Why Passion is such a Bad Thing

I have been annoyed for some time now about the frequent misuse of the term ‘Passion’ in the personal development arena. I must admit beforehand that I was also guilty of the same mistake in one or two of my past articles.

The thing is that passion is most frequently used to mean a positive quality that is essential for personal development, Happiness, goal setting and finding one’s true purpose.

Even the laymen use of the word falls into this misconception. People talk about passion almost with reverence. “He is very passionate about his team” or “He loved her passionately“. It seems as though passion is a very respected quality of a person or of a culture.

I know something about this being born in a southern Mediterranean culture.Southern European people will openly boast about being passionate, hot-headed and warm-blooded people. In Sicily, for example, there were many cases, in the not so distant past, of murders in which people were acquitted or their sentence heavily reduced because their crime was not just any crime but  ‘a crime of passion’. That means that a man (it’s almost always a man who is absolved with a crime of passion) gets away with killing his wife because he caught her having sex with another man and in a moment of blind fury he followed his irrational but ‘justified’ rage. (more…)

Why Resolutions Fail

This is a Guest Post by Joseph Philips of Lifelong Project

Did you know that most people ditch their resolutions before January is over and many more give up on their resolutions before springtime? That’s a result based on a survey from FranklinCovey.

And when we fail from a resolution we feel lousy, depressed, and deflated. And then December rolls around and it’s the same resolutions all over again: improve finances, lose weight, start a healthy habit. Before long, the resolutions fade and the process repeats.

I know. I’ve been there over and over and over. And then I learned something amazing: Life will repeat lessons until you learn them. Once more: life will repeat lessons until you learn them.

If you’re on the treadmill of resolutions year after year you need to learn a lesson: Change your approach. (more…)

Heart Driven Success

Photo by timtom.ch

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. (more…)

Overcome writer’s block: Understanding the Yin and Yang nature of the creative process

I have never done writing for a living yet. My writing has always been mostly for study or passion.

Yet even though I haven’t been under the pressure of having my monthly income depending on the flow and quality of my writing as any paid writer would, my own experiences still brought to my conscious awareness two important and closely linked notions: Inspiration and its dreaded enemy writer’s block.

Writer’s Block

This concept notoriously gained an iconic status having been so widely referred to in the media and arts. We all have collective unconscious images from the movie classics of some writer at a desk in front of an old-style typewriter, an ashtray full of half-snuffed cigarette butts and a paper bin overflowing with balled up papers of unfinished sentences.

Conventionally, writer’s block is understood as that part in a writer’s career where her creative process comes to a halt and her inspiration runs dry due to some psychological blockage or emotional distress. Less dramatically, it is when we are doing a writing job and words and ideas stop coming to our heads. We stop for hours trying to get the thing started again sometimes with no success.

There are two main views on writer’s block. Both views see it as some block in the overall creative process but while one view sees creativity as predominantly or even exclusively a generative process the other sees it as a receptive process. (more…)

Putting Life Purpose in Sharper Focus: How I re-aligned Goals to my Mission

Knowing what I wanted in life had always been terribly hard for me. Of all the things that I always felt were not clicking in the right cog in my life, the lack of a clear mission faithfully accompanied by a complete absence of goal-setting skills, has always been the thing that irritated me most.

However, one thing I learned later on was that not having a clearly defined route plan, or rather not having a route in the first place, was not so much about lack of clarity or direction but had more to do about conflicting interests, unordered priorities and a lack of a simplified goal structure. Let me explain. (more…)