“Lighting a fire under someone will never be as effect as lighting a fire within someone.” – Bob Teague
Each and every one of us has within us our own source of inspiration as we are all inspired by the things we feel passionate about. Whether it’s sport, music, art, business, education, or anything else, it’s being passionate about your involvement that leads to realising your full potential.
Success breeds success.
Whatever field it is you aspire to be successful in, it’s the success of others that often inspires further success. However, aspiring to be like someone does not mean trying to become a carbon copy of that someone. Much can be learned from following the training schedule of a successful athlete, for example, or from eating the same diet, but to learn the secret of their success, you need to understand how they connect with the world and the people around them on a daily basis. You need an understanding of their everyday successful habits and an understanding of how they view life, and how they respond physically and emotionally to everyday challenges – and then you need to apply and adapt what you learn to your own life and your own circumstances.
It’s not someone else’s success you want, it’s your own.
It’s your life, so in terms of achieving your true potential, you need to ask yourself a very important question: are you pursuing your dreams and ambitions, or the ambitions someone else has for you? If your dream or ambition is something you feel you should be doing, you could be pursuing someone else’s dream for you. As Steve Jobs once wisely said…
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”
The something you really want to do is not always the something others want you to do. It can be hard to follow your dream when it goes against the expectation of influential others. An example of this might be growing up with the expectation of becoming a doctor because your father is a doctor and his father before him was a doctor… but it’s your dream to be a fashion designer.
What lights your fire?
It was a belief of ancient Norse people that everyone carried a “fire within” and those who continued to carry the fire within themselves would travel the furthest. In other words, it was their belief that those who held a burning passion and kept it alive within themselves were most likely to go places with it, and going places equates to achievement and success.
With this in mind, finding your fire within may hold the key to discovering what it is you really want to achieve in life, not what you feel you should achieve in life. There are many successful people who recognise with hindsight that the something they are now doing with their lives is the very something they have always loved to do and felt passionate about doing. So, what gets you fired up? What do you love doing? What sparks your interest and fills you with enthusiasm?
What do you wish you could do more often? Answer these questions, and you’ll find the fuel you need to keep your fire within burning brightly.
Don MacNaughton is a High-Performance Coach and has worked tirelessly to help clients achieve success in the world of sport and business over the past 15 years. The next, highly popular, NLP Diploma and Life Coaching Certificate course starts in April 2019. Click here for more information or to sign up.