Follow Your Passions

We hear phrases like “giving back to the community” and “community outreach” all the time. But what is “community”? A quick Google search provides the following definitions (among others):

- a group of people living in a particular local area
- a group of people having ethnic or cultural or religious characteristics in common
- a group of nations having common interests
- profession: the body of people in a learned occupation
- agreement as to goals
- a group of interdependent organisms inhabiting the same region and interacting with each other

Well, that clears it up, right?

Basically, the common thread is “a group”. Generally it indicates a group of humans, though not always, and if you are supporting “your community”, that indicates it is a group of humans you are a part of.

What communities are you a part of? When people volunteer or donate, they often select something that has touched them on a personal level, indicating somehow they feel tied into that community. This is a very natural thing for us to do. But maybe you don’t feel particularly tied into any of the most visible charitable organizations. Does that mean you can’t make a difference you feel great about?

Allow me to challenge you to stretch your mind about what communities you are a part of, and can make a big difference in by volunteering your time, money, and talents. Here is a list of some of the communities I feel tied into, which all tie back into the definitions of “community” listed above:

- the college I graduated from
- my current employer
- my family and friends (and things which are important to them)
- my church
- the city I live in
- my country
- the human race

That last one might be the most important towards saying what I am trying to say, which is – you ARE part of a community. No matter what. And you can give back to your community, you can reach out to your community, however you define that. You can make a difference.

Today’s post is just personal sharing. Not sure there are great lessons to be learned from it. But it is certainly about following my passions.

I live in a condo. It ain’t bad. It’s got a reasonable amount of space, a decent floorplan, and the location is pretty convenient. The neighborhood is okay, I have neighbors that usually aren’t too awful, and I can see a few stars in the sky through the light pollution.

If I lived in this place the rest of my life, I could certainly live out a happy enough existence. I am not unhappy here. But this place does not really add to my happiness, other than it is a good shelter from elements, has all my stuff in it, and quite often does not have police chasing someone closeby.

But it is not a home my wife and I love. It was a great starter home for us, and we’ve lived hear longer than I think we anticipated originally. 2007 is a year when one of my major themes is Independence. Another is Fun. In the spirit of those themes, we have a goal this year: to buy a home we love.

We have an area we really like, and the pros drastically outweigh the cons in terms of making the move. But it is a huge change, and it will uproot the life we have known, shake it up a bit, and plant it in some new shape somewhere else. Another of my five themes for 2007 is Balance, so while we’re looking for a home we love we’re also not going to break the bank reaching that dream. I am confident we can accomplish both the purchase of a home we love and making sure we continue to be in good financial shape.

I’ll keep you updated on the progress.

Prejudice is a reality. It is something we all experience about some one or some thing else, judging with our eyes when we have little else to go on. It is a natural reaction. But what you do about your reaction, how you process it, makes ALL the difference. Do you take your prejudices and let them rule your experiences and interactions with others? Or, are you conscious of your prejudices, and do you try to make sure they don’t affect your life and the lives of those around you in artificial ways?

When I meet someone new, regardless of skin color, environment, style, or any sort of outward appearance (except, perhaps to some degree, body language), I try desperately to give people the same high level of respect when I meet them for the first time. My philosophy is to start at that high level, and hope that they exceed or match it (and they usually do). It means it is up to their actions and words to make me gain or lose respect for them, not whether they are in a wheel chair, or they are a different age, or female, or from a different part of the world, etc.

Today as you go out into the world and spend another day in the world, experiment with seeing how differently people react to you if you begin the relationship by granting them a great deal of respect just for being a human being, capable of joy and suffering just as much as yourself.

I understand the major themes in my life, and I have taken stock of how I am spending my time relative to those themes (see the previous two posts for what I am referring to). So… now what?

Two summers ago, my wife and I went to a beach town in Oregon armed with a couple of pens and a stack of index cards. We each began writing every goal we individually had in life, whether short term or long, small or massive. Then we combined our individual stacks, tossed the duplicates (luckily there were a lot of those), and laid the remaining cards out in front of us. Slowly but surely, we discussed and agreed upon the priority each item held for us, and combined the results on one sheet of paper in order of priority. Once we had our list, we wrote the time frame associated with each goal, broken down into the categories of “one year”, “one to five years”, “five to ten years”, “by retirement”, and “ongoing”. Some of the items were things we both wanted to work towards, some were individual items, so we noted that as well.

We keep the list on our fridge, looking at it every time we walk by, talking about specific items on it as time passes. Keeping aware of it.

Last year, we went to a beach in San Diego and got our list out. We discussed where we were on the items. What did we accomplish? What new goals do we have? Which goals have dropped in priority or completely off our list? What has become more important? Do the time frames for any of them need to be adjusted? Once we had our answers, we wrote the new list on a new sheet of paper, brought it home, stuck it on the fridge, and kept moving towards our dreams.

I want to be clear – you do NOT have to be married or have a partner to do this exercise. Just trim it to a single person – you just pull out the part where you combine the index cards. But I do recommend once you have them done, you share them with a trusted friend or family member and discuss them. Often times, this will help you get some of them clearer in your mind, and help hold you accountable to the goals.

Also, you don’t have to go to a beach to do this exercise, but I encourage you to find some relaxing, quiet place you can be alone with your thoughts for a while in. And make sure you can stay there for at least a few hours, so you’re not stressed out about getting it done in time. This is worth spending a good chunk of time on, to make you a better manager of your time in the long run.

In my previous post, I talked about the importance of identifying what you feel are the most important themes in your life. If you have accomplished that, I think you’re on a path to living a healthier life filled with success as you yourself define success.

What I would like to suggest you do next is to increase your awareness of how you are spending your time. Keeping your self-defined major themes in mind, begin journalling your days and how you are spending your time from hour to hour, and if appropriate in smaller chunks of time. Try to capture the major things happening during each time period. If you eat dinner while watching television, those are two separate things to journal.

As you are tracking your time, compare how you are spending your time with the major themes you previously identified as the most important to you. How do the activities you are taking part in during the day match up with your themes? Are you spending three or four hours a day watching television? Is “Watch a lot of television” one of the major things you identified as important to you? If so, then great, you’re well in tune with what is important to you. If not, though, maybe it is time to start re-evaluating how you are spending some of your time.

I want to say that I am not saying you need to unplug your TV and toss it out the window! My themes, as I mentioned, included my health, my wife, my family, my work, and my faith. So if I am sitting back watching mindless junk on TV and doing nothing else, then that isn’t very in line with what I say is important to me. But what if I am sitting in the living room with my wife and family, watching Joel Osteen give a sermon on TV, while I answer a few e-mails from work? Now I’m in TOTAL alignment with my passions and I’m multi-tasking extremely effectively.

And that’s one of the big things to take from this exercise. It isn’t just about making sure the thing you are doing is in line with your themes, it is adapting how you already life your life to infuse it with things that build your important themese stronger. In time, you’ll get really good at filtering your decisions on how you spend your time through the question of whether it enhances your life or is ust a distraction (and distractions, some times, are okay – we all need a little time to just chill out and unwind).

You’ll also start to get good at multi-tasking. “How many themes am I strengthening at one time? Can I be doing something right now to add a few of my themes to what I am doing?” This sort of thinking will eventually lead to becoming a much better time manager, and you will be amazed at how much you accomplish in a day’s time.

Next up: “Life is a beach”

It’s quite a bit in to January now – how are your New Year’s Resolutions going? Hopefully the next few posts will reinvigorate and refocus your efforts on improving your life.

A lot of resolutions start out sounding something like this: “I want to lose weight” or “I want to make more money”. Both are good goals, and in fact are goals that, in a form, I hold as well. But they are both questions that require more basic questions to be answered first.

You say you want to lose weight, but why? Is it for increased health benefits? Will it help you feel more attractive? Do you think it will help you advance your career?

Making more money is important to you? Is that because there are items you want, like a house or a new car? Do you want to change your lifestyle to one that demands more income? Are you trying to put away more towards retirement? (And if retirement is the answer, why do you want money for that?)

You get the idea, I hope. The more you can get a good understanding of why you want to accomplish the goals you have set, and the more you write those reasons down and review them, the better you will be at reaching your goals. You’ll have a clearer mental image of the end result. When distractions come your way, you can ask yourself “Do I want to eat this cookie, or would I rather fit into my pants more comfortably?” “Do I want to buy this new pair of boots, or would I rather press the heel of my old boots on the accelerator pedal of my new car?”

Understanding the major themes of your priorities and goals, and being consciously aware of them, is absolutely the ultimate key to success (I’ll talk more about how to do this in the next two posts). And review your themes, priorities, and goals on a regular basis. For two years I filtered everything I did through the five major themes of my family, my wife, my faith, my work, and my health. If something I was considering doing did not enhance one, some, or all of those themes, I usually declined. Now that I am in a constant habit of doing so, and have reworked my life to be strong in those five themes, I am moving on to five new themes that continue helping me build to where I want to be (those five, FYI, are “independence”, “fun”, “creativity”, “Balance”, and “Making a Difference”).

All this may sound rigid to some, but it really doesn’t have to be. It is about focusing more of your time on things that you yourself identify as key priorities for your life, and the more you do it the easier it gets (and the closer you get to where you want to be).

Next Post: “Increasing Self Awareness”

I apologize for the sudden leave of absence from the blog over the last few weeks. The silence is soon to come to an end. Look for new posts by Monday.

Thanks.

For several years, I made New Years Resolutions. In fact, my tradition until two years ago was to make twelve New Years Resolutions, a number chosen partially as symbolic of the twelve months of the year but also a number that meant I probably had a shot of achieving at least a couple of them!

I started a series of exercises, somewhat by accident, a couple of years ago that approach assisting me in identifying, defining, and achieving my goals in life in a different way. Now that I approach the first New Year’s Day following the instatement of this new method, I am realizing that New Years Resolutions would not only be somewhat redundant to make, they might also be somewhat detrimental to the process.

I should put the disclaimer in, before we get too far, that I am married. Some of the methodology I have used has marriage, or at least being part of a couple, as a filter. I am confident that there is equal value for singles in the process I have gone through, but there may have to be some adjustment, “tweaking”, in parts to make it fit well for your life if you are reading this and are single. I will try to make suggestions, when applicable, to help that process.

The three main parts to my process are listed below. In the coming days, I will discuss each of them in detail.

Step One: Paint the Big Picture
Step Two: Increase Self Awareness
Step Three: Life is a Beach

I’m going to stop there for today, but I want to say one last thing about New Years Resolutions in general. As you will see in the exercises over the next few days, one of the big take-aways I am trying to suggest is that it is somewhat dangerous to tie resolutions down to just New Years. In fact, it is dangerous to tie goals and resolutions down too much to anything. You want goals to be simultaneously quantifiable and flexible, to give to drive and direction while recognizing that life is always changing and what it important one year may have a totally different level of importance the next, relative to other things in life.

The classic holiday crooner Jon Bon Jovi once suggested that he wished every day could be like Christmas. I have heard people from outside of New Jersey also express a similar notion.

I presume these people aren’t referring to songs about George Michael giving his heart to someone the previous Christmas who proceeded to throw it away. Nor do I suspect they yearn to clash eternally with a thousand soccer moms in the toy aisles while trying to make their way back to the electronics department at Target.

No, I imagine people wanting every day to be like Christmas comes down to some combination of the following:

* receiving kind gifts from people who care about you
* giving gifts to those we appreciate
* sending cards out to people we haven’t communicated with as often as we’d like
* celebrating the birth of Christ (if that’s what you’re in to)
* volunteering or collecting food for the hungry, or giving toys to kids who can’t afford them, etc. – charitable works
* forgiving others (and if need be, yourself)
* spending quality time with family and friends sharing meals, playing games, etc.

I guess my point of all this is… there’s really no reason any of these things should be limited to one day a year.

So enjoy your Christmas, one and all. And have a Merry January 17th too, just for the heck of it.

I thought it was about time I defined the mission of this blog more clearly.

The Follow Your Passions blog is my attempt to spur people into doing what they love and loving what they do. It’s about owning whatever you’re doing with your life and making the most of it. It’s about becoming a leader in the communities you are a part of, however you define those communities for yourself.

Leadership. Mentoring. Giving. Enriching our own lives and the lives of those around us through our choices, our words, and our actions. Living happy, satisfied lives as productive, contributing human beings in the time we’re given to be with one another.

Each month, I’ll be collecting contributions from anyone who wishes to participate, and donating them to an organization that embodies the spirit of following your passions. For January, the target organization is National Public Radio, which you can contribute as little as $2 to or as much as you feel like via the ChipIn widget over in the sidebar – credit card, PayPal, however you prefer. If NPR doesn’t align well enough with your interests to give, stay tuned and I’m sure one month I’ll pick an organization closer to your heart we can work together to do some good for.