Follow your passion, be prepared to work hard and sacrifice, and, above all, don’t let anyone limit your dreams.
Donovan Bailey
Passion got you here.
Do you remember the feeling? The feeling burning inside you as you recognized that it was up to you to create the world that you wanted most? It’s different for each person; maybe you wanted to play sports professionally, maybe you wanted to save the whales, or travel the world or buy a Ferrari or start the next big business. Whatever it was you had a fire that felt like it would never go out, and it was driving you to DO something.
What do we mean when we talk about passion?
Passion is the reason you get excited to do something. It’s the feeling deep down telling you to pursue something difficult because it’s important. Passion can show up as a flash-in-the-pan sprint of activity, or a slow-burning undercurrent.
For some people passion is scary. Passion isn’t logical, it isn’t telling us to take the safe road, it is telling us to push ourselves. The good news is living into your passion doesn’t have to be scary.
Where is the passion now?
Take a moment and think about your day to day life.
How much passion do you have for what you do? Are you excited to go to work most days? Or does it feel like the passion is missing in your regular life?
There are many people today who don’t connect with either passion or purpose in their daily lives. They play it off like it is some kind of pipe dream to enjoy and be meaningfully engaged in their daily existence.
What comes up when you ask yourself what your passion is? Is there something speaking up that is quickly squashed? Is there a whisper of something trying to be heard?
How do you bring them back into your life?
The first thing to do is go through the six steps to the life you want process. Although it doesn’t explicitly mention passion and purpose, it will often times help you gain clarity about them through brainstorming about the life you want.
You can also journal
Whichever of these you do, the goal is to simply start to understand what your passions are. They don’t have to make sense, they don’t have to be logical, they don’t even have to be possible right now. You just want to identify what they are.
Once you’ve got an idea of what they are, then it is time to start to understand them. Why are those the passions? Where do they come from in your past? How do they connect with your future? If you couldn’t lose, how would you let them show up in your life?
Decide where you want to go next.
Now you’ve got a choice to make. You can start creating the future, or you can try to keep on as you are. How strongly does a life with passion call to you?