Summary
If you find yourself lacking motivation and you want to find your lost passion, try these four steps:
- Rest. First and foremost, get some rest. You must get more disciplined in recovering all that energy spent when you are always on the go. When you get enough sleep, your cognitive abilities refire, and motivation comes back to your life. If you can’t get a good night sleep, catch up the next day by napping or meditating.
- Visualize. Close your eyes and visualize your passions and their positive outcomes. You need time away from your phone, and time away from responding to everyone else so that you can dream again. Part of the reason we lose passion is that, in all the busyness, we lose sight of what we want. Visualize every morning and night to regain focus and emotional connection.
- Trigger Your Passions. Set up triggers that remind you of the things you should be excited or intentional about. Triggers can be reminders on your phone or mirror, motivating music and videos, and affirmations that you state at certain times that bring you aliveness and appreciation.
- Integrate and Celebrate Your Wins. When you achieve something great, celebrate it! Take the time to journal about it and share it with others. You need to slow down and appreciate yourself. People forget to celebrate their wins, they go from one thing to another, which flat-lines their emotional energy. If you give yourself the gift of celebrating your small wins and everyday life, you allow yourself to feel emotions that re-connect you with your passions.
Get these things right, and you’ll start to experience what we call #TheChargedLife!
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Transcript
Have you ever lost your passion?
You found yourself, you used to be so fired up about things, so motivated, so driven, and now these days you’re like just barely dragging yourself out of the bed.
- How do you re-fire that passion?
- How do you refine that?
And I don’t just mean it like passion in your relationships. I mean passion in your career, passion in your everyday life, excitement to go out with your friends; just that overall passion for life.
How do you get that back?
I got some ideas for you today.
- Rest: Don’t fool yourself and think you’re going to get lots of energy back in your life, if you’re constantly wiped out because:
- You’re not sleeping enough.
- You’re not rehabbing enough.
- You’re rejuvenating enough.
If you are always go, go, go, go, go, but you’re never taking a moment to give your brain and your body that break, then you’re never going to have the levels of energy that frankly you deserve.
We know from science and neuroscience you must be getting 7 to 8 hours of sleep consistently. If you don’t believe that please go do the research. It’s unanimous, it’s 50 years of sleep research now.
Your cognitive abilities go so much further down in terms of negativity, your ability to think, your ability to process when you’re tired. And along with your cognition goes your motivation. It’s just like if you can’t think, you can’t get really motivated and excited about things so please just get some resting.
Make sure if you’re not getting enough sleep, then meditate or nap throughout the day whenever you can find your spot. I don’t care if that means: You come home and before you go in to hang out with the kids, you just pass out for 15 minutes in the car.
Just do something to rejuvenate yourself because if you’re not rested, the passion is going to go away, and you and I both know that we are living in a culture right now where everyone’s burning the candle at both ends, and most of what they’re doing isn’t really necessary. They’re just replying to everybody else and losing themselves in their lives. We go to get you back, and the way to get your energy back is first and foremost please get some rest.
- Visualize: Do you remember back in high-school or college, or in your younger years when you used to just lay there and dream stuff up and get so excited thinking about things and it was just—you would literally get fired up just thinking about something. A new movie was coming out and you just sit there thinking about it. At some new opportunity, a new date was going to come up for somebody new and you just get stoked; you’d be thinking about it.
What happens today is no one is thinking about every, anything because there’s no white space to do that anymore. They’re just constantly looking at their phone or constantly replying to somebody. You need white space. You need time to think and the best way to do that is to close your eyes off from everything else and just think about the things you’re excited about again. That’s it.
You just need those moments to connect with your passions. It’s not that you don’t have passions. Look, if you got kids, you got passions. You got a job, you got passions. You’re doing something that you care about in the world, or you’re an artist, you’ve got passions. It’s that you’re disconnected from them because you’re not thinking about them anymore.
You used to just obsess. You’d sit there with your journal and write out ideas. You’d draw things. You talk about that thing with everybody else. You’d just lay in bed and just be like, “Oh my gosh when this happens to me, so amazing.”
And you haven’t had that for a while, and that’s why there’s no passion. You’re not taking the time to dream up, to think about and to get excited about the passions.
- You have to trigger your passions. You have to set up reminders about why you should be excited about things. Set up reminders to focus on things. It’s hard to have a continual emotional experience about anything unless you’re reminded continually about that thing.
Think about something like as common as fear or anger. Most people don’t have fear or anger in debilitating ways as they go throughout the day. It’s that something triggers them, that emotion comes up and they’re like, “Oh dang”.
Well the same thing that happens for passion. You need something that is triggering your passions, your emotions. Like that side of your life that is more connected to your heart or your interest that are beyond the analytical mind. So, you have to do something to trigger yourself in that.
For me, for example, I’ll watch really motivating and inspiring films or really motivating and inspiring YouTube shorts, that just, I watch this thing, and the music and everything just, it just fires me up. I have to have a soundtrack to my life that’s passionate to stay passionate.
So, I listen to music that makes me passionate. I watch things that make me passionate. I set reminders on my phone that literally says, “Be passionate, fool.” And it is like, having all these reminders, being in an environment of passion
- Around other people
- Around music
- Around visuals
- Around reminders
All of that adds up to keep me on track to living a passionate life. If you don’t have triggers, then you’re just not going to be consistent in that feeling of passion.
And then last…
- Integrate and celebrate your wins. As you’re going through, sometimes, people when they achieve something or they’re doing something great, they just start not celebrating anymore. Do you remember the first time you did something awesome? Those first steps, those first big wins, that first time you did something cool at work or with your friends.
You’re like, “Hey guys, look what I did here.”
And you like celebrated and then you went home and you integrated. You thought, “Yeah, I did that.”
And you allowed that thing that you achieved to kind of settle in on you a little bit; to strengthen up your spine to be proud of yourself.
And sometimes, we’ve lost passion in our lives because we stop celebrating and integrating them. You just keep going after one thing after next, after the next, after next and never taking a pause to appreciate what you’ve done. To appreciate what you’ve contributed or felt or connected, and when we don’t take those moments just to pause the passion goes away.
The emotional energy of our lives flat lines because we’re not giving ourselves that gift of just a few moments to appreciate and celebrate and feel life again, feel our accomplishments again. You won’t feel passionate for the day if you don’t allow yourself to feel greater ranges of emotion:
- That are celebratory
- That are excited
- That are happy
- That are connected
So, give yourself that gift of just taking a set back today.
- What could you be grateful for?
- What could you be proud of?
- What could you connect with right now that you’ve done?
Give yourself some credit, and if you don’t allow yourself to do that then your passions will never arise because the last times your passions arose, you didn’t celebrate them, you didn’t notice it. So your passions said, “You know what? Jack, I’m going over here; I’m out of here.” If you don’t care about your passions and celebrating them, they’re not going to care about waking up for you.
So, I hope these ideas help you re-connect. You deserve to have a passionate life but it won’t happen automatically. You have to do these things to cultivate those passions, and when you do that you start to feel an incredible sense of emotional connection with life again, you start to feel more engaged, more enthusiastic, more energized. You start to feel what we call The Charged Life.
