Living and loving with blinding passion, the gift of life, for me at least. Dropping into the moment in high gear and building speed. Eyes closed seeing what I want to be and acting like it is. The world outside a medium for to move, control and shape, to make whatever is firing me exist as it feels it should be.
Cycling, training, writing, hiking, lifting weights, instructing, all done with almost all of my effort, when I am dialed in and bleeding passion. And I enjoy a tremendous amount of success with action activities when I’m present and burning for them. Single minded and unstoppable. It’s great to observe someone pour all of themselves into something and it’s even better when I pull back to myself and realize that I have been watching ms. It’s flow and it feels pure energy and absolute power. And in many ways it is. I’ve created a world in which I am moving effortlessly, taking positive action in service to the passion I’m feeling about, whatever.
A lot of my life is fantastic. When I’m fulfilling my passions I float happily building more and more passion. It flames hotter and hotter, and there’s no way, when I think about it right now, that I’m engaging the world logically. Which doesn’t matter much with most things, in fact, approaching training and athletic stuff with moderate intensity gets you about 50% of the results. Achieving your potential in anything requires 100% of your effort so an overly active passionate emotional response or drive is what is required. People like seeing results of intensity and they need to be coached and trained with passion. I’m doing a lot of the right things in my life because most of the time there is very little push-back when I attack the world with my passionate needs expecting to be expressed.
But, the gift of living completely in a moment has a big down side. A lot of what is going on is only going on in my head. And I make the mistake of interpreting a lack of push-back as confirmation that the world is actually behaving the way it is for the reason I think it is; which is really easy to do when you’ve throttled up the passion and started taking action to make it happen. When the push-back comes, I start to suffer very quickly. I become unhappy and begin to take action to remove the obstruction. Fired up with intensity I engage the road block to restore things to how they need to be. This gets the hill climbed, the weight lifted, the class working to exhaustion. But when the expression of your passion is linked to another person and when its actualization depends on a shared objective and agreed expectations, any misinterpretation caused by the state of passion can be a future problem. Unlike a dead-lift, what other people feel and think isn’t something that can just be lifted out of the way.
Sometimes I forget this, sometimes when I’m really passionate I get angry at my clients for not following the nutrition advice they asked me for and said they would follow. Sometimes I’ll get frustrated when someone else is using a bench that I want to use with a client. I can get thrown off slightly when people talk in my class, and I think to myself that maybe they should shut-up.
Romantic relationships is an area which is most susceptible to distortions when it comes to expectations and objectives. It can take a while to discover who you are around someone you are falling in love with so for the first while, who they are is who you think they are and what they are going to do is what you expect they are going to do. But do you know this? Unless you’ve had a clear conversation about expectations, moving forward based on your own assumptions will eventually lead to disappointment. The degree of disappointment is going to be proportionately related to how heavily my passion has been invested in the expectation that was distorted.
All in all, my approach is fairly good, but it’s just in need of some adjustment. Now what that adjustment is, I’m not entirely sure but I’m confident it will be uncovered very soon!