Last week, I shared “Wisdom From The Woo-Woo Sisters.” And I promised to provide you with a simple exercise to bring and keep more joy and passion in your life.
As a recap, the idea here is to look at how much of your day is spent feeling joy and passion for what you are doing. So, the first step is to bring a little awareness to the subject. So ask yourself, “How much of my time is spent in joy or feeling passionate?” Give it a moment of reflection and come up with a percentage.
What’s Your Joy & Passion Number?
As I shared last week, I came up with 80%. Once you have your Joy & Passion Number, it will give you something to work toward. For example, if you are at 50%, you may decide that you have big room for improvement. So, you may decide that a great first step would be to increase from 50% to 60%. Once you’re at 60%, you can set another incremental goal. In other words, make it an ongoing process. Baby steps are just fine.
Now comes the exercise. Take out a piece of paper and draw a big circle filling most of the page. Now inside the circle, write down all the things that you do, think or feel that bring you joy and passion. Fill up your circle. If you start to run out of room, feel free to abbreviate. You’ll likely find that new items will pop up that should be added to your circle. Keep your sheet handy for a while, so you can keep filling your circle.
The power of this simple exercise is two-fold. First, you raise your awareness of all the things in your life that bring you joy and passion. Sometimes in our busy lives, it’s too easy to lose sight of that. Second, you consciously go through your day focusing on those things that fill your bucket while simultaneously avoiding those things that keep you from being inspired and happy.
Optional Exercise: If there are items that come to mind that don’t fill you with joy or passion, put them on a separate sheet of paper all together. Once you have those things listed out…ball up the piece of paper and throw it away. Or if you want to be more dramatic, you can always set the piece of paper on fire. (Just be safe and make Smoky proud.) Just like the previous exercise, the act of writing down the bad stuff is great for making you more mindful of the things you are doing that suck your energy so you can make the better choices for staying stress-free. Of course, destroying the paper is a symbolic gesture of cleansing and letting go. Think of it as a little spring pruning for your life!
Tips For The Not-So-Fun Stuff
While your goal is to focus time on those things that are inside your circle, those other things won’t disappear on their own. So for items on the separate sheet of paper that drain you, bore you or otherwise don’t ignite your passion – you have a few choices:
- Eliminate them. If possible, simply say “no” to the things that don’t fulfill you in some way. Or delegate them to someone else when possible. This includes outsourcing. Paying a teenager to cut your grass is not a bad deal if it allows you to get in a run or a shopping spree.
- Minimize them. I know there are some things that you can’t simply eliminate. Think about ways you can do less of it – either by reducing the frequency or the duration. There’s an old time management strategy called “eating the frog.” The idea is to batch the items that are the most distasteful and do them first thing in the morning. Just knock them out all at once as quickly as possible, so you have nothing to look forward to for the rest of the days but “blue skies and sunshine.”
- Change Your Perception. When all else fails, look for ways to see the good in the bad. In other words, focus on changing your attitude. Sometimes we get jaded or simply bored, so look for ways to see the positive. For me, it’s invoicing. I don’t particularly like taking the time to pull it all together and it’s a bit boring. So I focus on thinking about having a satisfied client that I’ve taken care of and the excitement of having money coming in for something I love to do.
