Eight ways to put some passion back into your profession
BY DAVE McGINN
FP WEEKEND: NATIONAL POST, SATURDAY, FEBRURAY 11, 2006
Love is in the air this time of year — except, it seems, at work. “For so many people, no matter how exciting their job was for them in the beginning, it’s inevitable that there will be a plateau effect where you climb and learn and love your job but then things just flatten out,” says Nina Spencer, one of Canada’s top motivational speakers.
In her upcoming book, Getting Passion Out of Your Profession: How to keep loving your living…come what may (Transcontinental $19.95), Ms. Spencer identifies eight “passion points” meant to show people how to get back to loving their jobs.
“There is an incredible and ongoing demand for getting passion out of your profession…everyone is looking for it,” says Ms. Spencer. “If you don’t love your job, it starts to leak into your personality, it leaks into your performance level and your interactions with others.”
Feeling passionate about your profession isn’t a matter of having the perfect job. “If you can’t be in the job you love, then love the one you’re in,” she advises. “Find a way to have some joy about the valuable contribution you make, however humble it is.”
Getting Passion Out of Your Profession will be released on Feb. 14. Here’s a summary of Ms. Spencer’s eight passion points:
- Practise positive thinking: Consciously choose positive language and thinking to influence a passion for your work and to inspire the passion of others. This can be as simple as asking a colleague if you’ve caught them at a good time instead of asking if you’ve caught them at a bad time.
- Profess professional self-worth: Acknowledge to yourself the things you do well. Ask yourself: What do I do better than most? How have I grown this past year? What are some of the most challenging things I’ve accomplished in this job? What is the biggest workplace lesson I learned last year, and how am I applying that learning this year?
- Project as sense of humor: A laughless workplace is a joyless one. Having a sense of humor at work will help you and your colleagues think positively, and it creates a light mood at the office.
- Play with perspective: Perspective has everything to do with how you think about “control.” What do you control? What don’t you control? Think of control like the weather. When you go outside you get whatever’s there. Modifying your perspective can help you deal with “the workplace weather.”
- Purport your purpose: It’s easier to stay the course when you know why you’re doing what you’re doing. Get clear about the big picture by asking yourself why you’re doing a job and why it is important to you.
- Preserve your energy and enthusiasm: Energy is the groundwork of enthusiasm and the only thing more contagious than enthusiasm is the lack of it. Practise daily strategies for taking care of your physical and emotional energy.
- Promise to persevere: Even people in the right job with the right organization will still occasionally get into a funk about work. So, cut yourself some slack and persevere. Blue periods disappear sooner rather than later.
- Perpetuate relationships: Keep in touch with enthusiastic, energized colleagues in your circle of influence to help sustain your passion for your profession, and expand that circle regularly. Attend professional conferences and in-house development workshops. These can make a big difference in what happens next in your career or life and the daily passion you feel for the work you do.
Financial Post
Getting Passion Out of Your Profession will help you rediscover and reclaim your passion for your profession!
This book delivers a motivational, inspirational and content rich message that’s relevant and topical, with a great sense of humor, and in a way that gets the reader’s involvement and participants. Count on it, Nina Spencer delivers the goods!
In this remarkably readable and useful volume of wit and wisdom, Nina Spencer shares the 8 passion points for reclaiming that zest for work and empowering you to grab your professional life by the ankles and give it a fling!
