How passion and motivation can help your career

Companies dream of having employees that customers and partners remember and like. Your ability to build emotional relationships with colleagues, customers, and partners are essential to companies. You can help them achieve their goals by virtue of being your authentic self.

If you can get people to like you, then you create emotional ties with them and become someone they want to work with and someone they want to buy from. Your energy makes you stand out as passionate (which makes you easy to remember).

Companies like to employ passionate people

A person with this ability is someone companies like to employ. Too often we strive to be cool, detached, and clinical in our dealings with other people. This means that most encounters produce a bland impression.

Your market value is created through your energy and your ability to network and build emotional bonds with the people that you will encounter over the course of your career. Therefore you must become expert at how to map, maintain, and nurture professional relationships. Your biggest challenge will be to make yourself distinguishable from everyone else. Relationship expertise will prevent you from being a copy of the many new professionals entering the job market.

Passion trumps expertise

The combination of passion and energy is stronger than academic prowess alone. Are you academically talented and passionate at the same time? If you are, you are obviously in a really strong position.

Having both qualities maximizes your potential and allows others to see your authenticity! Authentic people take pride in what they do by demonstrating their passion. It is therefore important that you engage in work that you have passion for and execute it with energy. Passion creates positive energy and the two have become valuable and desirable attributes because they produce results.

Do you have doubts? Maybe this will convince you. Think about how often you judge a person based on their energy and charisma. The impression you leave will have a more lasting effect than what you said or did.

Think of how you react when you meet someone who is enthusiastic, energetic, informed, and excited. They are contagious, and you remember that person better than someone who is quiet and timid. The energy you bring to the table and leave in the room becomes part of your business image, your business card.

“Shining eyes” effect

Passion and energy produce what has been called the “shining eyes” effect, which simply means that one has a radiant sparkle in their eyes. People enjoy working with someone whose eyes are vibrant, smiling, convincing, and compelling.

Look at some recent photos of yourself. What do you see? Is there life and enthusiasm or are they the kind of eyes that you would not be fascinated with or drawn to if you saw them in another individual? If you want to exhibit “shining eyes” find your passion!

Find your motivation

It is important to know what motivates you because it is your so-called driving force that will take you forward toward your goals. Identify what makes you “hungry.” Write it down. Your motivation is divided into two types:

• internal motivation
• external motivation

Understanding the two types of motivation is rather intuitive. Internal motivation is sourced from within. There is less of a concern for the rewards of an activity than with the satisfaction of engaging in the activity itself. The process, not the goal, is important.

External motivation is sourced outside the individual. For example: validation by friends, family, colleagues, and supervisors; tangible rewards such as pay increases, promotions, and job titles. Arguably, intrinsic, or inner motivation is the strongest form of motivation as it is not subject to changes by outside sources.

Your motivation drives your performance and is enhanced by three key factors:

• Faith: As they say, faith can move mountains. Believe that you can. Your faith will feed your passion and vice versa, and it will be instrumental in making other people believe in you. It’s just that simple, if you believe in yourself, other people will also believe in you.

• Commitment: If you want something, it is important that you have the ability to override other needs when it really counts. A very simple, yet very important question needs to be answered: How much do you want it? The degree to which you want something will determine the level of commitment necessary to acquire it.
• Focus: You will be continually diverted and distracted. Be good at staying focused for the long haul. To do this you must draw upon your faith and commitment.