Human Potential: What We’re Capable of

I was invited to a weekend training course that sounded interesting: mind stuff. It was up my alley. They were long days, but worthwhile. On the Sunday evening, the trainer sent us home to apply what we’d learned. Specifically, he suggested that we set a huge goal for ourselves, one so grandiose that when we achieved it, we would know that it was only as a result of what we’d learned that weekend.

On the ferry home that night, the overachiever in me didn’t want to stop at one goal. If I was doing the work anyway, I wanted three things: I wanted out of the job that I’d grown to dislike, I wanted $50,000 cash, and I wanted to meet my husband. Sure.

The next day, on my Monday lunch break, I went downstairs and sat in the café alone. I had goals to work on. I came up with a plan that appealed to two out of the three goals I’d set. I called my mum and announced that a redundancy was the obvious solution.

Back up to my desk at 2 p.m., I logged onto my computer and saw a meeting request from the managing director. He’d noticed I was looking uninspired by my job and offered me a new role within the company. My lunchtime thoughts, dangling in front of my eyes, were all I could see. Everything I heard from him at that moment was tainted by the opportunity to be made redundant. With my version of reality the only way forward, I kindly declined the new role and we both tip-toed around the “R” topic without either of us saying the word. The meeting was rescheduled to Friday, allowing both of us time to “think about it.”

Think about it, I did. I applied everything I’d learned. I focused on the $50,000 goal and tweaked it to be “$50,000 or more.”

Friday’s meeting came, and the magical redundancy was put on the table. Trying not to look enthusiastic about it, I accepted my payout of $50,132. I was part bemused, part impressed, part inspired, and completely excited. A good friend, Cam, lived upstairs from me and I relayed the news to him as soon as I was home. We decided to celebrate, and given it was the Manly Jazz Festival that weekend, thought we’d invite friends around for a BBQ breakfast on the back deck, with live music to follow. Cam invited a few of his friends, and I invited a handful of mine.

It was raining that weekend, so we moved breakfast into my apartment. As people were arriving, an unfamiliar person knocked on my door. “I’m Joel, Cam’s friend.”

One year later, Joel proposed. This was ten years ago now.

It was the beginning for me—of a lot of things…life as I know it. Not just my lifestyle, but life. Human life. The human experience.

This experience opened my eyes to what we are capable of. There is nothing within me that thinks this was coincidental. Not three things like that in one week.

The human experience has been dubbed both a spiritual experience in a physical body and, vice versa, a physical experience in a spiritual body. Whichever way it is, every part of me knows that we are more than just meat, electrical impulses, and chemistry. We have the capacity to fulfill our grandest goals. We have the capacity to create our journey.

My later struggle of wanting to have a family, only to awaken to the grand goal of mothering 10,000 people whom I’d consider family, showed me that it is not necessarily our conscious desires that happen as planned. It is our deepest desires, which we are programmed to pursue. And when we align our deepest desires with our conscious goal-setting, that is when life transforms—sometimes within just one week.

Ahhh, life.

With love. With bemusement. With excitement. And with an incredible amount of inspiration for what life is and just what we’re capable of…

Sherrie Laryse x

Previously published here.