BLOCK YOU FROM REACHING YOUR POTENTIAL THAN YOU WILL BY INCREASING EITHER THE INFORMATION OR THE MOTIVATION YOU HAVE.

Graham Hunt is the founder of Prentis Carpenter Center, an organisation established to resource an environment where those people who chose to do so could discover and work towards their potential. One way in which Graham is doing that is through his website http://www.higher-self-esteem-site.com/ . Drop by anytime.