Untapped Potential

Jack Lannom

• Editorial: Thomas Nelson
• Año: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781418561758
• Categoría: Persönliche Entwicklung
• Categoría: Persönlicher Erfolg

Unleash the strategies for success.

You are a winner. You desire to build a home and business that radiates excellence and resonates with passion. You possess the desire to build lives and pass on a legacy, but until now, you lacked the specific, how-to techniques that will allow you to achieve your full capability, and that will enable you to inspire discretionary effort in others. Now realize your Untapped Potential! In this book, you will:

• Learn the twelve secrets for turning ordinary people into extraordinary performers.
• Discover how to bring out the best in yourself and in everyone around you by learning the Seven Powers of Personhood.
• Master the five secrets for turning the workplace into a fun place.
• Learn the three essentials for becoming a master of human performance technology.

Untapped Potential is unparalleled in the field of personal development and professional motivation because it contends for a theistic, rather than a humanistic, basis for self-worth. "This is a book of motivation that is based on the personal nature of God, " says Jack Lannom. "Humanism teaches that we must work for self-worth, in order to become somebody. Theism teaches that we work from a secure platform of human worth because we are somebody."

Untapped Potential is more than mere attitude adjustment, it is life changing. It will stretch your mind, broaden your belief, increase your effectiveness, and enrich your spirit.

1
Humans Possess
Dignity and Worth

IT WAS TEN YEARS AGO, but I remember it as if it were yesterday. My family and I, along with millions of other Americans, sat tensely in front of the television, watching the dramatic live broadcasts of the attempts to rescue little Jessica McClure, who had fallen down an abandoned well in Midland, Texas. I remember watching with fascination and mounting anxiety as the hours slipped away, the little toddler still trapped alone in the darkness, wedged into a narrow, suffocating tunnel, with no food or water. I marveled at all the action and equipment and energy that went into the rescue attempts: men and women worked around the clock; trucks and tractors and all kinds of heavy equipment were utilized; specialists drove for hours to lend their assistance. A huge crowd of onlookers gathered at the site, along with a national TV audience, waiting, hoping, watching, and praying. Finally, the crowd erupted in cheers as one of the rescuers emerged with the toddler—alive! I wept without shame, and my family, grouped around the television set, was crying also.

I like to reflect on all the incredibly brave and sacrificial efforts and expense that went into that wonderful rescue. Thousands of dollars and hours were expended, all for a tiny child, not yet two years old. This was not the president of the United States who was in danger, or some superstar of the athletic world, or the CEO of a major corporation, but a little girl—and the value and worth that was placed on her by her rescuers and a watching nation was monumental!

Divine Viewpoint:
Humans Possess Dignity and Worth

Jessica McClure is just an example of the value we should place on every human being. Think about this: every person possesses exalted worth and exalted dignity. Look at the words exalted worth and exalted dignity. The word exalted is used to express the truth that humans are the apex, the zenith, of God’s creation. To be a person means you are God’s image. God created every human being in His image after His likeness. We are the only creatures that bear the likeness of the living God. Consequently, this is the only foundation for human worth, human dignity, and human rights. The effectiveness of every interpersonal encounter is ultimately predicated by an accurate view of the dignity and incalculable worth of man’s personhood.

Human Life Is Spiritual and Sacred

You may say at this time that this book sounds like a spiritual book, and you are correct—it is spiritual. Anytime you discuss human nature you must recognize that it is spiritual and sacred, from conception to the grave. The essence of who we are as persons is preeminently and profoundly spiritual and sacred. It is that we come from the Father and Creator of the universe, and not from Mother Earth, that gives us sacred and eternal worth. The value of human worth is not found in the condition of human life but in the sanctity of human life. That is why we are to look upon the person who is born without any arms or legs, or is considered by society to be a vegetable, to have the same exalted worth and exalted dignity as any other human being.

In the Netherlands, people are being involuntarily euthanized. The elderly are afraid to go to the hospitals in that country, because they know the doctors can kill them without their consent.¹ It is no different from a dog going to the pound to be put to sleep. The doctors in the Netherlands have adopted a man-centered economic formula to determine if a person has enough worth to be allowed to live. They are playing God with immortal souls.

God’s economic formula is different from man’s economic formula: God values human life in all of its forms; the spiritually fallen man does not. In America we are moving in the same direction as the Netherlands because we have moved away from a God-centered position on human worth and embraced a man-centered view of human worth.

Success:
A Faithful Response to God’s Truth

This book is God-centered and not man-centered. The goal of this book is for God’s glory and our good. This chapter is seeking God’s truth about who we are and God’s truth about human performance. Consequently, I am contending for the highest possible view of man in order to appeal to every person on the noblest foundation to be what God designed, equipped, and intended for us to be.

The only way that this can happen is to learn the definition of success early in your life’s journey. True long-term, sustainable success is simply a faithful response to God’s truth. This response to God’s truth is summed up in two twin concepts. We must be dependent on God and responsible to God.

The root cause of all evil in this world comes from rebelling against these two divine absolutes. This definition of success is the foundation that makes it possible for people to be their best and do their best. These outcomes of human excellence are called BEST EVERS. With the help of these truths you can learn to create a transformational environment that constantly empowers every person to produce “best evers.”

The Four Kingdoms

A man-centered view of human worth is not new. Ever since we were children, we have been taught that there are three kingdoms: animal, vegetable, and mineral. Ptolemy dominated the intellectual world for more than a thousand years until Copernicus came along and refuted the notion that the earth was the center of the universe.² Likewise, this teaching of the three kingdoms had dominated intellectual thought for hundreds of years, and it is time for that teaching to rest on the ash heap of history, as well! This limited view of life is a defining down of life. It suffers from the error of reductionism.

There is a fourth kingdom, which is the kingdom of humankind. We in the United States and throughout much of the industrialized West have forgotten what it means to be human! This is the reason why families are splitting apart at such an alarming rate and why so many of our children seem apathetic, at best, and become violent killers, at worst. This is why a young girl can go to her prom, slip into the bathroom and deliver a baby, stuff the child in a trash can, and then coolly go back to the dance and request another song. This is the reason why companies don’t do as well as they should, why so many of our corporations are struggling in the arena of global competition. All of the education and all of the quality management programs in the world will never work if we treat people as if they were members of the animal kingdom! If we tell children and adults that they are part of the animal kingdom, guess what: they are going to begin to act as if they were animals! We are told that our sexual desires are no different from those of animals in heat, and so every kind of sexual perversion and immorality takes hold of our land today, and, in many cases, is even glorified in our popular culture.

I work with multibillion-dollar companies every year. They have various quality management programs in place and expensive business systems up and running. Their leadership assures me, “It’ll take us about five to seven years to get where we want to be on our quality program.” Time after time, I’ve watched companies embark on these projects, but they rarely seem to work because the people who are the vitally important cogs in the machinery are dehumanized. All too often I meet CEOs and CFOs who are far more impressed with themselves than they are with the human beings who are responsible for making their programs work! They’ll take me on a tour of the facility, pointing out all kinds of expensive equipment, and never once introduce me to the human beings who keep the equipment running! Then when I visit the production areas alone and talk to the folks who have to work under this kind of “leadership,” the workers tell me, point-blank: “No one treats me like a person here. I’m devalued.”

If people are treated as human doings instead of human beings, they will never perform to their highest and their best. Within these huge companies, workers are doing little more than what it takes to get by, relationships are strained and splintered, and production moves ahead in fits and starts. This is because the incorporation of sound furnishings does not make up for an unsound foundation!

The vitally important foundation that is missing in all these programs is the definition of personhood. I challenge you to remember the last time you walked into a classroom or seminar and were asked: “Tell me, what is a person?” When was the last time you were given a working definition of what it means to be human? The best questions determine the best approach, and the best approach will yield the best results. What I am proposing is that most of us have never been taught what the right questions are! Think about it for a minute. How can you or I motivate others to their highest and their best, how can we work in harmony with other human beings, if we don’t really know who they are? How can the renowned teachers of human performance write books about how to motivate me if they are unable to explain who I am? I promise you this: if they have defined me as a member of the animal kingdom, they have not defined me—or you.

The Error of Reductionism

For centuries, it was generally recognized that we human beings have a soul, a spiritual aspect of our nature, that separates us from the beasts of the field. Then empiricism, which claimed that we can know only what we have experienced, that we can only examine and understand what the physical world has revealed to us, came creeping up on us in the early 1800s. Empiricism reduced humankind to the observable and the physical. In 1859 Darwin’s Origin of Species reduced us to the animal. The disastrous effects of these twin hammer blows to humanity are still reverberating throughout our society and our world today.³

The denial of the spiritual self strips us of our dignity and worth as human beings. This fundamental denial of who we really are robs us of the grandest pursuits for which we were designed by our Creator to achieve! We are intended, equipped, and designed to live a life that models excellence in all six dimensions of human development: mental, physical, spiritual, social, emotional, and financial. However, when one is defined down to membership in the third kingdom—the animal kingdom—there is absolutely no incentive to aspire to excellence other than the naked acquisition of power! If you define away the spiritual aspect of our lives, you define away self-sacrifice, the noblest and grandest pursuit of all.

As a result, we live lives that are substandard. “For what profit is it to a man,” God asks us, “if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?” (Matt. 16:26). We are reduced to spiritual beggars, sifting through the dumpster of New Age religion, hoping to find some scraps that will sustain us. We have been prohibited from aspiring to the highest pinnacle of life, which is the spiritual! We don’t honor human beings, we dishonor their dignity and worth. We strip away personhood. We strip man of a regal human garment, one that is rightfully his to wear with thanksgiving and pride and passion. Instead, we clothe man in animal skins. We treat human beings as if they were animals or machines. This is an animalistic, mechanistic approach to human nature. We deny the very essence of humanity by disowning, discrediting, disallowing, and devaluing who we are!

Darwinism, behaviorism, and empiricism all throw the kill switch on the human spirit! So many of us are walking around with clipped wings, our spirit locked in a cage of unbelief. We’re supposed to fly, but we’re crawling on all fours. Ours is a learned helplessness. God never intended for us to live by the law of the jungle—killing, clawing, and stealing for survival. Think of the tragedy that crushes the lives of the many men and women whose society taught them to climb the ladder of success. They pushed and shoved and climbed the ladder to the very top, only to discover that it was leaning against the wrong wall. The bottom line for success should be, “Am I all that I was designed and intended to be, both internally and externally?” Let us determine up front who we were designed and intended to be, and then develop life skills to live in harmony with that knowledge!

The Queen Who Lived Like a Dog

I once heard a story told about a powerful queen who used to go out on campaigns of conquest with her ships. One day, while her ship was in port for supplies, the queen was separated from her entourage and became lost. The captain of her ship scoured the port looking for her and finally found the great queen dressed in rags, living in a filthy hovel, and working as a prostitute. She had become ill and was suffering from amnesia. She no longer had any idea who she was!

The captain saw her and stammered, “Your Majesty!” The queen looked back at the captain blankly, disinterestedly. The captain spoke to her clearly and firmly: “You are the Queen!” Hearing those words, the true definition of who she was, the queen’s eyes cleared, and she stood up. With great dignity, despite her foul surroundings, she stretched out her arm for him to take, and said, “Let us go, Captain.”

The captain had appealed to her according to who she really was. That brought her back to her true identity. She regained her regal posture and walked away from the degradation she had been subjected to.

Clarity, meaning, insight, and understanding begin with one word: definition. Definition demands distinction; if a word means everything, it means nothing. So to properly define something, we must not only understand what it is, but also what it isn’t: i.e., a human being is not an animal. When you know what something isn’t you can draw a line of demarcation. In this way, we create clarity.

When I describe man as an animal, I have blurred the distinction between man and animal. If man is defined as an animal, I have robbed man of the dignity of his personhood! If I don’t know who I am, there’s a great possibility that I may incorporate what I’m not into who I am. What do I have then? I have become a distortion of a human being.

If you take totally pure water, with no mineral content at all, and then you add a drop of mud—or poison—you have then adulterated the purity of that water. You’ve tampered with the purity of the water by adding another substance to it. The distinction of water has been blurred. Throughout this book, I want to stress and contend for the precious uniqueness of humanity. I want to celebrate the apex of God’s creation.

The noted physicist Dr. Bohm said, “Only meaning arouses energy.” The more meaning we can drive into the word person, the more the value of personhood appreciates. This is the only thing that will extricate human beings from mediocrity and propel them into magnificence! But we have been taught just the opposite: evolution, empiricism, and behaviorism have reduced p...