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There are many factors that play a determining role in success. The most commonly identified are qualities such as passion, determination, perseverance, good planning, intuition and creativity amongst a few others.

It is to be said, however, that not all success comes from the heart or leads to happiness.

There is success which comes from taking smart decisions, hard work and perseverance together with a pinch of good luck. But this type of success does not necessarily lead to a happy fulfilled life. It might be the type of success that comes from striking the right six figure business deal or from having your name become big in your area of expertise.

This is obviously a great thing but does not necessarily entail what you really want deep inside.

Authenticity and inner purpose

Heart driven success is the ultimate form of success because it goes beyond limited beliefs about cause and effect, desire for money, fear and expectations and most of all, it is guided from the heart.

When you have stripped off the socially induced values of what is good, bad and ugly and listen more to what your heart is saying, you thrive towards your inner purpose. You would have found your authentic self.

Heart driven success comes from having your heart open to your life’s purpose without fear and limitations. It comes from the power of being conscious of your passion that drives you with enthusiasm and joy.

If you are in doubt, ask yourself: what drives you? What motivates you? What makes you work hard without getting tired and unsatisfied? If you had a guarantee of success in whatever venture you take, what would you do?

Aligning with your purpose in life

Heart driven success is powerful. There is a certain energy that flows through people when they are doing what they are passionate about. This comes from the fact that the person is aligned and in perfect sync with his purpose. When this happens, the energies of life flow through him freely without obstruction.

It’s like an unblocked pipe connected straight to the source. There are even some highly motivated and self-empowered people that would describe this energy as literally too powerful too handle at times. It feels as if it is filling every cell in their body and keeps them revved up as they produce work well beyond average quality and quantity.

Success beyond the self

Heart driven success means also, above other things, not to be limited and enslaved by narrow self-interest. It is not shallow. It’s free, unbounded, selfless and embraces broader interests than self-satisfying ones.

This is why some illustrious self-empowered people have given the world their creations and inventions for free.

They are already blessed by the greatness of following their life purpose with heart-driven success, so much so that monetary compensation falls way below that level of satisfaction.

A perfect example is the following TED talk from inventor Pranav Mistry,  who decided to give out his ingenious and mind blowing work on ‘sixth sense technology’ as open source knowledge. Utterly fantastic

Related posts:

1. Follow Your Heart and Life will Follow
2. A Note on Happiness
3. The art of creating meaning into your life

When these words of wisdom were told to me I was still a young man. The real depth behind their meaning was not apparent to me yet.  Their wisdom was concealed by my unripe age. Not that they are cryptic or anything but rather because it’s one of those sayings which unfolds and reveals itself to you as your experiences in life grow and mature.

There are three fundamental notions that the saying points at:

1. Authenticity

2. Trust

3. Manifesting your destiny or Life’s Purpose

The lesson is simple as much it is abysmally deep: When you learn to discover your authentic self amongst socially constructed preconceptions, distorted self-images and learn to trust the natural pulse of your heart’s true desires then you will manifest them in your life. You will manifest your life’s purpose

Finding your Authenticity

The quest for authenticity, self-discovery, soul-searching, or call it what you like, is one of those things that has always been a popular note on anyone’s life diary.

But what is really meant by authenticity or self-discovery?

Many people who either have succeeded in their path to self-discovery or otherwise would all agree on one thing – that the authentic self is not something that is found along the path as one backpacks around the world, breaks through his normal parameters of existence, searches through every monastery or whore house in the world, capsizes his life’s agenda or anything that sounds bizarre and abnormal as possibly can.  Finding your authentic self is not done through adding or doing anything extravagant to your life. Actually, it’s not achieved by adding anything at all but on the contrary by stripping off what you already have – the blinkers and veils that skew one’s perspective on life.

We live most of our lives contending to the fact that we are what we are – what Mother Nature made us, how our genes determined us or how our past experiences have formed us. This deterministic worldview instead of inspiring us to go beyond our limitations and explore our inner world with open eyes holds us tightly firm into one position of thought and action. We think that we are what we are and so we cannot change. According to this view we are nothing more than our life-story, all our thoughts and experiences put together in a concept we call the ‘I’. This is a self-defeating start which will take us nowhere far.  It’s the first stumbling block towards self-discovery.

Another firm conviction is that life is limited and scarce in resources and not abundant. We believe that what others gain is taken from ours.

More importantly, it makes us believe that we are separate and special from the rest and that others’ successes are a threat to us.  We fall into a self-centered orientation which makes us lose perspective on life and especially of ourselves. It cuts us off from the source of abundance, life and the universe. It disconnects us from the network.

We are all connected to the same network and to the same source of limitless abundance which is life itself. Life is interdependent and if we think in a self-centered way, we are disconnecting ourselves from it and also from ourselves. This limited way of thinking also distorts our own image. We can’t see clearly who we are and what we want if our vision is obscured by a self-defeating and self-centered vision of life.

Building Trust

Once we can shift our perspective by understanding our authentic selves as part of a greater network of interdependent consciousnesses, we can more easily let go of the notion of self as being a powerless independent entity struggling for limited shared resources.

The more we change that the more we are able to trust in ourselves and in others. Things become easier since we are able to respond adequately and within perspective. As Stephen Covey would put it, we become response-able or responsible. Being responsible means, amongst other things, being able to be in charge of your life and destiny. It means listening to your heart’s calling without being sucked into negative patterns of thought and conditioning. It means trusting your heart’s true messages and not the short-sighted call of the ego.

It means being a healthy node in the network of life.

Manifesting your destiny

The natural consequent to listening to and trusting your heart is the true manifestation of your life’s dreams and goals.  This always sounded as something extremely big to me, and by all means it is. What excites me though is the prospect that it is possible and within any human being’s reach.

Many enlightened people along history have made reference to this basic truth in many different forms. A recent and very popular comeback to the idea which took the self-development bookshelves by storm was renamed ‘The secret” or “The Law of Attraction”.  This is very much referring to the same principle.

We all have within us the power to manifest our destiny but as we grow up in this world that capacity is blocked or obscured by our conditioning into limiting beliefs and distorted visions of ourselves. It’s rendered ineffective by the self-centered and short-sighted whims of our egos.

When people learn to transcend beyond their limitations, or to make reference to a Hollywood all time favorite, escape the Matrix, they are no longer held back into the parameters of the socially constructed illusion and mediocrity. They become co-creators of their life and destiny. They become self-realized beings with the potential of shaping their future instead of just reacting to it.

Wake up to your Life

This all sounds very good talk but I’m sure most of you are asking – how can something sounding so esoteric and transcendental have any proximity to my everyday mundane life?

Well the straight answer is that it has so much more than we dare think.

Here are a few things that I do and follow as a regular practice to manifesting my destiny (I started this a few days ago so I will keep you posted as I go along):

• Contemplate frequently on the fact that life is interdependent and connected. This helps entrench the perspective that I am not isolated but part of a holistic universe.

• I try to be conscious about the extent of my responsibility on the things I do and everyday occurrences. This has been a recent life-changer for me. I have started to grow from a ‘passive slacker’ attitude to a more proactive and self-disciplined attitude to life.  This comes out from the realization that I am a proactive agent in the cause and effect cycle of my life.

• Contemplate on the fact that life and the universe is infinitely abundant. I try to break free from the limited belief that life is limited and resources are scarce.

• Believe more in the fact that I am not what my past has made me. This is a self-incurred limitation. I try to believe more in the fact that my positive actions today will bring forth positive results tomorrow. I can break through the threshold of self-imposed limitations.

• Be more positive. This has been another life-changer for me. Accentuate the positive vibes and good moments while attenuating the not so good ones.

• Try to listen more to my heart’s true desires. This was somehow a bit harder for me to come by since one has to considerably slow down for this. One has to peel off the non-essential needs and goals (counter-intuitively even the so much needed immediate financial needs!) and listen to the more long-term and soul enriching needs of the heart. This has to do a lot with authenticity as explained above.

• Think vividly and visualize my goals.

• Expect them to happen because I am now starting to become more and more connected to the source of abundance and my heart is starting to unlock from useless and false expectations.

When your heart is open, then life can flow through it. Life will follow it and destiny will be naturally manifested.

Related posts:

1. Heart Driven Success
2. A Note on Happiness

Confidence and self-esteem are not only personality plus points that influence our wellbeing and the way we interact with others but are two of the main ingredients for personal success.

I was once hearing a speech given by his holiness the Dalai Lama in an audio book entitled “A Path to Happiness”, where he confessed how he was dumbfounded to learn, in his first encounters with the west, that there are people who disapprove of themselves or are unhappy with themselves even to the point of self-hatred. He mentioned how up to that point in time self-hatred was something he had never heard of. There is no conceptual equivalence of self-hatred in Tibetan culture and language. So for him it was not only a foreign and alien concept but completely absent in his stock of experiences.

I remember that this had struck me as a very peculiar notion. It begged the question of how is it that we come to a point of not liking ourselves or become uncomfortable with ourselves. Surely this is not a natural thing to happen. There is no evolutionary purpose for it.

So why do we sometimes feel this way about ourselves?  Ok, perhaps self-hatred is an extreme example and as far as I know, or rather I hope, it’s not that common. However it comes in a myriad of forms as it goes down in scale. Lack of self-confidence and low self-esteem are examples which in this case happen to be considerably common among us.

Lack of Self-Confidence and Self-Esteem:

We all had those moments when we feel sheepish and insecure about our own image, actions or speech or by having that constant self-critic reminding us how we might not be looking the part.

“This dress doesn’t fit my overweight body…tonight’s party is going to be an utter disaster!”, “who knows what they will be thinking about me?”, “I might be making a fool of myself if I say this or that”, “My boss is looking unimpressed…am I saying the right words?”, “Will I ever make it to my graduation?” and so on and on. The mind keeps on lurking on unassertive and self-defeating thoughts that shake our own confidence up to a point of renouncing or cutting back from fully and actively engaging in life or in the things we want to endeavor.

Perhaps the Dalai Lama’s remark has a lot of truth in it. I am also of the idea that in the west, lack of confidence and self-esteem is more pronounced than other non-western cultures. Probably this has to do with the fact that we base a lot of our own self-image on what the media and pop culture feeds us. In other words we benchmark ourselves with the icons and role-models the media and our peer network ‘impose’ on us and hence we bitterly feel that we are very often not living up to those expectations. This continues to place on us a falsely perceived state of under-achievement, failure and dissatisfaction with our projected image.  Lack of self-confidence and self-esteem are an effect of this.

Seeking Attention & Approval from Others:

Another problem which I think runs deeper than the above is the fact that as humans we constantly seek attention and approval from others. The need for attention and approval is a very strong motivational force deeply rooted in our behavioral makeup.

Since we are infants (especially when we are infants) we constantly look for our parents or care taker’s attention, loving-care and warmth. Also, their approval or disapproval helps us build boundaries and guidelines on what is and what is not accepted or tolerated in the social environment we live in.

We subconsciously learn this skill from a very tender age and use it throughout our development and adulthood. At school, pupils are extremely influenced by whether or not they are given attention by their tutors and peers. Teenagers are the quintessential example of attention-grabbers as they constantly try to make a statement through rebellious and deviant behavior, nonconformist looks, outbursts of home-made drama and on the other extreme by being totally compliant and trying to please their teachers and people in the authoritative rung above them.

Most of us adults are not free from the shackles of attention-seeking behavior either. There is a Sufi scholar, whose name escapes me at the moment, who pointed out that most, if not all, of our social interactions are heavily driven by attention-seeking and approval-seeking behavior even those which may not seem like it such as business meetings or negotiating.

In a few words, attention-seeking and approval-seeking seem to dictate a lot of what we say and do in all areas of our lives and throughout its different stages. More than that it also influences how we perceive ourselves, our self-image, which is what some refer to as our blueprint for outward action.

The Identity Profile of a False Self-Image

It seems then that the common denominator for the lack of self-confidence or low self-esteem episodes lies in the building or measuring our self-image on outward cues (role model behavior through social media or approval from others) rather than inward perceptions. Some features to note about this type of false self-image are that it’s:

1. Inauthentic: Since it’s not naturally born from within us but ‘suggested’ to us externally through social media and our peers.
2. Decentralized: It’s not coming from one source but from different signs we pick up around us (from other people’s remarks about you; from your friend’s behavior, from your colleagues’ way of relating to you; etc)
3. Impermanent: It changes constantly, it’s never fixed. As the world changes around us, so does our self-image
4. Contradictory: It is often contradictory since sometimes the same thing (the image we have of ourselves) appears to change under a different light.
5. Counter-intuitive: It goes against what we really, really think and feel about ourselves deep inside. This can lead to inner conflict with our purpose in life.

How to build self-confidence:

So how do we find and cultivate true self-confidence? …and the natural question that comes prior to that is: Can we program ourselves to be self-confident if it feels that we ‘naturally’ aren’t?

The answer to the latter question is a definite and big YES.  The answer to the former can be listed in a few anecdotes below:

• Realization: One of the most powerful techniques to boost self-confidence is the realization that we are not products of our past experiences or of other people’s way of seeing us. This means that if in the past I have failed to pursue a certain task, or I was embarrassed about something I did, it doesn’t mean that that thing will happen to me again. I am not determined by past events but I have the power to change my future. Also if some people see me or think of me in a certain way, then that does not mean that it really reflects who I am. We don’t need to take that information in. We can choose not to pick up that information, filter it out or not let it affect us.   If someone passes on a depreciating remark on us we can either take it all in and let it haunt our heads for the rest of the day (with negative repercussions on our self-confidence) or we can choose to ignore it as a wrong assessment of ourselves.
• Moderation: You know, just as much as a discussion group or a forum needs a moderator to keep the discussion in balance without any one thread of discussion going to far off in one direction, so do we need to be moderators with our own discussions going on in our heads. We all have that inner-critic which most of the time keeps us in check from not doing something crazy or stupid that we might regret afterwards. That’s fine. However the inner-critic also very often gives us disempowering and self-defeating thoughts that undermine our self-confidence.  Like for example “Oh no, you’re not good at this…don’t try it or you’ll make a fool of yourself.”  So try to moderate and challenge your inner-critic in a good way. Try to catch that limiting thought as it arises in your head and challenge it by asking: “How true is this thought I am having right now? Is it just an irrational fear trying to scare me off?”
• Equalization: Up to not so long time ago, I had the wrong habit of accentuating worrying thoughts more than I should have and not adequately cherishing the positive good things that come along the way. This lack of equalization is a very natural fault to fall into because we are more influenced by warning signs than by counting blessings. With some effort and shift in perspective, we can start seeing things under a more positive and encouraging light. Now I make it a point to stop and absorb those little good things in life more. It’s simple. I just put my attention to them for a minute or two every time. On the other hand, I try to discount the not so good episodes by investing less time thinking about them and more time in trying to sort them out.  This is what I call the principle of equalization.
• Visualization: The more I learn and practice it, the more I realize on the tremendous power of visualization. When you visualize or imagine something happening, it is like running a movie in your head. You know, when we are watching a movie, we all know that what’s on the screen is not for real but it still captures us in a way that we feel part of it or living it at that moment (we bite our nails and tense up in those moments of suspense, laugh or cry in the dramatic ones, etc). So although we know it’s not happening, there is another part of our mind which acts on it as though it is. So if you visualize yourself achieving a desired goal or a desired outcome every day, you are running that movie in your head and your mind is picking up the instruction to act on it. Your mind is then set on it.  This is also part of what some people refer to as the law of attraction.
• Authentication: There is a straight line of divide between pursuing your own dreams or benchmarking with those of others. As mentioned in the beginning of this article, the main reason for our false self-image arises out of constantly comparing ourselves with the ‘ideal’  looks, bodyweight and shape, achievements, goals, etc that are being fed to us by the media. This skews and distorts our self-image. What we need is to spend some time to validate, or rather authenticate how we think or feel about ourselves.   There is no need to over-analyze ourselves. However, it would be extremely insightful to sometimes question ourselves whether the way we feel about ourselves is genuinely based on true & verifiable facts or just on fleeting hints and cues that we pick up from around us or from others.

The building up of self-confidence therefore seems to be tied to re-orienting the way look at ourselves from outward to inward.  Going back once more to the Dalai Lama’s remark, this seems to resonate with one fundamental difference in orientation between Western and Eastern cultures. Western cultures are more outwardly oriented, what Carl Jung would have called the collective extrovert type, while Eastern cultures are guided by philosophies that thread more upon the inward path.

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1. 7 Kick-ass Steps to Getting More Done