The element is the meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion. When in your element, you will usually do the things you love, and in doing them you feel like your most authentic self. You find that time passes differently and that you are more alive, more centered, and more vibrant than at any other time. You connect with something fundamental to your sense of identity, purpose, and wellbeing.

Being in your element depends on finding your own distinctive talents and passions. One of the most important reasons of why most people haven’t found this is that most people have a very limited conception of their own natural capacities. This is true in several ways.

The first limitation is in our understanding of the range of our capacities. We are all born with the extraordinary power of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness.

The second limitation is in our understanding of how all these capacities relate to each other holistically. For the most part, we think that our mind, our bodies and our feelings and relationships with others operate independently of each other like separate systems.

The third limitation is in our understanding of how much potential we have for growth and change. For the most part, people seem to think that life is linear, that our capabilities decline as we grow older and that opportunities we have missed are gone forever.

The limited view of our own capabilities can be compounded by our peer groups, by our culture and by our own experience of ourselves.