Live Your Whole Capacity: How to tap into and grow unknown potential in your life

By Adele M Lim

Are you are living the life you are meant to live?

Do you feel you could live life so much more deeply or immersively, but are held back in one way or another. 

In this inspiring book, Adele M Lim offers a fresh perspective and a simplified map that you can use to discover new capacities within yourself

• Language: English
• Publisher: IAM Self-Publishing
• Release date: Feb 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781912145010

Book preview

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

My journey into writing this book began in 2007 when I left a promising Finance career to move into the totally different field of Human Development.

During this period, I also made the decision to end my first marriage and move to London.

I was turning everything I knew as my life upside down to step into a world that was so alien to me, and where, as the main actor, I was not even sure I knew how to play or be myself anymore.

My search led me to meet some of the most amazing people, including myself.

I felt like I was dying.

Everything I had ever known about me was dissolving, as if being sucked into a black hole. I mourned for the loss of all that I knew about me and what I thought I was pursuing.

In that period, I was like a child learning to stand and walk, and learning the vocabulary and grammar of a strange language, with no reliable past knowledge to draw upon.

On the surface, I looked no different from the many people I commuted to and from work with on every busy working day in the London Underground, and no different from the many people who hung out at cafes, museums and parks at the weekends. Underneath my calm exterior, I was a sea storm. It was the darkest most confusing period of my life.

But something kept me going. I was looking to feel better. Or perhaps I was looking to prove to myself and my family that I did the right thing.

Whatever the case, my search led me to meet some of the most amazing people, including myself; the many aspects of myself, all my co-existing identities.

In seven years, I got married and divorced, left my motherland, changed career, met my second husband, got married, became pregnant, wound up back in Asia, became a mother and transitioned to doing my life’s work.

My conscious and unconscious learning from all my life experiences, particularly in those seven years, had begun to form clear patterns and wonderful insights.

I felt excited about what I was discovering and started sharing it with a small circle of friends. Many encouraged me to write about my discoveries but I hesitated.

I hesitated because I was afraid that I was not going to appear technical, intelligent and researched enough. Other reasons were not crystal clear to me as fear is often easily masked by excuses, complexes and doubt:

I am too busy and I don’t need to share what I learned.

No one will listen to me without a PhD.

I need to do ‘proper’ research with big names endorsing it to be worthy of having an audience.

Can I really pull this off?

What if I let myself down?

What if I let others down?

Until one day, I experienced déjà vu.

DISSOLVING THE OLD ME

Sharing what I learnt by writing a book was like dissolving me, as I knew me, to step into the unknown. At one point in time, that meant utter darkness, very painful, and very scary.

So I struggled with making progress on the book until I realised that I needed to really connect with WHY I wanted to write the book; the Big Why. What purpose did I want to serve?

As a human and organisation development practitioner in large multinational companies, I was exposed to and had gotten involved with, how things generally operate in large multinationals.

These organisations mostly have a long history behind them, and practices that had kept them going for years. Unhealthy politics and competition were rife.

The big gap between what we know and what we actually practice became an accepted norm. This is one of the common causes of many organisational illnesses and perpetuates an environment of helplessness where innovation is simply stifled.

As a passionate learner with an active-reflective style, I was constantly on-the-go, connecting my various experiences in and out of the office, journaling and meditating.

I felt like I was living multi-parallel lives, spinning many plates, feeling productive and optimistic, but somehow overwhelmed and unfulfilled. I was also worn out from going against the grain and kept thinking that there must be another way; a healthier, happier way, for everyone involved.

Additionally, my constant exposure to both personal development and professional development kept reinforcing my opinion that we cannot split the individual to parts and only deal with the professional one at work.

I was worn out from going against the grain and kept thinking that there must be another way.

When we go to work, whilst we can choose to leave our personal problems at home, for example, systemically they are with us, in our energetic field, and vice versa (we are impacted by the collective energy that exists in the organisation).

And no matter how adept we have become at splitting parts of ourselves and being professional, whatever that means, we cannot ignore the fact that the majority of us will have our experience coloured by both our current state as well as the nature of our whole being.

So who and how we are impacts, and are impacted, by others constantly, whether we like it or not.

I first encountered the idea of the Use of Self as an Instrument for Change when I was on the NTL Organisation Development programme. The theory goes that the only tool anyone truly has to bring about change is themselves, even as a consultant to organisations.

We must choose to use all that we are, past, present and future, to intentionally bring about change.

We must know how to use ourselves as the instrument of change. And to do this, we must own and refine our instrumentality.

To own means to develop self-knowledge and to refine means to engage in regular maintenance work on the self. In other words, if we want anything to change, we need to start with ourselves, in every sense of the word.

We must know who and what we are, our biases, worldviews, and lens, our motivation, needs and wants, our default tendencies, strengths and weaknesses, and our blind spots.

We must be willing to continue to grow as a person and be well-resourced for that.

And when we walk into a scheduled or chance encounter, we accept that we are presented with an opportunity to impact another.

With awareness and skilled use of self, we can be more conscious about how to engage and enable a better outcome for