The Power of Passion

"Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion." -- G.W.F. Hengel

FOR A MOMENT, picture your passion. Visualize a time when you were immersed in your favorite activity. Perhaps it was a refreshing run on the beach, a soothing session of yoga or an uplifting hike up a mountain -- anything that resonates with you deeply. What sensations does that image evoke? You likely felt energized, excited, even euphoric. That’s because it’s an activity about which you feel passion—a powerful force that can drive you to great heights. “It's your passion that, throughout your life, will be your saving grace,” says Barbara De Angelis, author of Passion (Dell, 1999). “It will kePublishep you going after your dreams when everyone advises you to give up.” On the other hand, when you do something solely out of a sense of obligation, you may feel drained or uninspired. How fulfilled you are depends a lot on how much energy you devote to things that you feel deeply passionate about. Here’s how to turn up the heat in your relationships, career, hobbies and health so that you can live with more passion.

RELATIONSHIPS

The people with whom you spend the most time have a profound impact on how much passion you feel in your life. If your friends or family members consistently exhaust you rather than energize you it may be time to make some changes.

Action Item: Create a list of the main relationships in your life. Now assign an “A,” “B” or “C” to each person in terms of how much they enrich you. You owe it to yourself to do three things: maximize your “A” relationships by devoting more time to them; improve your “B’s” by communicating your needs to those people; and purge the “C’s” by gently, but firmly moving on from those relationships.

CAREER

According to renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow, human beings are driven primarily by two needs: physiological (getting air, water and food) and safetysafe rather than on work that’s stimulating. (establishing stability and consistency in a chaotic world). While seeking “stability” and “consistency” may improve our chances of survival, it doesn’t necessarily make us optimally happy. Our careers are our main sources of stability, so we tend to put a higher premium on work that’s safe, rather than on work that inspires us.

Action Item: Take a truthful look at how passionate you feel about your career. When you wake up in the morning, do you more often feel enthused, or deflated, at the idea of going to work? If you decide that you no longer feel passion for your career (or that you never had it!), then you can do one of two things: Weave your passion into your work-week. For example, you may devote evenings to writing your new book or launching your home-based business. The other option is to build up three to five month’s worth of savings, quit your job entirely and pursue your passion with everything you’ve got. The latter move involves heftier sacrifices and more moments of fear and doubt, but the potential payoffs are bigger. If you follow your heart, you’ll meet each challenge with gusto.

HOBBIES

Your leisure time is meant to refresh and rejuvenate you. But, how often do you spend your hard-earned days off doing things that really fire you up? Maybe it’s time to devote more of your free time to activities that impassion you.

Action Item: What hobbies have you always felt a deep desire to take up? Do you have a burning desire to learn to play the piano? Sculpt? Garden? Allocate a few hours each week to pursuing new, passion-filled interests.

HEALTH

Making the decision to exercise is more often guilt-induced than it is passion-driven. We tend to do whatever workouts make us thinner. While the destination of being more slender may fill you with passion, why not make the journey exciting and energizing as well?

Action Item: To infuse your fitness program with more passion, vary your workouts more often. Try this: write down three physical activities that you’re wild about. Spend the next six weeks integrating one, or all three, of those new exercises into your weekly workout program. By keeping things fresh and fun in this way, you will get excited, motivated and energized -- the three hallmarks of passion.

PINPOINT YOUR PASSION

Take the following survey. If you answer “yes” to four or more of the following questions, you are passionate about that pursuit -- and should strive to do it more often.

1. When you perform this activity do you lose track of time?
2. Does it spark your creative side? Are you constantly conjuring up ways of doing it differently, or better?
3. Do you tend to daydream about it when you’re not doing it?
4. Does it energize you?
5. Does it feel more like “play” than “work?”

Do one thing each day that inspires you deeply, and you will reap the rich rewards that come from unleashing the power of passion.