The most well-intentioned plans, the most heart-felt desires – they’re great.
That’s the fuel that can help things get done.
But that passion can also be blindingly detrimental, strangling the life from an otherwise excellent venture or project.
Sometimes your passion will get in the way of your success.
Sometimes your passion will paralyze you.
Sometimes your passion is actually setting you up for failure.
How, you say?
- By giving you the false hope that what you’re doing is the best way to do it.
- By allowing you to rationalize procrastination as “due diligence.”
- By helping you to stubbornly refuse seeking or adopting better tools or methods.
- By ham-stringing you with the thought that with a change, all your work will be undone.
- By making you dig your heels in because you didn’t come up with the idea first.
- By painting the illusion that it’s too hard to learn something new or better.
- By filling you with a fear that it will be too scary to make changes.
- By making you believe you’re the only one that really understands the issue.
- By perceiving help from people as a threat to your own position.
And finally….
- By creating barriers between you and those that can help you most.
We’re in a wonderful point in time where there are easy and remarkable tools, ideas and methods to accomplish most anything we want. The beauty of this is we have the ability to really take our projects to other heights, and do so like never before. We don’t need to reinvent things, we merely need to find better ways to get there. And we need to accept that while we don’t know everything, we have the potential to learn anything and leverage ourselves with people that share the same vision and have the same desires.
It’s time to build a better mousetrap.
And it’s time for a challenge: Take a deep breath and loosen the reins a bit. Let people and ideas into your life that will help you get where you need to go.
Photocredit: Teamwork by PaDumBumPsh
Excess, or misplaced, passion can also lead to what I call Emperor’s tailor syndrome: you’re dragging them along, they can’t get the new suit together, emperor winds up naked in public. Passionate, but naked. Great post!
Hi Deb! I was just talking to a friend about this just a couple hours ago! We have a "problem" and I think she has done everything she can and has planted all the seeds, I think if she just sits back everything will fall into place the team will take her thoughts and they will bloom. I believe we have all done this in our lives, some of us more than once…. I'm taking a deep breath too… amy
My recent post Open House or Not?
Thanks for the feedback, Amy. Deep breathing is good and stepping back would certainly give your colleague some perspective; one way to help her do this might be to just say it: "We know you've busted your tail on this, how about stepping back a little bit and relaxing – you've earned it. That space might also stir some other ideas or even allow you to enjoy what you've accomplished so far." Believe it or not, at this point, your mind starts to come up with even better, more clarified ideas and the actual project doesn't hold so much mystery – or burdensome weight.
It's hard though, when you're so entrenched in getting something off the ground – there's a fear of failure if you don't have your hands on it all the way or it you're not concentrating on it 24/7. But sometimes, that's exactly what is needed to let something take off. I think you're guidance will help her 🙂
D