These past four weeks, we’ve focused on passion. We’ve gained a clearer understanding of what passion is, what our passions are, and how it rallies around purpose and supplies leaders with energy.
At the end of the day, our appetites matter just as much — if not more than — our aptitudes! What we are passionate about, fired up about, driven by, is much more important than what our skills are…because passion will drive us to move forward with a force beyond our wildest imagination, if we allow it to!
Before you can lead with confidence and force, you must first understand where you want to go, and why. What consumes your thoughts? What grabs your attention, tugs at your heart, and won’t let go?
Once you discover your passion, nurture it. Life will assault your passions, disappointment will assault your passions, and responsibilities — and, yes, self-limiting beliefs and self-imposed constraints — will try to crowd it out and keep you from pursuing your passion. I encourage you to be strong; refuse to bury your passion under life’s many challenges. Passion is the key to finding fulfillment in life.
Consider what Henry David Thoreau said:
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
I encourage you to not let this be an apt description of you. Take the time to discover your passion. Then nurture it, feed it, allow it the time and space to grow. Harness it to your leadership and the song you sing will outlive you.
Having only recently (within the last few years) allowed my passion to be fully acknowledged and developing my dream and plan to move forward into my potential and my vision, I can say from experience, it’s an amazing, exciting, energizing, reinvigorating, fun adventure. I wouldn’t trade it for anything!
So, what are you passionate about? And what are you doing about it?
