"Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion"
CCEs: 1.25 in Core Competencies
Passion is a concept that’s talked about a lot in the business, career, coaching and leadership arenas – employee engagement, mission statements, finding a calling. But passion is much bigger (and deeper) than what happens M-F 9-5. It’s a life skill – a stance – that helps bring vitality to all our engagements: work life, family life, school life, love life, creative life, social life, and spiritual life.
Passion is the impulse toward growth and aliveness, and not only helps awaken us from the trances and torpors of daily life, but is a survival mechanism, because our attachment to life depends on our interest in it.
This presentation is about what inspires passion and what defeats it, how we lose it and how we get it back – both for ourselves and our clients. It’s not just about finding a passion, but living passionately. Not just passion as a place we get to, but a place we come from, whether in the arenas of creativity and self-expression, service and spirituality, adventure and discovery, or relationship.
Some of the principles we’ll explore:
- Passion can be cultivated, turned on as well as turned off. And this happens most readily at the level of the gesture and the moment, not the five-year plan.
- Passion is in the risk. In the willingness to step from the sidelines onto the playing field.
- Passion breeds passion and disinterest breeds disinterest. If we lack passion in our own lives, our other relationships will be denied that energy – our partnerships, friendships, communities, classrooms, corporations and congregations.
- Passion isn’t just exuberance, it’s endurance. It’s sometimes shoulder-to-the-wheel stamina and patience on the order of years.
- Passion is intimately related to health. To the degree passion is vitality, honoring our passions enhances our vitality.
Who should attend?
This experience is designed for coaches and other leaders who want to build their internal and external alignment with passion and energy.
What will you take away?
We will learn these key concepts:
- Passion as not just a goal but a life-skill.
- The role that passion plays in the vitalizing and revitalizing of vocational and creative endeavors, as well as health and relationship.
- How passion turns into dispassion – and back.
- The difference between harmonious and obsessive passion.
- The role that passionate curiosity and “beginner’s mind” play in success and vitality.
- How to identify and work with the downward-pulling forces that rob people of passion.
- The endless tug-of-war between security and passion, inhibition and exhibition.
- The state of passion and vitality in our own work/lives.
We will learn how to apply this in our own lives as well as to help our clients with these struggles.
ABOUT GREGG LEVOY
Gregg Levoy is the author of Callings: Finding and Following An Authentic Life (Random House) – rated among the “Top 20 Career Publications” by the Workforce Information Group and a text in various graduate programs in Management and Organizational Leadership – and Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion (Penguin). He is a lecturer and seminar-leader in the business, educational, governmental, faith-based and human-potential arenas, and has keynoted and presented workshops at the Smithsonian Institution, Environmental Protection Agency, National League of Cities, National Conference on Positive Aging, Microsoft, British Petroleum, the Universities of Texas/California/Colorado/Washington/Arizona/Nevada/Wisconsin and others, the American Counseling Association, National Career Development Association, International Association of Career Management Professionals, ICF–SF and NM, Esalen Institute, Omega Institute, and others, and has been a frequent guest of the media, including ABC-TV, CNN, NPR and PBS.
A former adjunct professor of journalism at the University of New Mexico, former columnist and reporter for USA Today and the Cincinnati Enquirer, he has written about the subject of callings for the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Omni, Psychology Today, Reader’s Digest, and many others, as well as for corporate, promotional and television projects. His website is www.gregglevoy.com.