The PurposeGirl Podcast: Empowering women to live their purpose with courage, joy, and fierce self-love. - The PurposeGirl Podcast Episode 020: How To Discover And Live Your Passion

The PurposeGirl Podcast Episode 020: How To Discover And Live Your Passion

07/26/18 • 43 min

The PurposeGirl Podcast: Empowering women to live their purpose with courage, joy, and fierce self-love.

What are you truly, deeply passionate about? Some of us have ready answers to this, but others have suppressed their desires, have buried them away because they’ve been taught that one’s passions aren’t nearly as important as other things, like having a successful career. Many people believe that once they’re very successful, once they amass wealth, they’ll be happy. But more than 100 research studies prove conclusively that the opposite is true: When we are happy, we are more successful! When we follow our passions and do those things that nourish us and make us happy, it carries over to other aspects of our lives, including our work life.

When I was in college I was passionate about two very different things: event planning and creative writing. But my idea of event planning was mocked, and I was told that writers don’t make any money. And so I put those passions away. I hear similar stories from so many of my clients who, when they were little girls, were told that their passions were foolish or wrong. And when this happens, our brains bury these passions and tries to forget them. This is a defense mechanism, and I explain the evolutionary biology reasons for this.

Bob Vallerand, the premier researcher on passion, defines passion as a strong inclination towards an activity that people like, that people find important, and in which they invest their time and their energy. I expand that definition to “activity or cause.” He says that passions become a self-defining activity. So, you don’t just run, you’re a runner.

I walk you through a few exercises to help you remember your passions, which you most likely knew when you were little, before you buried them away.

Next I define purpose and explain how passion and purpose are so closely connected. Passions help us understand our purpose. Purpose is the active, unique impact you make on the world. You may have many passions. Your purpose often is in enacting that, being that, being your full self.

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly defines flow as when you are so engaged in an activity that you lose track of time, you’re “in the zone.” When we’re passionate about something we go into flow, we’re willing to give up our precious free time for it. Hopefully, as you listen to this episode, you’re getting more clear on your own passions.

I talk about some of my own passions, which were evident even when I was a young girl, and how I’ve incorporated them into my purpose, into my actions. People who live their passions harmoniously are happier, healthier, and more successful overall.

To help you with your passions, I leave you with Purpose Power Tips.

And if you’d like to check out a friend’s podcast, which I mentioned during this episode, it’s Naked Talk with Unprocessed Jess, and you can find it on iTunes.

It would really mean a lot to me if you would go to iTunesand leave me a review (hopefully a great one!), leave a 5 star rating, subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode, and download the episodes! And please spread the word and help our community grow!

Thank you so much spending your time with me! And if you aren’t following me already, you can find me on Instagramand Facebook, and click hereto receive my newsletter.

May you live purposefully, may you love yourself, and may you love life.

Bye for now!

I walk you through a few exercises to help you remember your passions, which you most likely knew when you were little, before you buried them away.

To help you with your passions, I leave you with Purpose Power Tips.

And if you’d like to check out a friend’s podcast, which I mentioned during this episode, it’s Naked Talk with Unprocessed Jess, and you can find it on iTunes.

Thank you so much spending your time with me! And if you aren’t following me already, you can find me on Instagramand Facebook, and click hereto receive my newsletter.

May you live purposefully, may you love yourself, and may you love life.

Bye for now!

Previous Episode

The PurposeGirl Podcast Episode 019: Why Do Women Tear Down Other Women, And What Can We Do About It?

Too often, women feel a sense of competition with other women and tear each other down instead of supporting each other. Today I have the pleasure of interviewing my dear friend, and a genuine inspiration to me and countless others, Caroline Adams Miller, an expert in, among other things, utilizing positive psychology research to help people find success, and how we as women can support and uplift each other.

When Caroline was young she struggled with competition with other women. Her awareness of unhealthy competition among women continued over the years, and as she spoke with more and more women, she learned that every women seems to have had experiences of other women tearing them down or engaging in forms of unhealthy competitiveness with them.

There are many reasons why women engage in this unhealthy competition with each other. For some, it’s driven by jealousy. For others it’s scarcity theory, the fear that there’s only “one seat at the table,” or that there isn’t enough success to go around. For others it might have a cause rooted in evolutionary biology. And for others, watching another woman go after her dreams in a big way triggers FOMO, a Fear Of Missing Out.

Caroline shares research that says that 84% of women confess to being surrounded by “frenemies,” friends who are really enemies, and women often keep these people around out of fear of standing out and standing up for themselves. But keeping them in your life is a huge danger, because they bring you down and make it much more likely that you’ll give up on going after your dreams. Research by Shelly Gable at UCLA on Active Constructive Responding teaches us that the way people around us respond to us greatly increases the chances that we’ll abandon our goals or interpret our progress as negative. We need to be much more selective and intentional about who we allow into our “inner circle.” The people who are “in” should be the people who are enthusiastic about our dreams, our goals, and our ideas.

We also discuss Adam Grant’s book, Give and Take, and what we can learn from it about giving to others, and the concept of “relational grit,” which Caroline and Lee Waters, the current president of the International Positive Psychology Association, have come up with.

Caroline and I are both huge supporters of dialogue with other like-minded women, participation in masterminds to uplift each other and support each other’s efforts towards goals, and we talk about the importance of developing these support systems.

As Caroline learned more about this issue she eventually came to the point where she decided that talking about it wasn’t enough; she needed to DO something about it! So she came up with a multi-pronged approach drawing on Shelly Gable’s research on Active Construcive Responding and on Peter Gollwitzer’s work on implementation intentions (which involves creating if-then scenarios to prompt you to do things that are difficult for you).

Caroline has created a simple way for women to uplift other women, which she calls Share 2 To 2. Every week, Caroline shares the successes of two women, each on two different social media platforms, and she uses the hashtag, #Share222. She often doesn’t know the women she uplifts personally; she finds them on LinkedIn, or on some other platform, and shares their successes with others. She firmly believes that by uplifting other women and highlighting their successes, there will be more women at the table in positions of authority, and there will be less of an effect of scarcity theory, less fear from some women of other women succeeding, and it will be a positive spiral.

I end with a few Purpose Power Tips, including learning about Active Constructive Responding, using the hastag #Share222, and “I’ll have what she’s having!”

Click here to learn more about the summit in Melbourne, Australia, in July 2019, in which Caroline will be participating with the founder of Appreciative Inquiry as they explore, using the tools of positive psychology, how women can uplift and inspire other women in the best possible ways.

To learn more about Shelly Gable’s work on Active Constructive Responding, here’s an article summarizing it, and here’s her original research.

To learn more about Caroline, go to CarolineMiller.com, and for more background into #Share222, take a look at her LinkedIn articles on it. And check out some her books: Getting Grit, Creating Your Best Life, and My Name Is Caroline.

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Next Episode

The PurposeGirl Podcast Episode 021: How We Can Profit At Work From Being Positive

We spend a significant percent of our waking hours at work, and yet, too many of us feel undervalued and underappreciated at work. It’s well documented that when employees are happier and feel valued, they perform better and retention is higher, but many employers aren’t conscious of this, or if they are, they don’t know what to do about it. Fortunately, the field of positive psychology holds a lot of answers, and my guest is the perfect person to share this knowledge with us.

Senia Maymin is a dear friend, a close colleague, and a mentor. She has a Masters in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Stanford, is a consultant and executive coach working with clients like Google, Intel, and VMware, and coaches entrepreneurs and executives on building confidence and creating successful teams, writes for a wide range of media outlets, founded, edits, and is the chief of research for Positive Psychology News Daily, and is the most get-it-done woman that I’ve ever met!

Senia shares a little of her background and some of the work that led to the writing of her book, Profit From The Positive. She and a colleague, Margaret Greenberg, had each been coaching a number of executives and entrepreneurs, and they began to realize that they were seeing patterns in the struggles and questions of their clients. They decided to conduct a number of interviews to dive deeper into this, and they asked what their biggest business burning questions were. Many said they wanted to know how they could get the mostout of their people, and Senia and Margaret felt this was the wrong way of thinking about it. Instead, better questions would be, “How can we get the bestout of our people? How can we bring our people to be their best?” From these interviews and their own research they learned so many important truths about how to maximize positivity and success in the workplace, including how crucial it is for employees to feel valued.

We discuss strengths, and Senia poses three questions for you to ponder to help you begin to identify your own strengths. Research is very clear that by using your strengths every day you’ll be happier and more productive, so understanding your own strengths is fundamental to leading a more fulfilled life. To go much deeper into strengths, you can take the Values In Action (VIA), a free questionnaire created by two of the founders of Positive Psychology; you’ll find a link below.

Senia and I share a number of questions that we ask our coaching clients to help get at their deeper truths and allow them to share more of themselves, we talk about the concept of “struggling well,” and Senia shares her thoughts on how people can take action on their dreams, which is different for different people.

We discuss the idea put forth by Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology, that we are called to the future, drawn by our future self, we are motivated every day to take action based on what our future self wants us to do. To me, this boils down to purpose, that if we think about the highest and best self that we can possibly be, then we’re going to take a different action in this moment.

We end with Purpose Power Tips on how you can immediately go into your own workplace and start being the champion of positivity and profitability, and for you to do and feel better and be more successful.

To take the free strangths assessment tool, the VIA, go to http://www.viacharacter.org.

To learn more about Senia and her coaching services, go to https://www.svchange.com.

You can also check out Senia’s book, Profit From the Positive, at Amazon: https://amzn.to/2LOIRKi

I invite you to check out Positive Psychology News, which you can find at https://positivepsychologynews.com.

We mention the Certificate in Applied Positive Psychology (CAPP) program, which I’ve been teaching for a number of years. If you’d like to learn more about it, you can check it out at http://certificateinpositivepsychology.com/. And if you decide to join CAPP, whether you study with me or another one of the outstanding instructors, you can receive a discount by using this code: carinr27

Thank you so much spending your time with me! And if you aren’t following me already, you can find me on