Have had some interesting off-the-blog discussions about Ho‘ohana (our value for the month of September) which have revolved around passion: Is having passion for the work you do overrated?
The talk-story started when I included this in last week’s Tuesday coaching on MWAC:
Ho‘ohana is not always passionate, and it is not always directed
toward high levels of professional achievement. Ho‘ohana is more about
getting personal satisfaction in your life. Every day.
I used to connect passion with Ho‘ohana very consistently (and with
profession, all in one fell swoop), and wow, when it happens it’s
absolutely fantastic. However I no longer start with asking you to wear
your passions on your sleeve (or with gut-wrenching professional
decisions); I know that can be too hard because it may be too
unrealistic that way.More at: Why Bother with Ho‘ohana, and “Worthwhile Work” at all?
Ho‘ohana may not always be passionate; but it still can be pretty intense. Anything that is important to you IS intense, right? Sometimes Ho‘ohana feels purely like hard work, but it’s the “damn, that was a great work-out” kind of hard work. Sometimes, working on your Ho‘ohana is frustrating, but at the end of the day, it is always life-affirming for the life you have deliberately chosen to lead.
An important distinction to keep in mind is that I don’t equate work with job the way that most people do. Sometimes you have your job just to finance that real work of eventually discovering your
Ho‘ohana along the way, and you find that works for you.
Ho‘ohana is the grit and grime of real work that makes a difference in your life, because Ho‘ohana is working on your life. It’s satisfying. Work is not always totally pretty, and at times it gets awfully messy, but the work of Ho‘ohana should be a kind of playing in the mud fun for you. Oddly enough, when the occasional frustration gets thrown in to the mix, it actually feels a bit more real.
If you can look at it that way, Ho‘ohana is utterly useful.
USEFUL is a word that becomes more and more attractive to me every day. I think that usefulness is highly desirable.
Our Ho‘ohana Language of Intention: Are we talking about the same thing?
WORK is one of the most commonplace words in use. That means it comes with an awful amount of baggage. There are far too many negative connotations being spoken in connection with the word “work,” and in the design of