How to Live with Passion

This blog post was originally a transcript from a podcast recording. Listen to the full episode below. Subscribe today!

Well hello friends! How are we doing this week? I am still here in sunny South Padre Island and enjoying the salty breeze. One of my favorite sounds here is the constant rustle of the palm trees blowing in the wind. It’s such a therapeutic sound and is lovely to fall asleep to when taking a midday nap by the pool!

I’ve also had some good news this week - as some of you know, I was a marketing communications contractor with American Airlines prior to being laid off due to COVID-19. Rather than spiral into misery with thoughts of fear for the future, I have really been loving this time to slow down and get back in touch with myself and my values.

For the past three months, I’ve been applying to jobs while also working on The Jet Set Blonde, and this week I’ve been offered another marketing consulting gig! I start next week and am really excited to help this company with their marketing strategy and branding.

But don’t fear - I’ll still be here with you on here on the podcast and blog, delivering weekly content to help you create extraordinary, jet set lives where you live life to the fullest.

I really enjoy coaching and consulting so I’m excited for what this next chapter brings as we head into the second half of 2020.

Now, I’d like to introduce a new aspect of the podcast called Society Spotlight. This is where I highlight someone in the Jet Set Society that has benefited from the jet set lifestyle. And this Society Spotlight is on Grande Latte Girl - I love your iTunes handle, by the way! Because I love my Grande Lattes from Starbucks too!

She left me a five-star review on iTunes and this is what she said, “Love this new podcast! Love the insight and the thoughtfulness to each podcast! Also really enjoy hearing about things you love and why! Will definitely keep listening!”

Thank you so much for that incredible review. This is why I love doing this. I want to provide women with a new perspective on how they can live the most amazing, passionate, and fulfilled versions of themselves. And even if you think that you’re not all that passionate about anything, I promise, she’s in there.

And that’s what we are going to be discussing today! How to find your passion and how to live every day with it. Are you ready to learn how to live with passion? Because I’m going to share it with you.

Passion is a Choice

So let’s jump into this week’s topic on how to live with passion. Last night, my aunt and uncle came over and joined my family for dinner on the island. We had the T.V. on and soon after we finished our meals, we noticed that the movie “Coming to America” with Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall was coming on. It had been years since I had seen the movie, so I was excited to re-watch it. And I absolutely love this movie. Not only is it entertaining but I also love what values are communicated in this film - values like self-resilience, purpose, passion, and generosity. I swear I was probably smiling from ear to ear for the whole movie!

I’ll give you a brief recap for those of you who haven’t seen it. The movie opens up with a Eddie Murphy’s character, Akeem, waking up in his family’s grand palace in Africa. They live lavish lives as royalty with rose petals being thrown onto the ground everywhere they walk. It’s Akeem’s 21st birthday and he’s supposed to marry a woman who he’s just met. He’s granted permission to take 40 days off before the wedding to travel to New York. Akeem secretly plans to meet someone that he has a real connection with and marry that woman instead.

Here’s what I love most about this movie. Akeem has all the wealth he needs and could stay at a 5-star hotel while he’s in New York, but he chooses to rent out a very poor apartment in Queens and work as a janitor at a fast-food restaurant. And he was thrilled to come to work everyday and mop the floors because he was focused on meeting someone genuine who loved him for his personality and not his status. Akeem was living life with passion - and it had nothing to do with his wealth.

That’s what I love about this movie. For most, renting a tiny apartment with rats running around would be terrible, but for him, it didn’t matter. He maintained a perspective of passion and excitement and kept his focus on his mission throughout it all. (I’m not going to tell you how it ends because I want you to watch it for yourself!)

But this is what I want for you. I want you to maintain a perspective of passion and excitement as you pursue your dreams.

Stop Trying to Find Your Passion

So many women today are looking for their passion and trying to find what they are passionate about. And what I want to explain to you today, is that passion is an emotion. And emotions are created by our thoughts. Emotions are always created within us, therefore we create our own feelings of passion.

This is great news, right?! This means that we have the ability to create passion. It’s not something that we have to find outside of ourselves. It’s already within us!

And this is based on cognitive behavioral therapy, which says that our thoughts create our emotions. The outside world doesn’t cause our emotions.

Prior to being laid off due to COVID-19, I was a Global Marketing Manager for a division of 5 very different product lines. I felt like I was constantly battling with certain personalities and always putting out fires. It felt like I could never get ahead - like I was always paddling frantically just to keep my head above water.

I neglected my self-care and personal health. I had gained weight and I wasn’t keeping up with an exercise routine anymore. I was feeling burnt out and completely drained. It started feeling like I was just trying to make it through the next 24 hours.

I loved my team and enjoyed the people I worked with, but I came to a place in my role where I started to feel a massive amount of anxiety every morning. I woke up dreading what chaos my email inbox would bring me.

And as a result of all this, I started asking myself the same question - what is my passion? And I couldn’t really come up with a good answer. It was frustrating because I couldn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. I couldn’t feel any ounce of passion anymore. I was just surviving, not thriving.

But then COVID-19 hit. And I lost my job. And the whole economy slowed down. And I finally had a chance to breathe. I finally had a chance to step back and out of the chaos to really evaluate what I wanted to attract in my life. And in this period of time, it became very clear to me that I was the one who had created the chaos.

I became aware of the power of my thoughts and how that could create my emotions and reality. I reflected on the thoughts that I kept replaying in my head day after day. I was thinking thoughts like, “Things will never change here. I am not looking forward to going to the office. I hate my stressful commute. What fires will this day bring that I’ll have to put out?”

And as a result, these thoughts were creating feelings of dread, doubt, anxiety, and overwhelm. Then when I’d approach work that day with those particular feelings bottled up, everything felt stressful - every meeting, every interaction, every email. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy because I was attracting these situations to myself because of the perspective I chose to take on.

It’s the filter through which we choose to see the world. I had a colleague who came in and she was always bubbly and cheerful and optimistic. She was looking forward to interacting with her peers at the office. We both worked in the same environment and yet we had two very different perspectives on it.

And this was because I was choosing to view my experience through a lens of despair while she chose to view her experiences through a lens of passion.

And we have the power to create a lens of despair or passion based on the thoughts that we repeat to ourselves throughout the day. You can create the emotion of passion through what you think.

And this is what I started to come to realize. Passion is not found, it’s created.

So I embraced this concept - I don’t have to find my passion; I can create it. With this revelation in mind, I started to show up as a passionate woman in the life that I had. I began to change the thoughts in my head to create the passion I desired.

Passion Starts with Gratitude

And to do this, my thoughts had to come from a place of gratitude. With a perspective of gratitude, you can focus on all of the good around you. You can see the world for all the blessings it’s given you. Instead of wallowing in self-pity for a job loss, I focused on being grateful for the opportunity to get back to a workout routine once again and re-focus on my self-care. Instead of living in fear of getting sick from COVID-19, I focused instead on how grateful I felt for my health.

I started to look at all the things I had instead of the things that I lacked. I accepted life in the moment and embraced all that was still going well in it - my health, my family, my house over my head, my ability to learn, my supportive fiance.

And as I focused on those blessings, I could feel myself re-awaken again. Life felt worth living once again. It’s from this headspace where you can start to create passion.

A passionate woman celebrates the small wins. She fully accepts her life as it is today, while simultaneously expresses excitement for how she plans to make it more exciting in the future.

I was not living life as a passionate woman as a Global Marketing Manager. I was focusing on all the things that would go wrong in my day. I was complaining about how I wish my life looked different. But that kind of thinking only attracts more of the same. I kept trying to search for things outside myself to help me feel better. But that was always fleeting.

Because the truth is, our feelings are always created by things inside of us - our thoughts. How we see ourselves, how we see others, how we see our situation, how we see the world.

And again - this is good news! It means that we don’t have to change all the people around us or the situation around us or the world outside of us to start feeling passionate about life. The only thing we have to focus on managing is our thoughts.

So your thoughts create your emotions. And your emotions are attracting like energies. So if you want to start attracting more passion in your life, you need to approach it by thinking thoughts of gratitude and abundance.

And something really wonderful can come from this energy shift. As you begin to feel more grateful and passionate for your life, you’ll start to see things that you have never seen before. You’ll see new opportunities that weren’t there before. You’ll notice new ideas that weren’t there before. If you’re too caught up in complaining about what you lack, you may miss out on these new opportunities and ideas.

So we don’t change jobs, change cities, or change schools to start feeling real, lasting passion. We have to change ourselves.

So instead of asking yourself, “How can I find my passion?”, ask yourself, “How can I choose to feel passion in all that I do?”

Now are you going to feel passionate about everything from cleaning the toilets to filing taxes? Eh, no, probably not. But choosing passion is an option that you can decide for yourself.

Consider how you can choose passion in cooking dinner. How can you choose passion in doing the laundry? How can you choose passion when grocery shopping?

But wouldn’t you rather do things with passion as opposed to begrudgingly lull through life? Passion is such a fun emotion! It’s exciting and feels fueled by purpose.

Now, I know us ladies in the Jet Set Society are passionate about travel. So consider that passionate high that you feel when you’re embarking on a trip or discovering a new city. It feels euphoric, doesn’t it? What if you brought that same enthusiasm and zest for life to your everyday, into your daily tasks?

Stop trying to find it. You already have it within you. Passion is not found outside of you - it’s created within you. So bring that emotion forward. Bring the zest of life that you feel when traveling and bring it into your home and work life.

So I’ll leave you with this question: How much could change if you chose to live with passion every single day?

With passion,