Your Mission, If you Choose to Accept it…

Douglas Clark

-Head writer, The Inspiration Engine

Have you ever thought or felt like you were wandering through life and things were just happening to you?  Have you ever felt as if you had no power to direct the course you were heading toward?   Ever feel as if you had no choice in the events and scenery in your field of view?  Ever just feel totally directionless?

I have and I hated it.

There’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re a spectator in your own life.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.  Not at all!  What you need is a mission.  Something that drives you and fills you with motivation and passion, something that spurs you forward, regardless of the financial gains or losses, regardless of the snickering or derision of others.  Something you’d do for free, or something you’d do even if YOU had to pay to do it.  That’s a passion.  Making your passion your mission in life gives you direction and focus. 

But how do you find your mission?  For me, it took a long, long time to recognize something that was right in front of me the whole time.  I love to be creative and artistic, mostly with writing, but self-expression has been a growing passion of mine for a long time.  I only recognized it when I seriously examined my life, my desires, my longings, and even the things that I hated and detested.  After meditating and contemplating on all of those things it hit me that self-expression was what I wanted.  Some way, somehow I needed to make that my mission.

So now I write, I create, I express.  That’s my mission.  If you have a mission you know it drives you and you can draw strength from it.  If you are searching for a mission, you need to really look at what you like, care about, gets your blood pumping, makes you tingle and excited.  Follow those feelings and your mission will present itself.  After that, the rest is up to you. 

Choose your mission!

How Do You Stir Up The Doldrums?

Douglas Clark

-Head writer, The Inspiration Engine

Sometimes I get stuck in a rut.  I hate to admit it, but it’s true.  For all of my own self-motivation and determined fortitude, I sometimes slack off.  Actually I probably do it a whole lot more than I am willing to admit to you or myself.  I’m not proud of that though.  In fact, sometimes I’ve actually sat down and calculated all the ‘wasted time’ during a week I could have used for something productive.  Yeah, that number can sometimes be staggering.  So what is it about life and responsibilities that fosters procrastination and the blasé feeling of the Doldrums?  Could it be disinterest? Or stress?  Possibly anxiety and lack of ability?  I think any one of those or a combination is definitely possible. However, I also think that the major cause is Overload. 

Think of all the things you have to do during just one single week.  For me, well, I work full time, I’m a single parent, I’m writing a master’s thesis, I’ve started my own small business, I write a blog, I’m writing a novel, I’m attempting to have a social life and engage in fun activities and hobbies.  Okay, I must be nuts!  Overload is a very real and likely possibility pretty much every day.  So with all that pressure, self-imposed and otherwise, it makes sense that even for just a little while during the day, you might just not want to ‘care’, even if it’s for a few minutes staring off into outer space.  It happens.  But what do you do when you’re so overloaded, you seem to get nothing done?  I realized recently that I was overloaded to the point of distraction.  In fact I was even getting distracted from my distractions.  It was disconcerting to say the least.  How did I fix it? 

Well, the first thing I did was admit I was overloaded and was wasting time in the doldrums.  I then picked ONE project that I knew was a major commitment and mental drain.  For me it is/was my thesis.  I committed all my free time to actually getting it finished and ready for submission.  Except for my daughter, I didn’t worry about all the rest (even though I knew they were all very important).  I now stand 99% ready to send it in to my review board.  As I committed all my ‘doldrums’ time to completing that literary monster I felt a relief, not because I was working hard, but because I could see the end coming up fast.  It let me know I would soon have a large chunk of my mind back to allocate to other things, or just give everything else a little wiggle room in my mind. Anxiety and stress immediately leveled off.

So, I learned the time old adage is true, ‘if you want something done, give it to a busy person’, but I also learned that wasting time and procrastinating only makes long projects longer.  And who wants that?

Thanks for reading.

Questions and comments are welcome.