When things are tough, it’s time to reconnect with your values and passion.
If you have lost your job or an important relationship or your money or your health or just having a tough time at work, then it is time to discover what you are passionate about and pursue that. Are you passionate about your job or your business right now or have you lost that zing?
The passionate person engages the minds, bodies and souls of people engaged in a similar endeavour and also powerfully inspires them. So why is it that in the past 18 years, research shows that less than 25% of people are passionate about their work.
You can achieve extraordinary results in productivity and leadership if you are passionate about your work. What’s more, if you and your team are passionate, then your business success will soar in revenue and profit too!
This article will help you whether you are the owner of your business, an employee in a business, a consultant to others, or wondering what to do next in your life.
Firstly, let’s understand what passion is.
Passion is an unlimited source of energy from the soul (or ‘spirit’, or ‘heart’) that enables a person to produce extraordinary results. The reason the results are ‘extraordinary’ is because so few people are passionate in their work place. Passionate people have massive amounts of energy.
Why is energy relevant to profits?
Because money is essentially a representation of human energy. The equation can be explained like this:
- Money was invented thousands of years ago to replace barter.
- Human beings bartered goods and services.
- These goods and services were the direct result of human beings ‘doing things’.
- The more things they did, the more they could barter.
- The amount of human energy determined how much could be done: that is, each person’s productivity.
- Thus, the more energy you had, the wealthier you would become.
Contemplate the times and places where you have spent your hard-earned money over the past month; for example, restaurants, car dealers, banks, convenience stores, theatres and movies, fashion, shoes, lawyers, and accountants. On how many of these occasions were you consciously surprised by the high levels of passion evident in the behaviours of the employees or owners who took your money? It is clear from evidence of thousands of my workshop attendees that the number of occasions would be less than 10%, if at all.
And yet, when you experience the positive, high-energy, uplifting behaviours of passionate employees, you surely would not choose to go to any of the competitors of such an organisation!
So, how do you create this energy source in your work and in your life?
Here are seven key strategies.
1. Understand the value of your passion
I encourage you to do the work to discover your passion, or to access your courage to pursue your passion if you know what it is but you have not yet been doing so.
History is full of the stories of people who have taken the passion steps to successfully learn, grow and change to be world-class performers in their chosen fields. I assure you that some of the other benefits of travelling this road of passion are proven to be:
- Living a life of significance
- Being full of energy and highly productive
- Being at peace on the inside while performing at the highest levels
- Creating fulfilling and rewarding relationships
- Using the Law of Attraction effectively
- Taking the calculated risks you need to take to achieve greatness
- Being willing to make the mistakes that will help you to develop yourself and your skills
- Clarifying your goals
- Clarifying your vision
- Acting with integrity
- Living a loving life
- Loving what you do
- Loving what happens to you on the way!
Doesn’t it make sense to live such a life? Isn’t it worth doing the work you may need to do to discover or pursue your passion?
2. Dream Big
“All successful people, men and women, are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision or purpose.” Brian Tracy
Anything that has ever been created started with a dream.
Do you dream? What is your dream job or business?
If you had a business, recall the dream that started your business? It rekindles passion when you share that dream with others. Your dreams are powerful clues to what you are meant to be doing. In Disneyland, new employees are given four days of ‘dream-sharing’ before they learn the technical parts of their jobs!
What prevents you from pursuing your dreams? Isn’t it time to take the risks at last?
3. Craft an inspirational vision for yourself and your organisation
- Where is your life going?
- What can you see?
- Where is your business going?
- What is the vision for the future?
- Why should you or your colleagues commit to that vision if they don’t understand it or don’t even know it?
Are you part of an organisation that has clarified and then published its Purpose (or ‘Mission’), Vision, and Goals? When I ask employees about these fundamentals, the usual response is sceptical, even cynical, laughter. In fact, very few employees can remember them! And if they do remember them, they often don’t believe them anyway as they do not see it being actioned by the leaders.
Many leaders are unwilling to share their financial and business goals with their employees.
If employees are kept in the dark, how can they be expected to throw their souls, their passion, into the business?
4. Build trust
Without trust, there is no communication. Without communication, the real issues are shoved under the carpet. Building trust is like building a brick wall; it can take years to build it, but it can collapse overnight.
Still, both the brick wall, and trust, is worth building. Understand the power of trust and how it unlocks the truth and everyone with whom you deal will be more willing to access their souls and their passion and, more importantly, to contribute them to ensure success for any endeavour.
5. Build exceptional team work and team spirit
Not many people are ‘loners’. Most of us want to be in relationships; we want friends, we want people to care about, and we want to be cared for. Team work supports this basic human need. If you value team work and team spirit, you will create the environment that allows passion to be nurtured, to grow and to be rekindled when it is accidentally squashed.
If you are having a tough time because the quality of team work in your life is not fulfilling, then this one strategy may have enormous value for you.
The two key criteria that build team spirit are trust and a commitment by team members to each other. In other words, team members care about each other.
6. Be willing to make mistakes
This sounds a bit scary, but we live in fast-changing times. Human beings are designed to learn through trial and error. Unless you and your colleagues are learning new skills, new attitudes, new ideas, you will be left behind! People who are left behind soon lose their passion.
The tragedy is that we are often punished for making mistakes. We were punished in school and we see colleagues get the sack for making mistakes. There are lots of reasons why we hide mistakes. Stay at the forefront of technology by sharing and rewarding mistakes: they are excellent learning opportunities.
7. Have some fun
Lighten up! Stop taking yourself too seriously. It is just not true that profits and fun are mutually exclusive.
Fun is not something that happens at 4:36 pm on Fridays: it is an ongoing process where you are constantly thinking of ways to create fun. Southwest Airlines in the USA has created an extraordinary business by focussing on fun. Fun is a spiritual component of our humanity: the more fun you have, the more likely you are to be passionate.
To sum up
Passion is a very powerful force that, when linked with our minds, helps to create an outstanding and unstoppable life and business. If you take the above steps, the passion levels in your life and your colleagues will increase. You will be delighted and you will transform your life to create the results that you want and others will want to follow you.
As the Nike ad says, “Just do it”!
We would love to hear what you think about this article. Does it ring true for you? What “AHA” moments that you can implement in your life straight away did you get?
About the Author – Charles Kovess
After 20 years of high level legal and business experience, Charles knew that most people have a powerful and under-used ingredient they can use to drive successful changes in their lives. He turned his back on the law in 1993 to share those success strategies as a professional speaker, educator, facilitator and coach. Charles is known as Australasia’s Passion Provocateur, and travels the world promoting the power of passion. Charles has authored two inspirational books, ‘Passionate People Produce’, and ‘Passionate Performance’, and is the co-author of ‘The 7 Heavenly Virtues of Leadership’. For more information see Our Experts page.
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