My passions

Like their close cousin, inspiration, passions demand and deserve our attention. They offer us exhilaration and release; they can animate us and capture us at our best. They’re addictive. When we visit them, time races by unnoticed. Our hearts may pound or quietly soar. Our senses are ignited and to hell with the consequences.

Our passions are energising. They have the potential to fulfil and lift us to greatness. And they’re a bit dangerous, too! Passions are essential to living our more.

A life without passion is like a world without joy: Incomplete.

Where our passions spring from is as varied and unique as we are. Whatever their origin, your passions will connect somewhere with the big stuff in your life, such as: your being, your compass, your relationships, your strongest innate talents, and your work. We believe that in order to reach our more, our passions must be enmeshed with our lives.

We suggest you aim for the same relationship with your passions as you have with your strengths. That is, you can name them, you can claim them, you can feed them, you can grow them and you can deliberately integrate them into your more map, your more compass and your focus found.

You may already have a clear sense of your passions and how you employ them in your life.

If, however, you don’t, we’ve developed a simple tool, power of my passions, which prompts you to once again, be the expert in you. To get to the nub of your passions. Know what they mean to you, where they come from, what they give you and what more they could yet offer you. We won’t ask you to analyse your passions until they lose their zest. We just want you to put them on the table, walk around them and get a sense of their heft and significance. Do write down what you discover, you’ll need to call on it soon!

We’ll also ask you how you’re fuelling and leveraging your passions at work. You may feel that your work is already your passion. You may say you’ve so much going on with your passions in your wider life, that professional reward is all you need from your work. It’s your life, so it’s your call. But if your work life is a totally passion-free zone, then—to misquote the movie—we ask, Houston, do we have a problem?

My passions: Actions and Outcomes