A Man's Guide to More Passion - Episode: 030
Ever felt that your day-to-day obligations are weighing you down? We are diving deep into the quest for passion in this episode. You'll learn why passion isn't found outside of us – we create it ourselves. And you'll walk away knowing exactly how to do that. You'll transform your obligations into desires and hone in on what lights you up. You'll find ways to align your values with your actions so you're not swallowed up by the monotony of each day. This episode will fire you up!
Speaker 1
This is the Durable Dad Podcast. I'm your host, tommy Geary. This show is going to give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community and, most importantly, your family. All right, what is up guys? Episode number 30 here. Durable Dad Podcast.
Speaker 1
What's happening today? Today's Friday, and I am heading out on a one night solo camping trip. It's not extreme, it's about 25 minutes from our house, this chill little tent, only campsite. Yeah, posting up for 24 hours. Brenda's going to drop me off at noon today and then pick me up with the girls tomorrow night. So, pretty pumped about 24 hours alone. I'm going to do some meditating, going to do some hiking, going to have some coffee in the morning. So should be pretty chill. Hopefully sleep, hopefully sleep a bunch. I need to catch up on my sleep.
Speaker 1
Today we are talking about passion and bringing passion into our lives, and it's a topic that I talk with a lot of my clients about. We can lose passion in our life, and the first thing that I usually want to point out is passion really falls into the thought and emotion part of the thinking cycle. A lot of the times, we'll think that passion is a circumstance. It's something outside of our self, that something gives us passion. But passion is actually created by us. It's inside of us, it's a way of thinking, it's a way of feeling that creates passion, and you can think about a really exciting job that you've had or a career that you've been in and has really pumped you up, and then one day it doesn't anymore and the job is there. It's still the same role, but you don't feel that desire anymore, and that's because it's not your job that gives you passion. You create it with your mindset. When we're thinking or feeling passionate about something, our work starts to prove those beliefs true. The actions that we start taking in the world are motivating and prove to us and help us continue to believe that we're working on our passion and keep that desire burning in the excitement for life inside of us. So I'm going to give two ways you can start to find more passion in your life. The first one is turning obligations into desires or turning obligations into passions, and one part of our life that sometimes we feel like is an obligation is our work or our career, and we can be working for a paycheck and going into the office because we need to be doing this and we need the money to feed our family and to provide for our family. That feels heavy, that feels like an obligation, doesn't feel very passionate, but we can switch it. We can turn work into more of a desire, a passion, and there's different ways to do this. You can sometimes just find something small, something small to light you up, that gets you excited.
Speaker 1
And for me, when I was in the corporate world and I was working, I started to lose passion. I started to not be excited about going to work and just going in for the benefits and the paycheck. And where I first leaned into was time management. And that might sound nerdy, but efficiencies, prioritizing, using my time really wisely, is something that gets me excited. It's kind of a game, it's kind of fun and it actually kind of led me onto this path of managing our minds, managing our emotions. And it started small. It started with managing my time and how can I get excited about it? And it was cool because in my job my job duties didn't change. But when I started to focus on time management, I started to say no to more things and I set some boundaries and started declining meetings that weren't a priority or weren't some things I really needed to be at and projects and committees that in the past I would hop on those but I would question them before I did Do I really want to, or am I just doing it because I'm trying to make someone else happy or I want them to think I'm good? But it's not really my passion. And I also found opportunities to start teaching more like the concepts that I was learning with time management I brought to my team and teaching and speaking in front of people lights me up, gets me excited, and it doesn't have to be a huge fire and this burning passion but in our career, turning an obligation into even just a small desire, right Like these little things were kindling on my fire of passion and eventually led me to leaving and creating this business and all that stuff.
Speaker 1
Another dude that I'm working with he owns his own company and he just was feeling kind of the monotony of doing what he had always been really good at in the company and he was good at it, he liked doing it, but he also wasn't feeling that burning desire. So he kind of looked within the rest of his company at like what excited him. He wanted to use more of his creativity and he found this area of their business that was working in one site and he wanted to expand it, and so he got really excited about seeing something that was a benefit to the company, a benefit to their customers, and how can his leadership spread it out to other areas of his business and I'm talking very vaguely here because I'm not going to dive into exactly what his business is, but it was cool right. As soon as he started talking about it, I could feel more momentum, more passion in his voice. So that's one obligation that we can turn into a desire, our work, our career.
Speaker 1
Another one is being a dad. Sometimes it can feel like an obligation, a weight to be a dad and the responsibilities that come with it. We can also remind ourselves that we chose this. We chose to become a dad, and our why was probably pretty powerful and we were probably pretty passionate about it. Being a dad like the a strong, healthy dad, is so important and like what, what else do you need to remind yourself about in life To get you fired up right? Owning being a dad, taking being a dad seriously, is pretty frickin cool and exciting. When you decide to Be passionate about being a father, then you can look at the ways like what are the attributes of a good dad? Learning how to create a safe environment for your kids, a safe, fun, physical and emotional space. So how do I get there? I start to understand my emotions so I can be safe with my emotions and create that safety for my kids. And Then that journey you're not just going and meditating and hiring a coach or taking a course out of Obligation. You're doing it because you see the desire, the purpose behind it. That's when we have passion, when we have some purpose there. So if you're looking for passion, one way to find it is to Look at the obligations you have in your life and try to turn them into a desire or your passion. Right, try to start to feel passionate about the things you're already doing. Another way, the second way to find passion is to Understand what you stand for, know what you stand for, and I'm in this men's group that just wrapped up yesterday and the leader his name is Dan Dodie. He's one of my big mentors, coaches, friends. Maybe I've talked about him before, but he teed off the Last session, the last group, with this kind of heady question and I'm just gonna ask it.
Speaker 1
I'm not really gonna dive into it too much, but the question was where do you fit in the universe and how do you make sense of your life? Right, pretty big question to answer, and you know, in the session every guy got five minutes to talk about it. And you Talk about it like you were speaking to your kids. And what it got me thinking about is passion. If we thread that, where do you fit in the universe? How do you make sense of your life? If we thread that into this passion conversation? I Think real passion is when we do understand our values and what's important to us. And so I think this question kind of ties in here, and I wanted to state that because it reminded me to focus on what I I value and what's important to me. Knowing what I stand for Means knowing what I value, because then the cool goal is that once you know what you stand for, you check and you look are your actions on a daily basis aligned with what you stand for?
Speaker 1
When I first hired a coach, I Started to understand that one of my values was service, was helping other people, and when I looked at my actions at work, I could kind of Mind ninja my way into how I was serving the customers that I was working with, but it wasn't landing. I wasn't believing it, so I needed to find some ways to serve. And what got me excited and this is when I started I started volunteering a little bit more. I eventually became a yoga and meditation instructor while I was working, because serving the community in that way really lit me up, like I felt excited about it, and that's actually so. When guys sign up to coach with me, before we even engage in the coaching, if you go to the website and just sign up for an intro call, there's a few questions you answer, and one of them is what lights you up? Answering that question can really dial in to some of your values, and so I went back before this podcast and looked at some of the things that light dudes up that I'm working with, and it's personal development making themselves better. It's Promotions at work, success in their career. It's connecting with friends, spending time with people that are close to them, watching their kids have success or watching their kids have fun time outdoors, living a healthy lifestyle, biking.
Speaker 1
All of those are Insights into how to create more passion in your life, if you're missing it If you're not feeling excited about life. What's an area that in the past has gotten you excited and how can you put a little bit more into your day-to-day life? So I say all this and we don't have much fricking time as dads. We're swamped, we got a lot of responsibilities and I get it, so we don't have all the time in the world to dive into our passions. But I think the first one right changing our obligations into desires those are things we're already doing. We're just flipping the script on how we're thinking about it so we can feel differently and we can feel more excited For this other part understanding what you stand for, and then maybe seeing that your day-to-day actions aren't aligned with what gets you excited.
Speaker 1
There might be a block like yeah, that would be great if I could go and volunteer more and serve more, or that would be awesome if I could spend more time hanging out and connecting with friends, but I just don't really have that time. I wanna question that. I wanna really be honest with ourself. And how much time do we waste? How much time do we waste at work, on social media, on snacking, on food? How much time do we spend on things that don't light us up, that we don't feel passionate about, and if we can get rid of those, we could probably slice out a half hour each day.
Speaker 1
Not that much time 30 minutes each day and picking some type of action that aligns with what's important to you when you know kind of the man that you wanna be, what you wanna stand for a better dad, a promotion at work, a better husband, whatever it is, whatever is getting you excited, you can spend a half hour a day on it, you can find some time, and if you do that, if you can hash out that half hour, the long-term effect of that is gonna be pretty powerful. If we just worked on something we were excited about for a half hour every day, that fire starts to burn inside of us. Life starts getting more exciting. What's possible in the long run, and what I want you guys to take away from this, is that I haven't said it yet, but life is short. We're here, we are born and in a blink of an eye we die. And if our time is so short, we don't wanna squander it. We wanna do things on a daily basis that get us excited and let us give our gift to the world Cause if we're doing things that we're excited about, it's going to feed into the people around us and the influence that we have. If we're smiling more, if we're bringing an energy that's uplifting instead of groggy and checking out and slumping into the couch, our family, our household is gonna be lighter and more exciting.
Speaker 1
So passion it's a broad topic. People will throw it around and just say I wanna find passion and think that it'll come to them, but there's some work to do. You gotta look inside, figure out what's important to you and then make some shifts, make some time to get your daily actions aligned with your passion. And that's what I got for you guys today. So I'm gonna end with how I end a lot of these podcasts. Please leave a review, follow us, download the podcast. It really helps. And if you're digging it, if it's hitting home for you and you're bringing it back and having conversations with your partner about it, I guarantee there's a bunch of other men out there that would benefit also. So leave a review, rate. All that good stuff Really appreciate it. I will catch you guys next week.
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