Your "hidden" potential is in plain sight.
For a long time, humans didn’t have a word for the color blue.
It was one of the last color words to evolve. Mostly because nothing essential for survival was blue.
And because of that, everything that was blue appeared black, grey, dark, or green to people.
The ability to see blue was always there.
But you couldn’t really use it until you knew what to call it. Until you were told it's there.
The same thing happens with human talent and potential often.
A lot of our abilities stay underdeveloped and underused simply because we don’t have good definitions for them. Nobody tells us it's there, or how and why we should use it.
Psychologists and cognitive scientists say that people with a richer emotional vocabulary experience richer emotional lives. They notice nuance. Subtle differences. Gradations.
For people with a poor emotional vocabulary, everything collapses into one category.
“It’s all kind of black and white.”
That dark, greenish color instead of shades of blue.
It's like when people are trained to become a wine sommelier. For you and me - it'll all taste the same. For them, there are thousands of variations.
Some time ago, I learned a concept called the TEA account from one of the lead coaching instructors in the course I was taking.
TEA stands for Time Energy Attention.
That’s the lens he teaches his clients to look at life through if they want to understand why their life looks the way it does, and how to change it.
Because in the end, the way you allocate your TEA account is the way you end up living your life.
For better.
Or worse.
If I want to predict where your life (or my own) will end up in a few years, I don’t need your goals.
I need to see where your TEA pours.
Where your TEA goes, your life flows.
That’s why, during my Sunday reflection, I started adding one more check-in, not on outcomes, but on TEA allocation.
I ask myself:
“Where did my time, energy, and attention go this week?
And would the person I aspire to become allocate their TEA this way?”
If the answer is no, I course-correct early.
Before life quietly drifts in a direction I don’t actually want to go.
Before I had this concept, “manifestation” felt like magic.
Mysterious. Random. A bit woo.
Now it feels much more like keeping a budget.
Over time, your life isn’t defined by what you want, by what you visualize.
It’s defined by what you consistently spend your TEA on.
So, over to you, dear reader,
What still feels like invisible magic running your life right now?
And where might learning the right word help you put it back into your zone of mastery and control?
PS Business used to feel like magic to me. When I started breaking it down into concrete concepts I could learn, skills I could master - it became more like school I could prep for, less like magic I hope to work.
