Desire is the fuel of power. One of the sweetest benefits of life as a human being is to enjoy the progressive fulfillment of your desires through the exercise of your power. This doesn’t just mean celebrating your big accomplishments. It means savoring every delicious step of the journey.
What do you want? What do you fantasize about? What do you long for so badly that you can’t stop thinking about it, even if you consider it impossible? Allow yourself to dream. Spend time cultivating your deepest desires, no matter how impractical or impossible they seem. It’s perfectly okay to want the impossible. It’s not okay to pretend that your desire don’t matter.
It’s impossible to build your power until you accept total responsibility for your life. It’s certainly possible to give up control, but final accountability always rests with you. You can’t duck or dodge that, no matter how hard you try. If your body is out of shape, you’re the one who’s out of breath after climbing the stairs. If your credit cards are maxed out, you’re the one who must deal with the debt. If you don’t like your job, you’re the one who must suffer through your work each day.
Your experience is unquestionably your own. I (Steve Pavlina) can discuss your life with you. I can empathize with your situation, and I can do my best to help you. But afterward I can go home to my own life and leave yours behind. You never have that luxury.
Power is the third principle of personal development. It is your ability to consciously and deliberately create the world around you. When your power is weak, you can’t effectively satisfy your needs and desires, and you become a victim of your environment. When your power is strong, you successfully cultivate a life of your own choosing, and your environment reflects it.
To some people, the word power is almost a dirty word, negatively associated with abuse of force, corruption, and unbridled greed. But in truth there’s nothing inherently evil or corrupt about the exercise of power. This principle can be aligned with truth and love, or it can be aligned with falsehood and disconnection. Whether power is used for good or evil is determined by the consciousness behind it.
Communion is the deep sense of bonding that gives rise to the emotional side of love. It’s the delicious feeling of completeness that comes from sharing our true selves.
Consider your relationship with another person. Where does it actually exist? It doesn’t exist anywhere in the external world. You can’t simply point to it and say, “That’s our relationship right there.” It lives purely within your thoughts. Consequently, your connection with another person is whatever you think it is. Your belief makes the relationship real. If you cease to believe in it, then for all practical purposes, it no longer exists. The physical residue may remain, such as a particular living arrangement, but the true human connection will have been lost.
Communication is the means through which we express love. The root of the word communicate means “common,” and it’s natural to think that when we communicate with someone, we look for something we have in common. Identifying commonalities is essentially how we form new connections.
You communicate effectively by first connecting with the familiar and then branching out into the unfamiliar. When you meet someone new, the first step is to discover your shared interests, values, and attitudes. This creates a basic bond of trust and friendship. The next step is to explore and learn from your differences. People who are too different from you are difficult to bond with, and those who are too similar can’t teach you very much. The best relationships provide enough common ground to form a strong bond while also stimulating growth in new directions.
In order to grow as a human being, you must master the art of forming connections. To connect means to give something your attention, to think about it, and to engage with it. In addition to connecting with people, you can connect with groups, objects, places, ideas, values, and activities. Establishing a link requires nothing but your attention. Think about your mother. Think about democracy. Think about your favorite song. Put your attention on something and you immediately connect with it.
Do you remember how you first learned about the physical universe when you were a young child? You looked around and noticed objects that grabbed your attention. Then you moved toward them, picked them up, and played with them. You learned about your environment through direct, hands-on experience. If you found something you didn’t like, you tried to avoid it in the future. If you found something you liked, you gave it even more attention. Sometimes your focus put you in a state of love.
Love is the second principle of personal development. Obviously love is an emotion, but it’s also much more than that. One of the fundamental choices you face in every encounter is the choice to approach or avoid. You can try to connect with people, or you can pull away from them. You can immerse yourself in your day’s work, or you can procrastinate. You can approach any person, place, or thing with the intention to connect, or you can remain aloof and keep your distance. The decision to connect is the essence of love.
Sometimes love arises spontaneously. You may feel a certain affinity for a person, place, or activity without knowing why. For some reason, you just perceive a strong connection. Maybe you meet someone new and have a sense you’re going to become friends. Maybe you have a special fondness for playing the guitar, or perhaps you feel a soulful connection to a certain place. You might not always know why such feelings arise, but forming connections is clearly an integral part of human life. You could even go so far as to say that it’s the very reason why we’re here.
As you strive to bring more truth into your life, you must cultivate a high degree of self-awareness. This includes becoming aware of your strengths, weaknesses, talents, knowledge, biases, attachments, desires, emotions, instincts, habits, and state of mind.
As human beings, we’re often filled with conflicting desires. One part of us want to be healthy, happy, and highly conscious. Another part wants nothing more than to eat, sleep, have sex, and be lazy. Without the presence of consciousness, we fall into reflexive patterns by default, living more like unconscious animals than fully sentient human beings.
