[Neurons] 2009 Meta Reflections #2

[Dr. Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2009 Meta-Reflections #2

January 12, 2009

 

Preparing for a Meta New Year

   Part II

 

HOW TO FIND OR DEVELOP

A LIFE PASSION

 

 

 

We all know the secret to success, greatness, and happiness, do we not?
Haven't we been told and seen studies and read the research that the way to
success, greatness, and happiness is to find and follow your passion?  Yes,
of course!  That's the secret!  Now that you know the secret of life, have a
good one!

 

What?  There's something else?  What?  Oh the how; you want to know "How to
find and follow your passion?"  Ah, that's a different question and one
that's not so easy to answer.  But there is an answer.

 

1) Find your Passion

For many the answer is to simply begin to notice how you answer the
following questions:  What makes you feel most fully alive?  What naturally
and inevitably excites you?  What do you dream about doing, experiencing,
having, or giving?   Or you could begin to recover those dreams that you had
as a child or a teenager.  What did you continually dream about in those
early years?  And even if you didn't talk about it aloud or discuss it with
others, what captivated the inmost places of your heart?

 

Now if you, like so many people, have had the dreams of youth extinguished,
if parenting, schooling, "being realistic," or the hard knocks of life have
knocked all the dreams out of you, you might give yourself to some
self-discovery for recovering an awareness about yourself and what's within.
Or if you, like so many, have had self-knowledge and self-awareness tabooed
so that you're not allowed to go there, then begin to giving yourself the
permission that's been taken away.  Then you too can begin the odessey of
discovering and "knowing thyself."

 

Finding your passion will, more often than not, mean discovering your
natural talents and dispositions.  But you knew that, didn't you?  Surely
you've heard that a hundred times.  "What are you good at?  What do you do
with ease that others find difficult?  What are some of your natural
dispositions?"

 

Generally speaking, your passion will be inside your natural "strengths" as
your innate talent or disposition, which if you give yourself to the effort
and discipline of learning, you can cultivate into a skill, then a
competency.  And if you stay with it, you will turn it into an expertise and
after some more years, into a mastery.  No one is born an expert; everybody
has to learn.  No one is born a master; people become masters in a given
field after years of commitment, discipline, and effort.  Howard Gardner
documented this in his work, Creating Minds as he explored the biography of
seven geniuses of the twentieth century, one corresponding to each of the
seven intelligences of his Multiple Intelligences Model.

 

Now if you find any of the words in the previous paragraph shocking or
disappointing, that might very well explain your challenge in finding your
passion.  Passions have to be developed.  They have to be cultivated.  They
do not just land in your lap full-grown.  "The Myth of the Easy Passion" is
precisely what discourages many.  When they come up against the effort,
discipline, and challenge of developing their passion, they experience a
disillusionment as if they had been betrayed or sold a bill of goods.

"I have to work?"  "I have to put out effort?"  "Why can't it be easy?"
"Why does there have to be set backs, challenges, discipline?  If it was
really my passion, it would all come easy, right?"

 

Perhaps the Myth begins with the word "find."  I suppose find could suggest
or imply that you will just happen upon it, and then, "Lo, and behold, There
it is!"  But find can also imply a search, a hunt, a digging around as in a
gold mine, filtering through all of the rock and dross to find the gold.
Find can suggest that you have to look here and there, turn over this rock
and that, until you discover it.  And this search may take years and lots of
experimenting to find your passion.

 

2) Create your passion

So what if you can't find your passion?  What then?  Well, the next choice
is to create it.          "Create it?  I can do that?  Just create it?  How
is that possible?   What does that mean?"

 

Don't let the idea that there is a passion for you-somewhere, some time, and
that you have to spend your whole life off on some Indiana Jones adventure
trying to find it-deceive you.  You don't.  Don't be deceived into thinking
that you can't start living, being successful, experiencing greatness,
enjoying happiness until you find it.  That's a Myth also.  And it's a
dangerous myth at that.  It encourages passive waiting, procrastination, and
path-of-least resistance living.

 

Because passions never come to you full-blown and at a red-hot temperature,
they have to be develop.  But there's more.  We have to develop them and we
also have to be developed for them.  This is true for both the passions that
you find in your natural talents and gifts and for those that you choose to
create.  So how do you just "create" a passion?  There are several steps.

 

First, take interest in something.  Anything.  In fact, if you look around
to see it, you will find human beings highly interested in all kinds of
things.  And many, many of these things are things that you might scratch
your head wondering "How in the world could anyone be interested in that?!"
Take anything and you'll find someone somewhere is interested in it!  Take
anything and someone finds it absolutely fascinating and interesting!  Now
isn't that fascinating?

Don't write that off as a pathology.  That's our usual tendency, isn't it?
That's what I often do.  But when I'm at my best I know that this strange
fact that anything and everything can be interesting to human beings is a
gateway to finding and creating passions.  This realization first struck me
a few years ago and when it did, I made a trip to the dictionary to find out
what the word "interest" really meant.  And that's when I discovered a
jewel-a real jewel.

 

Interesting enough, the word interest is comprised of two words- est (to
exist, to live in) and in  (to be inside of something).  So interest means
to exist inside of something or to put oneself inside of something.

 

Wow!  Did you catch that?  We typically talk about something "getting" our
interest, "catching" our interest, or of something as "being" interesting.
And when something is interesting to us, we get involved.  We get inside it.
We are inside it.  And we want to be more inside it!  After all, we're
interested in it.  Yet the word itself reveals the secret of why and how you
find something "interesting" or "boring."  And what is the secret?  The
secret is whether you put yourself into that thing or not.  If you do not
put yourself into it and live there, you will find it boring.  If you do,
then you are in-ter-est-ed in it-you yourself will be inside it!

 

Think about something that you find interesting and notice how you think
about it.  You probably have a movie playing in your mind in which you are
involved with it, you are inside the move seeing, hearing, and feeling.
Compare that now to something that you consider "boring" or un-interesting.
Do you have a movie or just a snapshot?  And is it in color or compelling?
Typically you represent one so that it is colorful, close, and that you are
inside it whereas boring things are black-and-white, at a distance, and you
are just observing it.

 

Now we have the key question for creation a passion:  Are you willing to put
yourself into something and to live in it?  If you are, you will begin to
become more and more interested in it.  In fact, most things are like this.
Think about all of the things in your life that you are not interested in
that you had to learn how to take interest in it.  You had to learn the
distinctions, the rules of the game, the key factors.

 

So what would you now like to take interest in?  What would you like to
create a passion out of?  I remember when I first got involved in real
estate.  I say "involved" because I was not interested.  So why did I do it?
One reason.  Because I figured it was something that I could do on the side
to build some equity and create an investment.  And why did I do that?
Because I was sick and tied of debt and of living paycheck to paycheck.
That aversion pushed me kicking and screaming into real estate.  Not exactly
a passion, right?

 

But today, these many years later, real estate has become a passion for me.
Ask my friends.  I'm always talking about it.  Always asking questions about
real estate in various places, reading books on it; taking workshops on it;
watching real estate channels on television!  You'd think I'm a nut about
it, and I guess I am.  It has become a passion.  I created it as a passion
by taking more and more and more interest in it.

 

Second, once you've begun with an interest, develop a strategic plan for
cultivating your passion in that area.  With real estate, I began with one
rental property that was an owner-carry loan and I put in a lot of physical
work cleaning, painting, repairing, etc.  Then I got burned.  I didn't
select the right people. So I had to learn how to get them out.  Then I got
burned again.  I selected more wrong people, again!  Now I was getting
interested.  One facet of the rental business really got my attention and
interest: How do you select the right people?  Knowing NLP, I began asking,
"How do I 'read' people and their meta-programs to pick a responsible person
who will be straight-forward from one irresponsible and refuses to be held
accountable?"  That's what I wanted to know.  And that drove me to figure
that one out, which I eventually did and briefly wrote about in the book,
Figuring Out People (1997/ 2007).

 

I developed my passion in that area by attending workshops, reading lots and
lots of books, and setting out a plan for buying one investment property a
year.  Doing that, in turn, cultivated my interest in that.  It is not my
biggest passion, but it is one.  And definitely one that I was not born with
nor a natural gift.

 

As you cultivate your passion, be sure to constantly check that you have
given up the non-sense and stupidity of waiting for a moment of magic when
some passion hits you up against the head and gets your attention.  It does
not work that way.  You have to go after it.

 

Summary

There's no need to miss the joy and meaningfulness of a life lived
passionately.  You can create one.  A life passion can be found and if not
discovered, it can be developed.  And passion in life is not merely nice, it
is essential.  It is especially essential for living life fully and with
vitality.  It is essential for joy, ecstasy, and meaningfulness; it is
essential for unleashing your potentials.

 

 

 

L.  Michael Hall, Ph.D.

International Society of Neuro-Semantics

Meta-Coach Training System

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO.  81520 USA

1 970-523-7877

1 970-523-5790 fax

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