Your passion is powerful

My daughter, Beth, came home from California for my birthday. Beth is working on her Masters and, as we were catching up, I got a wonderful example of the power of a great vision. Beth was sharing all this wonderful stuff that’s been happening in her professional pursuits. She’s making wonderful contacts, opportunities have been opening up, and has even been asked by an acknowledged expert in her field to consult.

I told her how proud I was of her, and how wonderful it is that she has become aware of how special she is. She told me, unprompted, that once she had a good handle on exactly what she wanted to do professionally, all of a sudden everything clicked. All these things started happening. There was no stopping her. She had found her passion.

This is the reason we want to find our vision. Once we find our calling, our purpose for being here, the universe, some would say, opens doors for us that had never been opened before. Others would say once we find our calling we notice open doors that we had never noticed before. Either way, and the difference is unimportant, once we find our passion there will be opportunities available to us to help us move forward to answer the call.

Notice, we are talking about two things that impact our motivation, one, having a great vision and two, having clarity in our lives.

A great vision gives us a destination. Until we know where we are going, we have no idea how to get there, we don’t know what we should be doing. We are confused and unfocused. Having a vision allows us to feel passion and use its power. Having a vision motivates us and keeps us motivated.

Clarity, on the other hand, guarantees that we know exactly how to get to our vision. It not only tells us our vision, but helps us determine the path to manifest it in our lives. Clarity increases our confidence in our competence, our successability.

It took Beth a while to figure out her vision. But now she knows what it is, there will be no stopping her.

The vision quest

In an earlier post I wrote that when I was younger I was not motivated, and my mom, even though she wanted me to be motivated, was not able to help me. The problem was that neither of us knew that to be motivated the first step is to have a worthwhile pursuit, something you feel passionately about.

My first wife, Karen, was passionate about her professional life, and I envied her. How I envied her and her passion. She built a program for home based child care, she started a drug rehab program. She knew what she wanted to do and she went out and did it.

I, on the other hand, even in my early grown up life, kind of coasted, just like I did when I was a kid. I did well at what I did. I graduated from a prestigious university, and went on to earn a law degree, but I never was highly motivated. So I decided to find my passion.

I somehow intuitively knew that in order for me to be motivated, really motivated, I needed something I was passionate about.

In the model for self motivation, I have made that worthwhile something, that thing to be passionate about, the vision. I couldn’t think of anything that would be more exciting, more worthwhile, than finding out why I am here, and fulfilling that purpose. And so I set upon a vision quest, a search for my vision. In my next couple of blog postings I will describe four strategies I used in my vision quest. Perhaps they can help you in yours. The four strategies are:

1. My waking dreams
2. My inventory
3. My philosophy statement
4. Look to your desires

Please join me as I present these four strategies.