Stuart’s Philosophies

I’ve been teaching about passion and following your dream for quite a long time. It’s been 14 years since I first started teaching anything in the first place, and I had to look back on this fairly long history to understand why I am doing the things that I’m doing and the dark side of seeking your passion.

Surprised?

Well, how many people do you know who really strive toward their passion and actually achieve much? Is passion really about the sensation of feeling good and loving what you do? Is it a romantic notion? Or have we all gotten it wrong?

In my opinion, passion for work is one of the biggest misnomers. I’ve put myself on a journey over the last two years to learn about entrepreneurs and what really gets them going and the secret blueprint behind entrepreneurship. Is it a system of work? Is it credibility? Is it passion and love for what you do?

These are all sexy and romantic notions as put forward in light by the media. Unfortunately, there are differences in the way in which things really are. So the thing is this - passion can actually destroy you if you don’t know what you are doing.

Here’s my first expose about passion, and I think it will lead to a lot more discovery as you read it. My intention is not to make you even more confused about where your direction in life is. Sure, you can seek out and win through your passion. But it’s not just “knowing your passion”. There really is more to it than meets the eye.

Passion Directive #1 - Know Who You Are

In recent months I’ve come to realize something. People who are in business do things because they want to make money from it. Sure, that’s a great thing. But you can’t rule out the fact that in the hustle and bustle of day-to-day living, we end up being inundated with many other things: concerns, worries, doubts, interactions… that could cause fragmentation.

The main reason is the question of identity. Who you are can make a difference. But you need to believe so much in who you are, and that your vision for your life is going to make that difference so powerful and so tremendous, that you become a magnet polarized for success.

There’s a group of entrepreneurs whom I know who are bitter about the entire world of business. These are people who are good at what they do - possibly exceptional - and provide excellent value to their customers and clients. They create magnificent quality of content in what they say. But at the end of it all, they end up still playing second fiddle to the people who are no more than snake-oil salesmen. They lose out their content to people who are just scratching the surface of the ‘quality’ game. So in this sense, people who are passionate about what they do are being punished. They work very hard all their lives to help other people. Often, they work well in places of intangible value, such as personal well-being, knowledge building and self-improvement.

For instance, education-based teachers create exceptional value in schools. But, there are other teachers who have the ‘entrepreneurial’ edge who end up making more money than teachers in schools. Whether or not this is fair is up to the decision of those who are in the marketplace, and there really is no basis for comparison. But from comparing content, it becomes far more obvious that those who are primed for education have better content than those who are primed for profit. In the end, many quality educators get sidelined, victims of their own competence.

You can probably see the parallels in other fields such as in medicine. Doctors who are working well within institutions may not have a presence the way private specialists do.

But now that you have read this far, my biggest argument is this. No matter how good you think you are, there’s always going to be something better. You might be a good person, but there are great people out there. Greatness, is not defined as something intangible. It is defined by the way you connect and resonate with people.

Resonance - The pathway to reaching your peak potential

You might have heard of “The Secret”. In my opinion, this is nothing more than a way to emphasize a more powerful concept known as ‘resonance’. Each of us ‘resonates’ with a certain kind of frequency: one that cannot be perceptible by the human senses, but can be ‘felt’ over and beyond these observable things. When our ‘energy patterns’ get disturbed, they are revealed through this resonance in our individual frequencies.

In nature, you can see resonance occurring. Here’s a definition from Wikipedia.

A resonant object will probably have more than one resonance frequency, especially at harmonics of the strongest resonance. It will easily vibrate at those frequencies, and vibrate less strongly at other frequencies. It will “pick out” its resonance frequency from a complex excitation, such as an impulse or a wideband noise excitation. In effect, it is filtering out all frequencies other than its resonance.

Hence, if you play a chord, such as a ‘C’ major, you will generate a certain mood that affects you as a human being. Each of the notes in ‘C’ major have overlapping harmonics that form the blending in of the chord to have its resonant characteristics.

But also observe this. Play a ‘E’ note on a piano, and a nearby guitar string will also vibrate in harmony even though it isn’t being plucked.

Likewise, one of the principles behind the ‘law of attraction’ is actually based off the idea of harmonic resonance. If you resonate with this quality, it becomes apparent about what you observe and what you see in other people. If you are mired with hatred or anger, you will see this quality in other people. If you are fearful or sad, you will see this quality in other people more readily, too.

Like a chord being played, you don’t just play one note. You are playing an entire symphony in your mental orchestra. But if you don’t conduct yourself well, it will become a complete and chaotic mess. If you don’t even know what instruments are in your orchestral complement, how can you make use of them optimally?

If you are going to be great, other people must experience that resonance. It’s a feeling of connection and wholeness. And it’s very easy for others to feel that sense of connection once it starts emanating from an aligned you.

Who’s Conducting Your Orchestra? 

Gee - sounds like I’m mimicking the ‘who moved my cheese’ story. But in reality, I’m asking about control. Who controls your orchestra? Are you playing second fiddle to what you are capable of? In addition, what you are capable of you might not want to do. So, do you know yourself well, and hold your tune so that you can create beautiful music?

You need to control your entire mental pitch effectively! As a conductor, what you do is know the resources in your orchestra. You need to have perfect timing. You need to have coordination. I do know that many people aren’t able to coordinate their own feelings of motivation effectively. Nor can they get themselves out of a rut when they feel depressed. Change your mental tunes, and you will change your life circumstances.

Knowing the orchestra in your mind will allow you to create changes in your life better. If you don’t know what your capabilities are, how can you create your passion?

Alignment

I’ve always  been a proponent of alignment and the power of directed action. You can’t swim forward if you are paddling in four different directions. You’ll be going around in circles (or worse, staying still)!

A lot of the things you do, you tend not to be in control of. You’ll then end up bouncing like a pin ball in a machine, to everywhere you’re supposed to be. But it you are directed and aligned and know exactly where you need to be, you can control your direction, even if it’s just one button on your left and the other on your right.

Likewise, a conductor needs to raise only his conductor’s baton to get the orchestra to raise their instruments. It’s like a magical wand that gets everyone aligned to their purpose in tandem with each other.

If you don’t know your orchestra, you can’t align them in the first place.

Why Knowing Who You Are Is So Important

Everyone can come up with some kind of metaphor for life and living. I can say you are a conductor, or a boxer, or a marathon runner. At the end of it all, it’s all a metaphor. If you understand it, that’s wonderful! If you don’t, I can tell you everything about that metaphor, it still won’t resonate with you.

If something foreign doesn’t resonate with your orchestra, you call it noise. You don’t appreciate it, and that becomes the focal point of your irritation. If you have a lot of these in your mind, it’s going to drive you slightly crazy because you don’t have a focal point!

Knowing your own personal identity will help you with that focus. With different circumstances in your life, you are going to have to revise your personal metaphors and change that around because your unconscious mind does not think in logic and parts. It thinks wholistically and metaphorically. This means to you that if you don’t have a fitting metaphor for your life, you will play out disastrous results.

If your metaphor is ‘boxing’ and you are in the ‘boxing ring’, you’ll find that you are evoking images of ‘one man against another’. This is fine and dandy if you are in a similar environment such as competitive design or even speaking. But imagine you took this same mental metaphor, but you ended up working in a military unit that had to coordinate each other’s firepower in order to overcome an enemy. Being a ‘Rambo’ in the army unit doesn’t help, and could endanger everyone else in the unit.

If your metaphor of identity is of the ‘dove of peace’ and you are in the sales profession, you might end up getting highly conflicted. You might find that there are too many things you are uncomfortable with. You either change your environment, or your change your identity!

Preliminary Conclusion

Sure, you have passion. You have capability. If it turns out that your passion is inappropriate to the environment you are in, you will end up being very confused, highly emotional, and possibly, have the feeling of loss. This is what growing up is about. We have ‘mid-life’ crises (which people, reportedly have been experiencing at a younger and younger age…) that cause upheavals.

You can create a life that you desire. You can achieve success the way you want it. It starts with understanding yourself and then allowing your passion to resonate from the inside out. More to come!

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The Passion Directives