4 Tips To Keep Your Passion Alive in Work & Life!

Periodically Ask Yourself:

1. What made me fall in love with ___________ in the first place?
Make a list and actively appreciate those things.

2. What is something new I can fall in love with now?
A new hobby or skill set, a friendship, an organization, an interest?

3. What can I eliminate that might be blocking my passion?
Unresolved problems, negative people or forces, long-term upsets, low-value time-suckers, lack of organizational or leadership skills?

4. What most excites me in life?
Oprah Winfrey said “Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.”

Give yourself permission to explore your passions; the more alive you allow your passions to be in your life and your work, the more rewarding your experience will be!

January is an inspiring month: crisp, refreshing . . . a seductive blank canvas, just waiting for you to paint your vision for the year. A blank canvas is full of hope and possibilities. A blank canvas invites you to stand up and decide what kind of year you are going to paint. Will it be one full of choices you make that lead you down a different path from the previous year? And perhaps down an even better one? Will this be the year you decide to paint with your most brilliant colors, a year where living in black and white simply won’t do?

We’re almost halfway through January, but it’s still not too late! Envision filling your blank canvas with your most spectacular colors this year. Envision a year filled with one masterpiece after another. Record the steps you will take to accomplish this and then pick up your brush and begin.

Be the Master of your Life!

My husband, Richard, and I saw the recently released movie, “The Help” yesterday afternoon. Not only were we both blown away by

the story, the Oscar-worthy acting, the humor, the authenticity to the 60s in set (did you, too, notice the Charles Chips cans?), clothing and music, and the pathos, but we were brought up straight in our seats by the power of the movie’s (and the book’s) basic theme, that of courage. Of moral courage. Of courage in the face of dire consequences, including possible death.

It made us think . . . in our modern day everyday lives, when are we called upon to muster giant-size courage? What decisions do we make in our lives and work where we can tap into our courage to take the road less traveled, the unpopular path? And by doing so, what changes, moderate or monumental, can we bring about?

No only did we leave “The Help” satisfied by a movie masterpiece, but exhorted to dip into our own storehouses of courage to make things better.

Get thee to “The Help!”

No matter what your political affiliation, you gotta’ love Gabby Giffords right

now. And you gotta’ admire her new definition of “perfect.”

In order to register her vote on raising the debt ceiling and particularly to cast a swing vote if necessary, Gabby Giffords got out of her hospital skivvies and made her way from Houston to Washington. She appeared on the floor of the House of Representatives and cast her vote. She did this even though her condition was nowhere near perfect. She did this when she was not able to articulate verbally everything she might want to. She did this even when she was not able to string together every single nuance of thought that she could previously. She did this when her hair was short, short, short and nowhere near the longer blonde “look” she had sported pre-shooting.

Gabby Giffords ventured out of her hospital bed into the flashbulbs of the cameras when she was nowhere near perfect. And in doing so, she redefined what “perfect” truly is.

A fellow exerciser and I were chatting it up as we huffed and puffed through our workout at our Boulder, Colorado 80305 Curves yesterday. This woman and I usually go at different times, so we had not had not met each other previously. I quickly learned that “Laura” is a 5th grade teacher at an accelerated school. She said that the end of the year for 5th grade teachers at her school is the opposite from the teachers of the other grades. As the other teachers are gearing down toward the end, the 5th graders are gearing up for important tests and markers as they finish the year. It had been so encompassing, she said she was just now barely starting to recover from the rigor of crossing that finish line and was glad to catch her breath and regroup.

I asked what she was doing to “let the air out of her tires,” and she responded with things I would have expected such as (Read more…)

This Memorial Day weekend, my husband and I went with good friends, Diane and Neil, to see the new documentary, “I AM.” This film is the creation of Tom Shadyac, the director of Jim Carrey’s blockbuster, “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” and Eddie Murphy’s popular “The Nutty Professor.” These movies and others made Shadyac a multi-millionaire with exquisite mansions scattered around the country. However, after having a severe cycling accident, Tom started to really think deeply about life and what was important in life. He especially addressed the question, (Read more…)

This morning I met a woman who is a friend, a neighbor and a fellow business owner for coffee at our local coffee shop. We met to discuss some possible affiliate marketing possibilities with our respective businesses. After 1.5 hours of sitting, sipping, talking and looking at different sites on her laptop computer, we agreed that we had made great headway. We each had gathered new ideas as to how to better our internet marketing efforts to move our businesses forward.

The interesting part is that we are in different businesses. She is a speech pathologist and vocal coach; my business is in keynote speaking and training on success and mastery. Yet we could use the same marketing tactics to expand our businesses.

Have you considered having a bit of a “master mind” experience with (Read more…)

Internationally acclaimed architect, Frank Gehry, now 81, materialized his desire once again to create something artistic and “unique” in his recently unveiled masterpiece, the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Absent are the usual 90° angles and shapes seen in most healthcare facilities and in their place is an undulating amalgamation of stainless steel. Although the architecture is decidedly playful, the mission of the Center is dead-on serious.

An international medical research facility, the prestigious scientists are studying neurocognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ALS. Gehry is known for his other unorthodox and stimulating buildings as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A. With the new Center, Gehry realized the importance of  creating a structure for these world-renowned researchers that is “unique, (Read more…)

The month of May is known for graduations and attendant celebrations. This May, I have a niece, Sarah, graduating from college and a nephew, Nicholas,

graduating from the IBEW program to receive his Journeyman Electrician’s License. Both Sarah and Nick have worked long and hard on their coursework, expanding their minds and their skill sets along the way.  Their graduations are hard earned and well deserved (and we are very proud of them!).

It got me thinking about graduations themselves and how we don’t really need to restrict them to the month of May or to getting degrees from our venerable institutions (although those are important accomplishments).  To “graduate” means “to complete a course of study.” It also means to “change” and to “go through progressive steps.”

One evening I was out to dinner with a number of my good women friends; we were talking about the fact that the real “raising” of our children was in the past. Although we had all poured our hearts and souls and brains (and, as one of them said, we have the damage to prove it!) into years of going through all of the progressive steps to raise them to be the best human beings they could be, it was a fait accompli. They had “graduated” and left the nest. And we realized . . . we had GRADUATED, too, and consequently, we are (Read more…)

As you or your organization go through your different STAGES, stop and acknowledge the different successes that you accomplish along the way. Don’t just wait for the big end result—you could miss out on some amazing “smaller” masterpieces along the way.

So often when we look at a successful person or a successful organization we tend to think of his/her success in terms of “Ah, she has finally arrived. She is NOW successful.” What we often overlook is that that person’s “ultimate” success probably came in STAGES of success. The famous 20^th century artist, Pablo Picasso, is a good example. “Ultimately,” Picasso is most known for his pinnacle style, Cubism.

In Cubism, Picasso viewed the form, e.g., a human being, in terms of geometric shapes which he then rearranged, camouflaging the forms in the geometry. However, Picasso went through several STAGES in his artistic evolvement before arriving at Cubism. For example, from 1901 to 1904, Picasso’s style manifested a strong sense of melancholy and poetic nuances in what has been called (Read more…)