Transformational Leadership. Social Entrepreneurship

Every Wednesday, we will feature a four or five-part series on personal development and/or leadership. This is the second installment of the Ignite Yourself series.

Please keep away matches and lighters in the room. I’m not talking about suicide or arson. This is about something red. Something hot. Something terribly hot! Fire!

You need to set yourself on fire. You have to do it if you really want to pursue what you want in life and be all that you can be!

Fire has been used as the metaphor for burning passion. And why not? When you are passionate about something, you feel the fire of determination in your guts, you feel your heart beating for what you desire! Have you ever had that intense feeling in your heart when you realize that you truly love something? When you feel as if you’d die if you don’t achieve that?

Too often, however, we are content with where we are, we say that we want the best, we say that we do not want to be mediocre and we say that we will be successful! But the thing is, we are not doing anything.

Do you lack passion? If so you lack fire! You lack a life well lived!

You should set yourself on fire and be passionate!

Pause for a minute and ask yourself what you are passionate about. It might help if you closed your eyes. Go back to your past. Feel your heart beating. Be at one with your spirit and push away all distractions.

What are the things you truly enjoyed doing as a child, as a teenager, as an employee or as an adult.

When do you feel truly alive?

The Root Cause of Mediocrity

A lot of people feel that they are not living the life they’re supposed to live. They just go on through life with half-hearted fervor for what they’re doing. They go to the office and as soon as they sit down on their cubicles, they cannot wait for dismissal time. Probably, they become excellent once or twice but they never really live out a lifestyle of excellence. So where is their happiness?

Mediocrity at work and in one’s life is not caused by a lack of skills or lack of opportunities. It’s a case of not finding one’s purpose in life. When you lack purpose, you lack passion!

Let’s explore further how this lack of purpose manifests in life. If you recognize some of the symptoms describe below, then you might not have found your purpose yet and you are languishing in a sea of mediocrity and uncertainty.

1. You wake up in the morning with a vague sense of discontent and anxiety.

It begins in the morning. Instead of waking up to a bright new day, you feel that you want to prolong your time in bed because you feel there are just too many anxieties and worries during your waking time. If you can help it, you’d just stay in bed and at home all day. And this doesn’t happen on a weekend. It goes on day after friggin’ day after freakin’ day.

2. You are not happy with your work, or if you are a student, with your current field of study.

If you are a student, you feel that you just can’t study well enough for your subjects. You attend your classes but your professors are just speaking Greek to you. You even fall asleep in class. Remember the time that you weren’t able to contribute to the discussion when your professor asked you to?

If you are working, you might feel you’re no longer growing even if you’ve been there for years. You want to be out but you can’t afford to. There are bills to pay and there’s a lifestyle to pay for. In short, you’re in it for the money and you’re not getting anything else apart from the money.

3. You don’t know what you want in life.

No matter how old you may be right now, if you don’t know what you want in life, then certainly, you’re missing out on a lot of things. You just keep walking and walking without a clear direction in mind.

After meeting with my classmates for my Master in Communication class one Saturday afternoon, I decided to explore a mall in the city. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do in a mall. I checked out my favorite second hand bookstore, checked out another bookstore and before long I was just walking from place to place till I decided to grab a burger at a fastfood. After eating I wanted to go home but there were just too many people at the train system. So I decided to linger around.

By the time I boarded a bus home, I regretted wasting almost four hours of my time walking in the mall with no sense of what I wanted there.

Life without purpose is like that. You keep on walking, you become thrilled with what you see and what life has to offer but in the end, when you start thinking about it, you’ll realize you’re not going anywhere.

For people who don’t know their purpose, life is just another walk in the mall!

4. You love some things but you don’t love them enough.

You want a rewarding career, have a good partner in life and build a family. You want to have a car and drive around town getting approving nods from people. You dream of writing that novel. You dream of being promoted and being rewarded for your work.

You may love and want all these things and more. But if you don’t love them enough, you’re bound to stay where you are—mediocre, lazy and unwilling to pursue the things that could turn these to reality.

5. You don’t know what a fulfilling life is like.

All you know are worries, half-remembered childhood dreams and the frustrations of not living up to your potential. Do you remember your grade school science teacher talk about potential energy and kinetic energy? Like a big stone atop a cliff, all of us have potential energy waiting to be released. But a lot of us don’t want to set ourselves on fire with passion.

Your potential is just like fuel inside a car. Without ignition, your potential energy will never be released.

Ignite yourself and discover your purpose!

image credit: atomicshark via Flickr

Related posts:

1. Unleash the Fire: Define Your Vision
2. Ignite Yourself: A Call to Personal Development Journey

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