One of my favorite frameworks to use with clients as we are starting our consulting journey is called Identifying the 3Ps: Passion, Power, and Purpose. These are the 3 building blocks to better understanding ourselves and setting direction for our living intentions. Rarely do we take the time to reflect on these components, which like anything, have to be directly identified to truly be enacted upon. This is why language is so powerful. In the words of Hattie Boydle, "The quality of the questions we ask ourselves determines the quality of the answers we discover about ourselves."
PASSION
What are you passionate about? This question can be overwhelming for some people. Perhaps you feel passionate about a lot of things or maybe you struggle to identify one thing that stands out amongst your interests. I try to always approach identifying your passion from the perspective of storytelling. There are pinnacle moments in our lives that shape our character and belief systems and often these memories are captured in a narrative format.
There are many things that I've been passionate about in the course of my life, but starting Slow Living Solutions was centered around one in particular. My father passed in early 2022 from pancreatic cancer, five months after his diagnosis. I felt a deep sense of loyalty and obligation to be a part of his journey through those final months and charged myself with making sure that he knew how much I loved him and how much he meant in the lives of other people. I wanted him to go feeling that he had lived a fulfilling life. But the harsh reality is that we can only create that type of fulfillment for ourselves.
So learning this lesson in a very heartbreaking way, I set out to determine what a fulfilling life would look like for me. I don't want to get to the end - tomorrow or 50+ years from now - and feel like I didn't make the most of my time. Without the only person whose approval I sought, the things that mattered in my mind while he was alive no longer held the same value they once did; and the things that I feared trying suddenly held less risk.
Grief and joy are two sides of the same coin. I vowed to live the entire spectrum of emotions. We sabotage our moments of joy when we fear and avoid having to feel moments of loss, disappointment, or failure. Why? Because joy feels just as vulnerable as pain. My internal passion became to build the life that I wanted for myself. This meant giving up the corporate rat race, aligning my lifestyle with my values about supporting a healthy, sustainable environment, and taking care of my physical, mental, and emotional health as well. My external passion became to help others who felt caught in the same position that I was - feeling unfulfilled by the life they had worked so hard for but hadn't met the dream that they had for themselves.
When you think about your passions, start with what stories in your life allow you to feel the most deeply? What have those stories taught you? How do they inspire you? Take a moment to write about that inspiration as a way of identifying what you are passionate about.
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