Personal Development Tips: Seven Criteria for Recognizing Your Passion and Purpose

Here at Studio 747, it is one of my missions to inspire you to live a life full of passion and purpose.  Here is a guest post by Linda Pierce in which she offers her tips on how to discover what your true passion in life is...

Your passion will fuel the engine that powers the manifestation of your dreams. You need a passion that will drive you to personal growth and business success.

Do you know what your passion in life is? Or are you still looking for it? Many times people are already living their passion and they don't recognize it.

On the other hand, you may think you are doing exactly what you were meant to do, only to find there's something else that calls to you more powerfully.

If you're looking to discover your passion, the following questions will get you started before I reveal the seven criteria. I suggest that you write each question on its own sheet of paper, which will give you ample room to add brainstorming ideas.

• What really excites you in your life?
• What do you do that gives you so much pleasure you lose track of time?
• What topics do you read about or see on the news that get you fired-up?
• What do you love doing so much you'd be willing to do it for free?

Many people wonder, "How do I know what my passion is?" "How do I know this is my life purpose?" Now you can put your passion to the test. Here are seven criteria for recognizing your passion and purpose. You'll want to write these down in a place that you can refer to often.

Seven Personal Success Criteria for recognizing your passion and purpose:

Personal Success Indicator #1: What you do makes you feel good about yourself.

Personal Success Indicator #2: You would do it for free.

Personal Success Indicator #3: You lose all track of time when you do it.

Personal Success Indicator #4: You love to talk about it to anyone who will listen.

Personal Success Indicator #5: You are happy to teach it to others.

Personal Success Indicator #6: If this were how you spent all of your time, it would be a good thing.

Personal Success Indicator #7: It makes you want to get out of bed in the morning.

This simple process to identifying your passion and your life purpose will help you focus so you're not creating a business about a subject you're going to get sick of in a few months.

Unfortunately, that occurs more often than you'd think. Misdiagnosing passion happens to many people. Using the above criteria will prevent this from happening to you. If you can say "yes" to all seven indicators, then you've verified that you're passionate about the subject.

So, what do you do once you think you've uncovered your passion? Well, the first step is to start visualizing your end result. Many people share the same passion and purpose, yet each one approaches it differently and contributes their own unique talents to it.

A major part of what I teach my clients is to turn their passions into information products. I had spoken on that topic at Mark Victor Hansen's Mega Book Marketing University, and later had a conversation with a plumber who was attending the event.

We discussed creating a product describing how he's made his plumbing business more successful than his competitors. I thought, "Well, yes, that could be a great product."

But then I asked him, "What gets you so excited about teaching, that you'd do it for free?" He immediately gave me a different answer. What got him enthusiastic was the work he did with kids, and he could have talked about that for hours.

His brain thought, "Well, I'm really good at X. X is probably what I should do as a product." But X is not what makes him happy. It's not what fulfills him. It's not what he's passionate about. He'd soon be bored and moving on to something else if he went ahead with X.

Sometimes we just need to clear our minds, ask some questions and give ourselves creative space to recognize our passions and purposes. Start identifying your own passion and purpose by putting the seven steps in motion for your personal success.

About the Author:

Lynn Pierce, the Success Architect, has taught people how to combine business and personal development to reach the pinnacle of success and live the life of their dreams for over 25 years. In addition, she is also the founder of one of the most exciting annual events for women entrepreneurs, ³Women¹s Business Empowerment Summit². Now she shares her keys to success and life mastery with you. You can get the first five lessons of "Change One Thing, Change Your Life: A Personal Transformation System" at www.YourBreakthroughToSuccess.com

For more personal development tips, visit our partner blog, The Good Life

Photo Credit: Abulic Monkey

Photo of the Week: San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge

The photo of the week comes from my personal photostream on Flickr...

It was a cloudy day with light showers on the day I visited San Francisco. However, it doesn't really matter what the weather is, I always love visiting this metropolitan city.

I've taken many photos of the Bay Bridge, but this time I wanted to offer a different perspective.

How to Create a Vision For Your Life

It's a New Year and I know that many of you are taking time out during these first couple of weeks of January to create your goals for 2010.

Goals are great, but do you have a vision for what you want your life to be like in 2010 and beyond?

Today I attended a Strategic Goal Setting seminar facilitated by Maureen Orey where we learned that there is a difference between having goals and having a vision.  Essentially, a vision is an overall goal for your life or business; something that isn't necessarily time-bound or measurable.

An example of vision vs. goal is my vision to inspire people to follow their dreams and passions in life.  Under that vision, I would have different goals that I could achieve as part of that vision, like writing a book or spreading inspiring messages via the Studio 747 blog network and social network.  Part of that vision is to also be able to travel the world and create passive income...

I recently talked to Wyatt Taubman, the founder of a website called Think Green Live Clean.  He has a vision of people being able to live in a healthier, more eco-friendly world.  His website was born from that vision.  Under that vision he now has a goal of attracting more people to the website.

A Vision Starts with Values and Passion

There are two things that play a role in creating a vision for your life:

1. Your Values - What is most important to you?  Is it family?  Your career?  Spirituality?

2. Your Passion - What excites and inspires you? 

My vision of helping internet entrepreneurs succeed with their business while I travel the world and create passive income stemmed from my value of freedom and my passion for online business and marketing.

I would recommend jotting down a list of your values and your passions.  Combine these values and passions to create your life vision.

After creating your vision, a product I recommend for staying motivated and focused on your vision, is this vision board software.

Dream Big

What is your dream?  Do you have a dream?  If so, is it big?

A vision is a dream that you have for the "perfect life".  What would you be doing if money were not an issue?   If you own a business, how do you picture your business benefitting customers?  

Take some time out each day to visualize how you would like your life and/or business to be like.  Don't put any limits on yourself.  Dream BIG!

By the way, if you're in the San Diego area and are interested in getting help with your goals and developing your life vision, Maureen Orey has an eight-week program starting on January 21.  Click here to find out more.