Finding your passion is the million-dollar question that business owners, consultants, and management gurus have been pondering since the earliest days of commerce. From the inventor of the wheel to modern entrepreneurs, everyone wants to know how to ignite and sustain motivation. Let’s explore how you can discover and harness your own inner drive.
Business owners often invest heavily in motivational speakers to rally their teams, even though extensive research shows that you can’t truly motivate another person—not in a lasting way. While you can use short-term incentives like rewards or penalties to influence behavior, these methods often lose their effectiveness over time. True, enduring motivation comes from within.
You may not be able to motivate someone else, but you can discover what motivates you. This self-awareness is the key to unlocking your latent creativity and passion. Finding your passion—the intrinsic motivation that comes from within—is the only lasting drive that will sustain you day after day without needing constant reminders, nudges, encouragement, or threats.
As an intrapreneur™—someone who works within a small business for a solo entrepreneur but is personally vested in their responsibility for creating a profitable business through assertive risk-taking and innovation—you must find that internal passion. A crucial part of your role is also helping your team discover and cultivate their own inner drive.
Finding Your Passion: The Key to Lasting Motivation
How do you find this hidden motivational switch? What inspires one person to approach their work with passion, while another equally talented individual performs the same task begrudgingly, doing just enough to get by? Why does one person feel energized by a particular task, while another does not? Many of us spend at least eight to nine hours a day at work—almost 25 to 30 percent of our lives. If you’re simply watching the clock, counting down the minutes until you can leave, you’re missing something crucial in your work life: passion.
Sadly, many people don’t enjoy their work, and worse still, they don’t expect to. They show up, look busy, and collect a paycheck just to cover their bills. Is it any wonder that most heart attacks and strokes in America happen on Monday mornings, as people begrudgingly prepare for another week of unfulfilling labor?
Being passionate about your job is more than just the old cliché, “Do what you love.” It’s about looking forward to going to work. It’s glancing at the clock at 2 p.m. and realizing you never even had your morning coffee. It’s working past “quitting” time, not because you have to, but because you’re so engrossed that time flies by. Is this your reality?
If You’re Not Passionate About Your Work, It’s Time for a Change
If you’re not passionate about your work, you may feel like you’re just going through the motions, wondering if this is all life has to offer. You might ask yourself, “What happened to my dreams?” If your life is currently filled with passion, our book Don’t Be a Yes Chick will help you identify the traits that contribute to that passion, so you’ll always have the tools to boost your confidence when it wanes. If your life isn’t driven by passion right now, Don’t Be a Yes Chick will help you discover what truly excites you and find simple ways to restructure your life so it feeds your desires.
If “finding your passion” seems like it would require running off to Paris, Pisa, or Prague to study art and history, or quitting your job to become a pianist, don’t worry. We’ll help you unleash your passion whether you’re in Des Moines, Detroit, or Dayton. Even if you were to leave everything behind to pursue your fantasies, without understanding the key elements of your passion, you might find yourself right back where you started—only without a steady paycheck.
“When work, commitment, and pleasure all become one and you reach that deep well where passion lives, nothing is impossible.” —Anonymous
You can read more about Finding Your Passion and Fulfillment in Don’t Be a Yes Chick, releasing Spring 2011.
P.S. For more insights and resources, visit our website at fire.h50.us/~hrgnmpwr/dev2/
