Success: Cultivate Passion through Progress | Terri Trespicio

Success is not always easy to achieve, so how do you fulfill YOUR progress towards success? How will you use criticism to fuel your progress? How will you embrace the gateless method of success? We are lucky to have Terri Trespicio with us to guide us on cultivating our passion towards success.

Terri Trespicio is an award-winning writer, speaker, and brand ambassador and she was named by HubSpot as one of the “Top 18 female speakers who are killing it”. She cultivated her way through her passion and rising through her way to success.

The Significance of Progress to Cultivate your Passion

Imagination is limitless. A writer who is hard-pressed to channel that imagination will have difficulty creating his craft. You might think of going on a tour, walking outside, and ask for ideas, but you don't need to wait for inspiration to come in to start your craft. Spend some time working to develop it. If writing is your passion, work on it and practice.

Write in a journal, have friends read and critique your work, or you could join a writing group. Terri shared her thoughts on this, "You do not need to be inspired to write; you get inspired by doing the work. Don't wait until you have it first; the key is to give yourself a chance to experience progress."

Writing that first paragraph will be challenging, but the momentum of starting it will slowly bring forth the inspirations inside while writing. Get inspiration by doing the work, not by pure anticipation. At some point, sit back and start re-evaluating your progress. You'll see how far you've come from where you started.

Reflect on where you are, what progress you have made. Being realistic in the process as you take steps to achieve your passion is important as well as being consisted with it.

Criticism: The Bane of Clarity

Criticisms temper our hearts. It allows us to fix the things deemed mistakes in our employers' eyes and help conform to the company's standards—however, an unfinished work receiving criticism devoid of clarity for the writer. Terri explained why "Criticisms narrows the parts that you want to come out. We were taught that criticisms are good, but that negativity bias will always stick in your head that you are bad."

Criticism has its fair share of pros and cons. As a writer, you'll hear feedback about your work in many different contexts. There are just so many avenues for responses to your writing, and not all of those responses are positive. And if you are not prepared to deal with that, your confidence and writing will suffer.

So anytime you receive criticism of your writing, take a moment to consider whether it's actually useful or whether it's not worth stressing over. One way to identify what's valuable is if the same issues keep cropping up in multiple people's critiques. The key is how to utilize criticisms to reinforce positivity instead of instilling endless negativity, leading to writers' block and eventually producing a subpar craft.

Embrace the Gateless Method to Success

Finding the right path is something all of us wanted to achieve. As a writer, your life is entangled with the literary world. Your craft will be the best evidence of your effort, time, and passion. To embrace the method towards a thriving art, Terri suggested the five rules:

1. Focus on the work,
2. Keep the speaker safe,
3. Listen and Respond to what is working,
4. Point the direction where the person should go, and
5. Never disclaim or criticize our work.

Embracing these five rules should allow a writer to have a haven of comfort, the comfort of being able to express one's work without the fear of getting judged, pressured, and demotivated. At the end of the day, it is essential to find a process that works for you.

If you are really determined to succeed, you can. Success is not an end result. It is a series of actions, activities, and relationships that prevail over all other factors. If it is necessary to adjust plans or expectations along the way, do it.

What I want you to do is to write without thinking. You’re going to see what comes up and you're going to trust that it's coming up for a reason. You're going to start from scratch, and you're going to use your body as well as your brain.