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.

This of course is a case of a society whose legal and moral system condones an act of passion – or in other words a blind,irrational and short-sighted outburst of emotion.But passion has been glorified in other cultures too perhaps with less drastic implications than the example above.

If you look at the definition of passion, it is obvious that its meaning is far from positive as people tend to attribute:

“a strong feeling or emotion

heat: the trait of being intensely emotional

rage: something that is desired intensely; “his rage for fame destroyed him”

mania: an irrational but irresistible motive for a belief or action

a feeling of strong sexual desire

the suffering of Jesus at the Crucifixion ”

(wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn)

The above are obviously all undesirable and negative traits. Its definition is associated with fanaticism, suffering, rage, strong emotions and irrational or compulsive thinking.

Passion is also the favorite game of the ego. It’s all about the ego’s shortsightedness to arduously attach itself to an object  (be that a person,  an idea,religion, a team or anything ) and over-react when they perceive that something or someone is playing down that object of attachment.

Not being a football fan (Soccer in the U.S), I often ask people who are fanatic of a particular team why is it that they take it so badly when their team loses. I mean why do grown up man, for example, cry desperately when their team loses the Sunday match, spend the rest of the week in a dark mood, carefully avoiding to meet colleagues who support a rival team? Trust me this and worse is true. I even know people who do not even watch their favorite team play because it’s too risky for their heart.

And when I ask these question the answer I get in bright eyes is “You don’t understand…it’s passion!!”

When personal development writers talk about Passion, it’s definitely not the passion as explained above that they mean. What I think they mean is ‘Enthusiasm’ and this is the right word that should be used instead.

Here are some definitions of Enthusiasm from the web:

a feeling of excitement

exuberance: overflowing with eager enjoyment or approval

a lively interest; “enthusiasm for his program is growing”

(wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn)

Enthusiasm (enthousiasmos) originally meant inspiration or possession by a divine afflatus or by the presence of a god. …

(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthusiasm)

enthusiastic – having or showing great excitement and interest; “enthusiastic crowds filled the streets”; “an enthusiastic response”; “was enthusiastic about …

(wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn)

Hence when bloggers write about passion, what they really mean is Enthusiasm. Passion is a negative trait of ego-driven behavior. On the other hand enthusiasm is not driven by the ego. It transcends the ego shortsighted whims and urge for instant gratification. It comes from embracing our authentic selves and being in alignment with a higher purpose. It is the joy of being that arises when we are doing something that has meaning and resonates with our genuine inspirations.

No related posts.

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.

Create Goals, Not Resolutions

First, replace your resolutions with goals. Goals are clearly defined statements of what you will accomplish in a given amount of time. For example, I will lose 25 pounds of weight over the next fifteen weeks. Or, I will save $12,000 over the next twelve months. These are clearly-defined statements with a due date, and that’s the first step to achieving a goal and ditching resolutions.

But here’s a secret: it’s great to have goals, but it is paramount to have the right goals. If you create a goal just because it sounds impressive, but your heart isn’t invested in the goal, it’s going to be a constant struggle to make the goal a reality. If you create a goal to run a marathon, but you secretly hate running, you’re going to be the angriest runner on the road. Goals must be backed by passion, determination, and an overwhelming desire to give your all to all your goals.

Put Down the Grocery List

I’m constantly amazed at how people will write grocery lists, to-do lists, and keep a calendar of events, but these same people won’t write down their goals. Which is more important? The granola bars and bananas on your shopping list or the goals you want to accomplish this year?

It’s true that goals locked between your ears may eventually find their way into your life, but take charge: write down your goals and initiate achievement. Success is not an accident.

When you write down your goal, include the reason why the goal is important to you. Why must you achieve the goal? How does the goal make you feel? Are you inspired by your goal? Are you thrilled at the possibility of your achievement? What will you gain by realizing the goal? Link the excitement of your goal to the hard work, sweat, and effort you’ll need.

Plan For Achievement

Resolutions are usually nothing more than meaningful wishes. The primary problem with resolutions is that we resolve to change some facet of our life, but we don’t create a method to get from the desire to the actual achievement. Unless you create a plan to reach your resolution, it’s probably not going to happen. You can resolve to lose weight, resolve to improve your finances, or resolve to give up smoking, but unless you know how to complete the resolution it’s just an exercising in wishing.

That’s not a subtle point, right? If you want to improve your life then you should create a plan. A plan to create your goal basically breaks down the goal into smaller, achievable chunks. Then define what actions you need to take to get the smaller chunks done. The aggregation of goal components, when completed, equates to the realization of the goal.

The Real Secret of Achievement

While a plan is ideal for every goal you establish, it’s really the execution of the plan that’s the most important. You can create complex, integrated plans for your goals, but until you take action, nothing is going to change. Executing your plan, according to plan, is what you’ll need to achieve all of your goals.

Finally, you don’t need to wait until the next year to create a goal. Unlike New Year’s resolutions you can create a goal for your life at any time – like right now. I encourage you to get to work defining your goals, creating a plan for achievement, and then doing the work your goals require. The real secret to achievement is in the constant, persistent, and logical effort of doing.

Joseph Phillips is the author of the goal achievement book The Lifelong Project. The Lifelong Project helps individuals achieve goals, find passion, and create joy. He has led seminars, keynote speeches, and workshops about goal achievement for organizations, churches, corporate clients, and individuals around the United States and Europe. Visit Joseph’s blog for more details.

Related posts:

1. Proactive resolutions for 2010
2. Putting Life Purpose in Sharper Focus: How I re-aligned Goals to my Mission
3. 10 Tips for Solving Office Disagreements

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.

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

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.

The difference between the two notions of creativity is stark but very often overlooked. In the former, creativity is thought to be something that is internal to the individual, resulting from a thinking process and involves effort to produce.

In the latter creativity is seen as passively receiving, tuning-in or listening to a ‘stream of ideas’ that are external to us. These streaming ‘Universal ideas’ are always present but we either connect to them and get inspired or just block them out and stop listening to them, hence the writer’s block according to this view.

I tend to subscribe to the point of view that creativity is both a generative and a receptive process, kind of a yin and yang thing, but the receptive part plays a big role in writer’s block which is very often overlooked. I’ll come to this later.

The universal & un-copyrighted source

Lately I have written an article on evolving beings about how we don’t always come up with ideas but rather tune in to a universal web of ideas.

This belief came to me when I started doing my dissertation for a Masters in Philosophy back in summer 03. Although it took me 3 and a half years to complete the course, all the raw ideas for the dissertation came to me in the first 2 months of that summer, most of the time in intuition or in dreams (I very often used to wake up at night jotting down ideas). These ideas were very novel to me at the time although I thought ‘I’ was the one coming up with the ideas.

When I started the research process and started reading piles of books and papers, I started encountering a lot of material not only with similar ideas and concepts to my own but even using the same analogies and metaphors. To my true disbelief I once came across an exact copy of a diagram with the same details I had used to sketch one of my ideas! Now I hadn’t seen it before and the other author could certainly not have copied it from me since my work was unpublished.

It was from that day that I remember starting to believe that people who claim possession of original ideas are unaware of the fact that we do not ‘possess’ ideas but we attract ideas and get inspired if we are listening and tuned-in to them. It was also a lesson in humility for me to come to see ideas as coming from a universal and un-copyrighted source (or shall I say open source?) that we tap into and get inspired. This points at an even deeper philosophical truth that everything in the universe is interconnected and the separateness of self is only an illusion of mind.

Having a creative genius vs. being a genius

Anyway, recently I also came across a very interesting TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the massively successful book ‘Eat, Pray, Love”, in which to my utmost bewilderment and astonishment she talked about her coming to understand the uplifting and ultimately liberating notion that creativity and inspiration come from outside of us rather than within us. (That came as a relief to me knowing my idea wasn’t completely crazy)

In her talk she explained how she traced back the concept of creativity down to the ancient world where the ancient Romans or Greeks used to belief that creative people had their own genius or daemon, a sort of divine ethereal entity or spirit, which inspired them.

This all changed through the onset of the rational Humanist movement where Man was placed at the centre of the Universe. The perspective shifted from people ‘having a genius’ to people ‘being a genius’. This is how it still is. We say “that person is a genius” but not “that person has a genius”. According to Elizabeth Gilbert this was an immensely huge mistake and I cannot agree more.

What happened with this shift in perspective is that people got under the false impression that ideas have to be given birth rather than received and as any mother knows birth is an exercise of force, hard labor and a good deal painful.

Very often, writers who become blocked feel that they have to push themselves more and force the ideas out of themselves. This has often proved to be damaging to a writer’s career, emotionally stressful and in some unhappy cases even tragic.

Creativity is less not more

Creativity is not about doing something more or forcing something out. It is actually about doing something less.  It is about letting go of certain preconceived ideas and notions and not allowing our conditioned and limited patterns of thought to interfere with the process. This is why lateral thinking is about leaping over normal routines of thought or why meditation is highly recommended in expanding creativity since it encourages us to suspend judgment, cultivate authenticity and keep a beginner’s mind.

Anyone who is engaged in creative work knows that creativity is not a rational process. It doesn’t come out of our more rational and linear left-hemisphere of our brain. When I am actually writing I very seldom think. If I think I stop writing because I stop the flow. I think and analyze only after I finish my writing in order to check, correct and edit.

Every person involved in some creative work knows that at the moment when we are in the flow, the ideas or the visions come from a source we can’t really identify. One thing is certain – it doesn’t come from our rational and conscious thinking.

The part of the creative process in which we are consciously and actively engaged in is the part where we brainstorm and play around with concepts, make unconditional leaps of thought and question the obvious like little children. The rest is pure receptive inspiration which combines beautifully together with the generative aspect of creativity in a yin and yang kind of way.

Accepting our role as creative agents

Here is where Elizabeth’s advice shines through beautifully. In a few words she realized that when writers shift their perspective from thinking of inspiration as coming exclusively from their heads to accepting that part of it comes from an unknowable source and the other comes from their efforts and background knowledge, they recognize their true authentic identity and roles as writers and creative people.

This reduces the pressure of expectation and self-blaming. It makes us more open and in line with our true roles as creative agents of universal ideas. This perspective keeps us on the leading edge of the creative process effectively making us less prone to writer’s block and more in tune with the ever-flowing stream of ideas out there.

Related posts:

1. Music for the Soul
2. How to find the Strength to Overcome Obstacles

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.

A Problem of Quantity?

I used to think that what was holding me back from having that rock solid definition of what I want in life, that one thing that fuels your determination and passion and keeps you tirelessly working on it without ever stopping day and night until you drop dead, is…well, not having that one thing but having many.

I have always been someone with divergent interests in life. My interests span across different disciplines and areas. This is not a bad thing but actually a very positive one. The problem was that it took me some time to realize that I should cherish and rejoice this fact.  Well better late than never right?

Now this thing used to be reflected in the way I used to see myself too. Sometimes I felt like a role-less individual with no specific job description as in “Hi I’m Martin the mechanic” or “Hi I’m Jenny the software engineer for distributed applications & ubiquitous networking.”  When someone used to describe himself with that amount of role-specificity it always used to make me feel somehow kind of standing and staring at the merry-go-round with a fast melting ice-cream in my hand if you know what I mean. It used to make me feel like someone who never checked-out of a bookstore but stayed endlessly browsing and flipping through as many books across as many category shelves as possible without ever exiting the store with that one book in hand.

I know people who knew what they wanted to be since they were 8 or 10 and never went astray or broke that devotion once in their lives. I could never quite fully grasp that notion no matter how hard I stretched the synaptic connections in my brain.

Yet later on I came to realize that whether you have one interest in life or many should not affect your clarity and direction in life.  This has nothing to do with it.

What really used to hold me back was lack of simplicity and structure.

The first thing I did was make a list of my mission and goals in life.

Mission and Goals

A mission is like having a foundation, a framework of beliefs and guidelines or simply an orientation. It is that main purpose in life upon which everything else threads.

Goals on the other hand should be more specific, practically attainable (despite being challenging), measurable and time-constrained targets that make you achieve your mission in life or at least bring you a step closer to it.

There are also sub-goals or mini-goals. A lot of literature about goal-setting and motivation in fact do recommend slicing down a goal or a problem to solve into manageable chunks.  If your mission is for example to establish yourself as a creative writer, one of your high-level goals could be writing articles for a widely distributed magazine or blog. Or perhaps write a book. Then your middle level goal could be writing a series of high quality articles on your own blog until you establish a name, enrich your profile and improve your writing skills. A smaller chunk of that would be to finish off those 3 articles you set to write until the end of this week and an even smaller chunk of that would be to finish off these two paragraphs before you wiggle your bones and walk to the kitchen to do yourself a coffee and then come back to work on it.

It’s a whole chain of goals that are aligned hierarchically and each one of those goals is driven by the bigger goal ahead of it.  Many people would tell us that great things come out of a whole series of little simple unassuming baby steps. I agree.

Order, Alignment & Simplification

My difficulty was not in doing or keeping up with the baby steps but in not having those baby steps aligned with a clearly defined mission and goal structure. The structure was unordered, complex and at times conflicting.

More and more I started realizing on the importance of simplifying things and understanding more clearly my mission statement.

These are some of the few things I started doing to understand better my mission, put goals in the perspective of that mission and simplify my action plan.

• Wrote down my Mission Statement declaring in point form what are the highest ends I want to achieve in life. These are broad and encompassing goals or qualities I want to achieve or be.

• I categorized the points into groups according to some label. My labels were: a) Mind: anything relating to learning and the intellect b) Heart: example – happiness, Love, relationships, authenticity c) Soul: expanded awareness and spiritual awakening are my 2 most important in this category d) Productivity: Would do I like to be most productive on and create the most in my life? e) Finance: What level of financial freedom do I seek? f) Health: Physical & mental well being, fitness and longevity are a classical example.

Note: I have used these categories because they seem to encompass everything that is of an interest in my life. These categories are however arbitrary. You can add your own or leave out any of the above which you feel has no importance to your life’s mission.

• The categories above helped me put my concepts into fixed dimensions and thus help me gain more focus on them. For those of you who are more of the visual type, I suggest mind-mapping your ideas. There are some interesting free online tools to do this. Mind-mapping is a very effective way of structuring your ideas and concepts into a very visually stimulating way.

I try to often look into my ‘mission statement’ and reaffirm it mentally. This entrenches a sense of being on the right track which can be motivating and encouraging.

• I then wrote down all of my goals in one unordered list first. These also included all those things that I have wanted to explore or do someday but never had the time or found out that they come after other things which are more demanding, etc.

• As in the mission items, I also categorized my goals according to: Mind, Heart, Soul, Productivity, Finance & Health.

• Cross-checked those goals with their corresponding category in the mission items. It then dawned on me that there were some goals somewhere in my head which were relatively unimportant (relative to my mission) but holding up the queue and weighing down the bag. I realized, for example that some of them were not ‘destination points’ but ‘hub points’ that would be nice to pass through but not necessary to stay there.  I discarded these unimportant goals. The result was a more defined and simpler set of goals which already started to be easier to put in perspective.

• After having filtered out the unimportant goals, I tagged the remaining goals by one of these two labels: Important and Urgent. Like other things in life, some things may be important but not urgent while some others may be urgent but not important. Those which are both important and urgent are given utmost priority. Those which are urgent but not important need to be swept away immediately but not a lot of time should be allocated. Those which are important but not urgent are dealt with later but more time is given to planning them.

This exercise has been liberating and has helped me a lot but I still need time to entrench it. Like any new habit, it needs an incubation period to settle. So far the response has been very positive and I am in a much more confident, self-disciplined and goal-oriented mode than I ever was before.

Let me know if you have further ideas, experiences or suggestion. It would be nice to hear them. Thanks

Related posts:

1. Why Resolutions Fail