Designing a passionate life requires that you define what success means to you. As I work with people I find that many have ideas about what success looks like based on the culture they live in, family beliefs, or listening to other outside influences. All of these outside influences can cause you to put unnecessary pressure on yourself. What society or other people see as successful may not be how you define it at all. Therefore, in your eyes you may feel like a "failure". It's time to question your ideas about what success means to you.
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Designing a passionate life includes gratitude. Since we are in the week for Thanksgiving here in the United States I thought it would be appropriate to talk about gratitude. I do believe that living in gratitude is key to living a passionate life because gratitude is saying 'yes' to your life. It opens you up to the possibilities and the energy flow of action and abundance. I don't think we celebrate gratitude just one time a year and then we're done with it. It's a way of life, of opening and letting Source flow through you.
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Designing a passionate life with balance includes writing down all the ya-buts that come up after you identify your passions. After you identify what you absolutely love and what makes your heart sing, often the self-doubt arises. Your self-doubt can arise in a variety of ways but one common way is what I call the choir or those voices in your head that just won't stop listing all of the reasons why following your passions won't work. There are usually two sides to the chatter, the voice coming from your heart that states all of the reasons why it's a good idea. Then there is the negative choir made up of multiple voices of naysayers. These voices are often a combination of your own self-doubts as well as the doubts of family members and friends.
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Designing a passionate life includes stopping the hiccups. Let me explain. I'm talking about the actual physical hiccups that you can get and what I'm calling the hiccups of life. Stay with me here. I will connect the dots. I got the hiccups today and I expressed my frustration with having them to a friend of mine. My friend's face lit up and he said, as people often do when you have the hiccups, "I have the perfect solution and it really works, just try it!" I don't know how many times I've heard different solutions for stopping the hiccups but I humored him and listened. What he said resonated with me and I knew it would work and I wanted to prove it to myself.
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Designing a passionate life includes living from inspiration. I'd like to define inspiration before I talk more about it. Inspiration is acting or moving either your intellect or emotions. I see working from inspiration different than working from motivation. Motivation is defined as a need or desire to take action. To me inspiration comes from a place of power, creativity, and connection from deep inside of you and you feel the desire to take action. To me, inspiration is a lighter energy than motivation. Motivation feels like "willing or forcing" myself to take action rather than being moved to take action. Both inspiration and motivation move you forward but from a different type of energy. Right now, I'm focused on inspiration.
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Designing a passionate life includes developing daily practices that move you towards your life vision. After you are clear about your passions, you need to take action towards living your passions. The actions come with the clarity of vision. You also need to develop daily practices that become habits that strengthen you and continue to move you towards living your passions.
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Designing a passionate life and life balance requires a clear vision of what this means to you. There are lots of different exercises that can help you and I've done many of them and they work. I want to introduce you to a different point of view that has given me a different perspective on how to gain clarity about what I want my life to look like. This technique is to have a conversation or dialog with your life.
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Designing a passionate life includes eliminating negative head-talk. I've also heard it referred to as negative self-talk, negative chatter, or what ever name you give it. The end result is the same, self-sabotage. You may not only experience negative head-talk but also depression, lack of energy, and other behaviors that keep you from moving forward, taking action, and enjoying life. So what can you do about it?
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