At PacificHealth, our
mission is simple: Power Your Passion. Here’s how unleashing your passion can
not only power a better body, it can power a better life.
Kids know passion. They don’t have to think about it. They just
instinctively follow their bliss. They are naturally passion-powered. It’s
beautiful to behold.
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
keep 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 safety (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’s stimulating.
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.
BODY
Making the decision to
exercise is more often guilt-induced than it is passion-driven. Some of us do
whatever workouts necessary to make us look a certain way. 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.
SURVEY
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?”
Life is not a dress rehearsal. Live passion-powered. We’ll help
you get there.
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