Recently, I came across the following article on the thought-patterns of success, originally published here. I found it very interesting and I decided to share it with you. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. – Jasmin Terrany, LMHC
Your passion for your career can sabotage your attempts to succeed.
When you go from feeling energized, excited and in control of your work to feeling an overwhelming compulsion to achieve and produce, you’ve tipped from helpful harmonious passion into harmful obsessive passion.
But when you’ve grown accustomed to operating from a state of obsessive passion, you may want to act differently, but you just don’t know how. Your deeply ingrained mental and behavioral patterns naturally lead you toward seemingly uncontrollable compulsion to work. Paradoxically, these natural reflexes inhibit the quality of your professional output. And when you do make small attempts to change, like leaving the office on time, you experience withdrawal symptoms, which send you scurrying back to your familiar habit patterns.
Fortunately, there is hope. You can rediscover a life of harmonious passion by intentionally changing your behavior and by replacing harmful thought patterns with helpful ones. To help you with this process, I’ve disclosed the thoughts I most commonly see coursing through people’s minds when they feel stuck in a state of obsessive passion and offered suggestions on how to modify them.



If you think you might have fallen into the trap of obsessive passion, go through this list and ask yourself: Do I agree with any of the harmful thought patterns?
If the answer is “yes,” you can incorporate more helpful thought patterns into your life through these types of activities:

• Writing down your thoughts in a journal and then revising your harmful thoughts into helpful ones.
• Keeping a list of helpful thoughts on the wall of your workspace
• Meditating on the helpful thoughts by repeating them aloud (or silently if you’re in a cube)

If you have been able to free yourself to achieve without becoming relentlessly driven, let us know how you succeeded in the comments. Have you noticed a difference in yourself or your work when you operated from a state of harmonious versus obsessive passion?