Jack Canfield and Amanda Gore on Finding Your Passion

This is from Success Magazine article with Advice from Amanda Gore and Jack Canfield

Jack Canfield is the co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and a peak performance coach.

Amanda Gore is a professional speaker and author of four books, including You Can Be Happy. She has a background in psychology and stress management.


Finding Your Passion

Q: I enjoy my work, but I don’t think I am living my passion with my professional choices.
What steps should I take to get closer to my dream business and out of the professional doldrums?

Amanda Gore: First, find clarity about what is your passion;
then you can create the opportunities to pursue it more specifically.

Once you are clear about what inspires you, enthuses you, makes you feel
creative and that you are contributing in a meaningful way or that you are
making a difference, then you can decide if you need to change jobs, change
your perception of your job, create your own company or volunteer more!

Often we expect our professional lives to feed all of our needs, but our perception
of a job is faulty! We can make a job our work. Work is a much bigger concept. It
refers to what we were put on Earth to do. A job can be work if we perceive it
correctly.

Any job we have needs to be viewed from the aspect of service:
Who are we serving and how are we serving them?
Doing our job with the right spirit, with the right heart, transforms it into our work.
When we are busy focusing on serving others, our passion ignites, our enthusiasm fires others up. We are more likely to be acknowledged and appreciated, our confidence and energy levels increase and we are fired up to start our own business, if that’s what emerges out of our search for clarity.


Jack Canfield: The key is to start by just leaning into it.
When I realized I wanted to do more writing and less traveling around the world
teaching live seminars, I decided to write the first Chicken Soup for the Soul® book.
I knew I wanted to have 100 stories in the book, so I wrote or edited two stories a
week for a year. The majority of that work took place from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. after my
wife had gone to bed and on the weekends. I couldn’t afford to quit my “day job,” so I
just knuckled under and did it when I could.

The most important thing is to get started in some way today.
If you have the capital to jump ship now, go for it.
If not, work up to it. But the key is to start doing something, however small, today.