Last updated on November 23rd, 2017 at 01:29 pm
YOUR Passion IS Your Purpose
The moral of the story is this: If there’s something you’re really passionate about, you need to express it in your work.
This book is an expression of the three items I am most passionate about: dance, psychology and business.
When you must make business decisions or personal choices between what is practical and lucrative, what is efficient or effective or what truly is your heart’s desire, go to a deep place inside yourself and ask, “Who am I?”, “What do I really want out of this business or life?” and “Why is this important to me or to my customers or the team of people I work with or who work for me?”
These questions are how you identify what you are passionate about. Purpose gives meaning to the activities you perform and makes it easier to achieve success with them.
For others, the real joy comes from getting to do more of what they love. They are passionate about their talents, and they want more opportunities to express them—whether it’s as a management consultant, a health practitioner, architect, or designer.
There’s a third group of go-getters who are on a mission to have their product or service reach more people, because they believe they have something better to offer than what’s already out there—if only more people knew about it. These are innovative thinkers like the application developer who creates an organizational communication app that actually helps people stop procrastinating and gets things done through collaboration, or the alternative medicine healer who knows what herbs to provide to get rid of the flu within 24 hours and energy work to practice.
Whether you need to express your Business Mind, your talents, or just reach more people, the only way to move forward is to make a decision to join the dance—to proactively transform your business—in whatever way that will take you to the next level.
Your goal is to find something that you find so compelling, that you want to do so badly that you “cannot NOT do it” and incorporate that into your everyday work.
It doesn’t have to be the whole ball of wax—it can just be a part of what you do. But that part will provide you with the satisfaction and fulfillment necessary to make your mind dance.
You may experience self-doubt time to time, but your dancing mind will strengthen your resolve. You are a great spirit, and great spirits have always encountered and overcome resistance and obstacles along their way.
There’s another important reason to do this: You want to put yourself in a leadership position, so you don’t have to always react to what everyone else in your field is doing. A connection to your passion and purpose will bring you to a place where your work reflects the truth of who you are as a person, thus increasing your personal satisfaction and perception of innovativeness by your customers or clients.
Don’t Just Learn How to Follow
A dance coach learned a similar version of this lesson when he was beginning to teach partner dancing and started by mimicking what he had seen other teachers do. The basic philosophy of dance at the time was that the woman follows and the man leads. “I spent a lot of time teaching the girls to follow,” he told me.
This put a lot of pressure on the girls he taught.
“I did not realize how much it was affecting the girl,” he adds. “She constantly had to be on her toes thinking, ‘What’s going to happen next?’ Can you imagine a life living like this, not knowing what’s going to happen and just being ready to respond to that every second?”
The solution is simple: “You do not teach someone to follow,” he says. “You teach them to dance. My students, before I get them on the floor, I know that they can dance the entire routine by themselves.”
It is the SAME in business. The reason you want to be mindful of transformation in business is so that you can be prepared and proactive and not depend on your “partner” for success.
Your Decision to Dance Will Lead to Transformation
That is why you need to make the decision to dance—to take action right now. Finding out and being self-aware of what gets your heart, mind, body and soul to sing and dance in the workplace. Being self-aware is to be the observer of yourself and be aware of the awareness. But what do I mean by transformation? Transformation is about being mindfully aware and alert as to where to make changes. It has to do with a change that impacts people, processes, technology, and information. It’s also about learning how to assess the impact of what you’re hoping to do and evaluating the risk you will be taking versus your potential reward. This is true whether you want to grow your business, refine the model you are using, or make it more efficient and effective.
Deciding to make that transformation is one way you can lift your business to new heights. Transformation will allow you to undergo a metamorphosis, to evolve from one state of being to another. In essence, transformation is a mindset. It comes in different styles, shapes, and forms, ranging from creating a new product or coaching program, changing the structure or marketing of your business, defining and/or delivering your product or service in a new way, changing your marketing, expanding to a new market, consolidating in ways that will save you money, or perhaps changing the entire direction of your business. Your transformation may have an impact on the people you serve and the people who work with and for you, how you do things, your technology, and even the information you use.
But your business won’t be the only thing you transform.
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Reprinted with permission from the publisher. If you’d like to continue reading, you can get your copy of The Dance of the Business Mind: Strategies to Thrive Anywhere, From the Ballroom to the Boardroom by Valeh Nazemoff, on Amazon.
