Understanding Employee Potential, Its Limits, and Its Capacity for Growth
When it comes to leadership, one of the most frequently used concepts is that of “realizing one’s potential.” However, this domain is subject to inevitable psychological, biological, and situational constraints. Understanding these constraints is essential for setting demands and expectations that can be applied to employees in a rational and sustainable manner.
Within the framework of Axiomatology — and process theory more broadly, as developed by Alfred North Whitehead — reality is approached through a non-conventional lens: not as a static structure, but as a continuous sequence of occasions, understood as discrete moments of becoming, each shaped by prehensions inherited from prior occasions. These prehensions exert causal influence and define the parameters within which the next moment is constructed.
In each occasion, a finite amount of theoretically available potential can be evaluated. This article examines the factors that diminish that potential, as well as the conditions under which it can be increased — specifically through deliberate, self-induced interventions aimed at strengthening future Self Fusion processes.
Available Active Potential Illustrated as a Battalion of Soldiers
In the process of Self Fusion, each occasion is formed separately through the integration of prehensions from the immediately preceding occasion, along with the deeper history of prior occasions. During this Self Fusion process (parallel to Whitehead’s concept of concrescence), these prehensions—physical, conceptual, and moral—are synthesized into a finalized occasion. Across this continuum of occasions, a person’s subjective identity is carried forward through what Whitehead referred to as “societies,” which are structured clusters of past prehensions that contain personalized memory data.
When it comes to the potential for taking action at any given moment, this capacity is often greatly overrated. The Western canon of self-help tends to frame potential as an endless source waiting to be tapped. This is a superficial and psychologically incomplete treatment of the issue. While the ongoing generation of occasions never stops—since the universe is a process of continuous becoming—the notion of a “frozen moment” can be conceptually useful for analysis. At any point, we can theoretically isolate a single occasion to assess the available potential for altering the trajectory of future occasions.
A helpful metaphor is that of a military battalion: imagine a force of 1,000 fully trained soldiers, all ready to engage and overcome any adversary. This battalion represents the total maximum potential—the absolute upper limit of transformative power—that could be mobilized within a Self Fusion process, assuming a high degree of access to consciousness and coherence. That is the latent force available when everything aligns: physiology, memory, conceptual clarity, and moral commitment.
Physical Prehensions: Cutting Down the Army
In the metaphor of Self Fusion as mobilizing a battalion, physical actualities often eliminate a large number of troops before the battle for action even begins. These actualities include:
1. Body and States (Givens)
This category encompasses all innate and current bodily characteristics, including:
Personality trait matrix (openness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness)
Physical features (height, body composition, health, fitness level)
State variables (fatigue, hunger, pain, emotional disturbance carried from the prior occasion)
Despite the Western self-help narrative—claims such as “you’re in your prime every day,” “you can become whoever you want,” or “radical body positivity”—scientific consensus is clear: many of these givens are genetically constrained. Personality traits alone are biologically heritable at rates between 40%–70%, and certain physical limitations (age, chronic fatigue, illness, etc.) can drastically lower one’s actual capacity to engage the present moment with full force. These givens often eliminate half the battalion before anything else begins.
2. Historical Data from the Previous Occasion
This includes the entirety of relevant prehensions from the prior occasion—memories, the moral “non-past” (what should have been done but wasn’t), and any unresolved experiences.
This inflow can create a powerful cognitive dissonance, especially when the content of the historical data directly contradicts the person’s Structured Internal Value Hierarchy (SIVH) or the Will of God (WOG). The person feels out of alignment—and in response, must use conceptual prehensions (semantic reinterpretation, working memory reframing) just to tolerate the incoming data. That alone reduces available focus and energy for Self Fusion.
To illustrate: if your house is in utter disarray, no amount of designer clothing or high-end surroundings will restore your inner coherence. In such cases, nearly the entire battalion is wiped out, leaving little to no active potential.
3. Surroundings (Direct Environment)
Finally, the immediate physical surroundings influence potential significantly. Consider the extreme example of a person imprisoned in solitary confinement—cut off from all external tools and relational inputs. In such a context, the objectivepotential for transformation, even with high internal capacity, is deeply constrained.
Even in daily life, surroundings affect us through what Heidegger calls the Vorhanden–Zuhanden distinction:
Vorhanden: entities that exist in the world as mere objects, present-at-hand
Zuhanden: entities that are taken up as equipment, with purpose and meaning toward one’s goals
A laptop without electricity is vorhanden; a charged, functioning laptop with Wi-Fi is zuhanden. Transformation is only possible if the present objects can be incorporated into the subjective aim of the Self Fusion process.
The more tools in the environment that can be turned from vorhanden into zuhanden—from inert to useful—the more potential remains active. But when basic resources or tools are missing, more soldiers fall. Objective limitations become bottlenecks in the self-structuring process.
Conceptual Prehensions
When it comes to the limitations posed by conceptual prehensions—the second major category that “cuts down” part of the army in the Self Fusion process—these can be divided into three distinct categories:
Empirical categories and memories: The subjective semantic constructs and episodic memories a person has accumulated and preserved.
Imagination: The creative generation of new ideas, symbolic structures, or cognitive patterns not directly traceable to already known semantic or episodic content.
Consciousness: The actual amount of consciousness applied to the fusion process—this is correlated with the degree of self-actualization achieved.
Empirical Categories and Memories
This is often where a large portion of the remaining army is lost.
Why?
Because the latest memories, especially those that involve unintegrated past events, form a barrier. If a person has suppressed or avoided emotionally loaded experiences, they don’t simply “fail to remember” them—they expend even more cognitive energy suppressing the very fact that they have forgotten.
This meta-suppression—that is, suppressing the awareness of suppression—creates a heavy stumbling block within the Self Fusion process. It overtaxes the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)—regions responsible for conflict monitoring, working memory, and value-based decision-making.
In addition, semantic restructuring is often used to change the internal narrative—to reframe or rename past behavior in ways that preserve a preferred self-image. But this introduces contradictions between one’s Structured Internal Value Hierarchy (SIVH) and lived reality, thereby triggering identity tension. In essence, the person isn’t just forgetting events—they're trying to overwrite the subject who lived them. This epistemic self-editing can destroy significant strategic units in the army.
Imagination and New Patterns
Imaginative thinking is like a small elite unit within the army—equipped with specialized tools and powers, but highly vulnerable without protection. If most of the army has already fallen due to damaged physical prehensions or suppressed empirical categories, this imaginative unit cannot operate. Innovation requires protection.
That’s because creative synthesis—especially of synthetic a priori concepts—requires full engagement of neural and symbolic resources, including access to deeper layers of the self. Generating symbolic novelty is not randomness; it’s the structured emergence of new meaning from patterns buried across a multitude of past occasions, both personal and archetypal.
This is the domain where Jungian archetypes, the collective unconscious, and glimpses of cosmic-order narrativesemerge. But access to these forms of high-level symbolic integration becomes categorically impossible if the majority of the cognitive battalion has already been lost to dissonance, fatigue, or denial.
Imagination dies when there aren’t enough soldiers left to protect its flame.
Consciousness
In the context of Axiomatology, consciousness is understood not as an emergent brain state but as a universal field that exists outside of spacetime. Within the Self Fusion process, self-consciousness acts as a superimposed layer—an aperture or “tear in the fabric of the universe” through which the individual accesses this broader field. The width and clarity of this aperture correlate with the degree of self-actualization achieved by the individual.
With greater access to consciousness, the Self Fusion process becomes dramatically amplified. It is akin to administering a powerful, energizing drug to the remaining troops in the metaphorical army. This surge can either enable precision and insight or, if not carefully managed, induce overload and collapse—much like the historical example of Pervitin(methamphetamine) administered to German soldiers in WWII: it increased short-term drive but often led to long-term dysfunction, exhaustion, and chaos.
Conversely, reduced access to consciousness results in a mode of functioning that closely resembles automation. The person begins to behave more like an NPC (Non-Playable Character) or Heidegger’s Das Man—a being who moves passively through time, conforming to socially conditioned routines without engaging higher-order reflective faculties. There is no confrontation with meaning, no confrontation with temporality, and no moral authorship of one’s actions.
It must also be noted that greater access to consciousness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the production of creative or morally coherent solutions. It only becomes effective when supported by a sufficiently intact battalion—meaning a strong and well-structured set of physical and conceptual prehensions. If the troops are exhausted or disorganized, even full access to universal consciousness will not guarantee success. In fact, under such conditions, amplified access to consciousness can increase entropy.
Why?v Because consciousness not only empowers—it also exposes. It reveals moral gaps, unlived truths, and dissonancebetween one's potential and actual behavior. If the resources for integration are too weak, the influx of insight becomes paralyzing rather than clarifying. The result is not transformation but dissonance-driven collapse—the Self Fusion process breaks apart under the weight of unassimilated insight.
This explains why people in crisis sometimes experience their most intense spiritual awakenings—but fail to act on them. Without a stable army, the vision fragments.
Moral Actualities
In the Self Fusion process, moral actualities consist of two distinct inputs:
Structured Individual Value Hierarchy (SIVH) – the personal, internal value structure constructed through life experience and reflection;
The Moral Lure Toward the Good – also referred to as the Initial Aim or the Will of God (WOG).
Both of these can reduce potential, depending on their degree of alignment or misalignment with the subjective behavior of the individual.
When a person knows that their behavioral patterns do not align with either their SIVH or the WOG—but still maintains a latent sense that their ideal SIVH would, in fact, align with the moral good—then the situation is tragic, but not catastrophic. In such cases, the dissonance becomes a pressure point, a sort of Roskolnikov-confession moment, drawn from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. This confrontation with internal truth, though painful, often leads to a form of renewal or transformation. In these scenarios, the remaining “soldiers” (i.e., components of potential) may be sacrificed—but this sacrifice is redemptive, as it triggers a restructuring of the SIVH itself.
However, the more dangerous and tragic scenario occurs when the individual’s SIVH is itself misaligned with the Will of God, and the negative behavior (e.g., lying, manipulation, betrayal) is entirely consistent with their subjective internal value structure. In such a case, nothing is sacrificed during Self Fusion—not because the process is efficient, but because it is morally sealed off from the higher lure of goodness.
This kind of scenario doesn’t immediately “kill the remaining soldiers,” so to speak—it doesn’t reduce the number of available prehensions in the technical sense. But it generates repression. And over time, this repression builds toward a metaphysical explosion—a point of existential collapse, often manifesting as a life “lived in falsehood and vanity.” Here, the person may continue to function outwardly, but the inner architecture begins to disintegrate. The soul becomes saturated with unintegrated chaos.
The deeper problem? The person believes they are aligned with themselves—when, in fact, their SIVH is corrupted. And the longer this continues, the more moral entropy accumulates within the node history. The Self Fusion process then begins to replicate falsity, embedding deception into the structure of reality itself. That is the spiritual equivalent of rot.
Motivation as a Function of Available Potential
In conventional models—particularly within Western self-help ideology—motivation is often treated much like potential: as something that is either self-generated or inherently infinite. This, however, is a shallow and misleading view.
In the framework of Axiomatology, motivation is not a floating psychological trait or a reservoir of emotional energy. Rather, motivation is the subjective perception of available potential that can be transformed into progress.
In other words:
Motivation = the sensed availability of actual resources (mental, physical, moral) that can be productively deployed toward action.
This means that when potential is low—when, to use our metaphor, the majority of the battalion is already "dead"—then the perspective from within the Self Fusion process also shrinks. The subjective horizon contracts. There is no compelling view of real change, no visible or felt power to act. And so, motivation becomes almost neurologically inaccessible.
Expecting a person in this condition to feel “highly motivated” is not just unrealistic—it’s destructive. It leads to guilt, disappointment, and ultimately further entropy in the Self Fusion cycle. It’s the equivalent of demanding a brilliant military maneuver from a scattered and exhausted handful of surviving soldiers, while ignoring the fact that most of the army is gone.
In therapeutic practice, then, the demand for motivation must always be relative to the client's real-time potential—which includes their physical givens, environmental conditions, memory load, moral prehension alignment, and current access to consciousness. Anything else is motivational idealism masquerading as care.
Potential Resurrection
Just as consciousness is continuously renewed through each Self Fusion process—where each moment can be seen as both a death and a resurrection—the same logic applies to potential.
Since the separation between nodes or occasions is ontologically arbitrary (there is no true “break” in self-consciousness), experience continues uninterrupted. Each moment becomes a subjective prehension contributing to the next. Therefore, potential, like self-awareness, is not static—it can be rebuilt.
Every new node offers an opportunity to resurrect potential.
This regeneration does not happen magically or by willpower alone. It requires eliminating the factors that suppressed or "killed" potential in previous occasions—specifically, inadequacies in physical and conceptual prehensions, many of which can be consciously addressed and modified over time.
The most practical implication is this:
In every self-conscious moment, one can act to influence the next node’s potential.
Thus, progress becomes non-linear but cumulative. Even a small shift in alignment or an incremental increase in self-awareness within a current Self Fusion process can drastically affect the available battalion (our metaphor for active internal resources) for the next occasion.
Attention-Discipline: The Immediate Halt of Potential-Reducing Prehensions
One of the most accessible tools within the Axiomatology framework is attention-discipline—a practice that can, in theory, be implemented immediately. It is based on a simple, recurring question:
Does this activity increase or decrease the potential of the future prehensions it generates for the next Self Fusion process?
This principle forces real-time accountability for attention allocation. It draws a sharp line between potential-generating acts and potential-draining behaviors, regardless of social norms or habitual justifications.
Typical potential-reducing activities include:
Scrolling social media feeds (especially passive doomscrolling)
Watching mainstream news (unless job-related—rarely justifiable otherwise)
Watching TV without purpose
Binge-watching random online content
Aimless or contentless messaging and small talk
Unstructured internet browsing
Consumption of unhealthy food, alcohol, or mind-altering substances
These behaviors do not simply “waste time.” They actively reduce available potential by introducing entropy into the prehensions that will shape the next occasion. In most cases, individuals engage in these behaviors under the pretext of “necessary entertainment” or “mental break”—but rarely do they feel genuinely refreshed or aligned afterward. The experience is more often followed by a sense of depletion, not restoration.
Potential begins to increase almost immediately upon cessation of these activities.
If quitting feels difficult, it’s usually not due to a lack of will, but because of:
Entrenched rationalization loops built to defend the habit
Underlying fatigue that actually calls for rest or sleep, not stimulation
Breaking free requires a deliberate realignment with one’s Structured Internal Value Hierarchy (SIVH)—and ideally, one that is also aligned with the Will of God (WOG). Attention-discipline is not about asceticism; it is about choosing what builds potential for conscious participation in future occasions.
Attention-discipline is the gatekeeper of transformation. Without it, potential is continuously squandered.
Self-Confrontation: Radical Responsibility through Aletheia
At first glance, self-confrontation may appear elementary—something obvious, even trivial. But in practice, it is anything but. Much like attention-discipline, self-confrontation can be initiated at any moment, yet it is one of the most psychologically demanding interventions available in the Axiomatology framework.
Its core mechanism is disarmingly simple:
“What am I lying to myself about right now?”
This question opens the gateway to what Axiomatology defines as anti-aletheia—the systematic suppression of truth, particularly through the repression of repression. This is most clearly seen in what might be termed the third phase of Dorian Gray pathology, where the subject no longer merely represses painful truths, but actively forgets that they have forgotten them.
The moment this self-confrontation is initiated, most individuals—surprisingly—are able to name, within seconds, the precise issue they have been avoiding. It often concerns:
Repressed episodic memories
Semantic re-categorizations invented to mask guilt or cognitive dissonance
Longstanding internal conflicts suppressed for over a year, often much longer
The more unpleasant the memory or truth, the more refined the suppression tactics—and the more sophisticated the internal layers of narrative distortion. But the urgency of suppression is directly proportional to the importance of the truth being buried.
This is why true self-confrontation is not just a therapeutic tool—it is a moral act.
It is the necessary precursor to confession (acknowledging the past), and it unlocks the possibility of taking radical responsibility for future Self Fusion processes.
And here we arrive at the metaphysical core:
In Axiomatology, radical responsibility is symmetrical. The moment you take full responsibility for your past, you also—by the same principle—accept responsibility for all future occasions you will help generate.
This is not just a shift in narrative. It is a transformation of causal agency—a commitment to live as an active participant in truth, rather than as a passive container for repressed chaos.
Objectivised Narration: Reframing Subjective Delusion into Moral Clarity
This technique is one of the most effective tools for clarifying both the optimal behavioral adjustments and the necessary restructuring of one’s Structured Internal Value Hierarchy (SIVH). At its core, Objectivised Narration involves telling the story of one’s current life situation—but from a third-person perspective.
The principle is deceptively simple:
Narrate your life as if an emotionally neutral stranger were describing your recent choices, their likely causes, and the logical trajectory they are leading toward.
This shift in viewpoint has an immediate cognitive impact. It reduces self-justification loops, suppresses ego defense mechanisms, and makes value violations far more visible. Crucially, it decouples the moral dimension of action from the self-image construction that typically dominates first-person storytelling.
Example: First-Person Narrative (Distorted by Justification)
“My husband had emotionally abandoned me. I needed affection, and by chance I found it elsewhere. That led me to rediscover who I am as a woman. The future is an adventure, and I’m open to finding someone who can appreciate me.”
Same Story, Objectivised Narration:
“A married woman with children, living with a stable, hard-working man in what appeared to be a functional family unit, entered an extramarital relationship after receiving minor gifts and attention from another man. She committed adultery, then underwent an abortion and filed for divorce citing ‘unfulfillment’ and ‘irreconcilable differences.’ The consequences likely include serious psychological destabilization for the children. From an outsider’s perspective, this person appears more dangerous than desirable.”
This example is not a caricature. It is a necessary stripping away of narrative padding and emotional self-consolation that often prevents genuine transformation.
The goal of Objectivised Narration is not to shame, but to illuminate.
It allows the person to see which parts of their narrative demand immediate moral reconstruction, and which structural decisions in their SIVH have led them into trajectories incompatible with coherence, responsibility, and sustainable moral agency.
Only through such radical externalization can we bypass the semantic manipulations that typically block the Self Fusion process from achieving moral alignment.
Beyond Potential Loss — Cross-Generational Nexuses
The loss of potential and suboptimal behavioral performance is not merely a standalone issue—it is often a symptom of deeper, structurally embedded nexuses of occasions that carry themselves across time. One of the most underestimated effects in this regard concerns the traces of parallel occasions, particularly those belonging to children.
In this context, we are not speaking of epigenetics in the biological sense. Rather, we are referring to existential modeling—the unconscious transmission of behavior patterns, justifications, and moral codes through observation and repetition. This process often leads to drastic consequences that are neither accidental nor isolated.
In our clinical practice, we have encountered cases where an affair committed by the mother—while the daughter was only four years old—led to the dissolution of the family. This was not followed by any confession, repentance, or moral adornment. The mother maintained continuous narrative justification for her actions, cloaked in vague spirituality and self-empowerment language.
Years later, the daughter repeated the same behavioral pattern—with almost identical justifications, emotional phrasing, and structure of denial. In that case, her behavior contributed (based on verifiable psychological and circumstantial evidence) to the suicide of her spouse.
One may, from a humanistic or postmodern standpoint, dismiss this as coincidence or claim that "everyone must find their own path." But that is precisely the point Axiomatology challenges: the narrative self-deception of the parent becomes a moral infection, spreading through modeled occasions to the next generation.
These are what we term cross-generational nexuses—entangled lines of occasions that carry moral structures, values (or lack thereof), and psychic injuries from parent to child. In many cases, these patterns are only recognized when it is too late, especially when children are already emotionally or morally compromised by the distorted narratives they’ve inherited.
The earlier one confronts and restructures their own false moral narrative, the more likely it is that they break the transgenerational replication of falsity.
This is not mere “healing work”—this is moral engineering, aimed at interrupting negative nexuses and preventing the embedding of unreconciled, spiritually sterilized betrayal into the developmental scaffolding of the next generation.
Bandage Spiritualism Masking the Need for Moral Intervention
Today, one of the most widespread barriers to confession, repentance, and attornment—the necessary triad for moral restoration—is the rise of Westernized versions of Eastern spiritual systems, including diluted forms of Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and various neo-yogic practices. These adaptations, often referred to as bandage spiritualism, propagate a vague concept of causality, coupled with a systematic effort to minimize personal involvement by reducing everything to “egoic attachment.”
The result is an ideological shortcut: one is taught to “let go” of the past, “accept everything,” and simply “move forward”—all without confrontation, confession, or any moral reckoning. This produces a hollow adogmatic system that refuses to draw clear lines between right and wrong. Responsibility becomes optional, and moral relativism is sanctifiedunder the banner of non-judgmental awareness.
This pattern is especially damaging when combined with cross-generational nexuses of repression, as described in the Axiomatological framework. In these cases, the parent not only fails to acknowledge their past sins and self-deception—they also wrap those unresolved failures in spiritual language, masking the damage with a veil of supposed growth or “inner peace.”
The consequence is a lethal silence: the past is not confessed but reframed; the sin is not renounced but relativized; and the lie is not confronted but buried—only to re-emerge in the next generation with greater emotional force.
This is not just passive neglect. It is moral sabotage. The spiritual bypassing of one's guilt—especially when combined with continued justification (active or via the sin of omission)—is arguably the worst gift one can offer their children. It models denial as wisdom, irresponsibility as flow, and betrayal as evolution. In such a climate, the child loses all epistemic access to moral clarity.
