Passion driven from internal purpose

by Jason Forrest

I hear all the time about the importance of finding your drive, from conferences to books to talks with friends. The one thing I don’t hear nearly as much is what drive actually looks like. And behaviorally drive has to start from an intrinsic purpose, not from extrinsic motivation.

If you’re a bank lender, your passion can be the difference between beating out those non-bank lenders in your market. Or it could be using your passion to break down tough housing math into comprehensible, bite-sized chunks so you can improve your customers’ lives. When you have passion driven by that internal purpose, mortgages simply become vehicles to make peoples’ lives better. And that’s where true passion lies.

I’ve identified six key behaviors observable when our drive is in flow, and the first bubbles out of our passion driven from an internal purpose. Even if it was simple to access drive over the short term, it’ll only look like quick bursts of energy mixed with long lulls if you aren’t driven by an internal purpose. And it’s this internal purpose that drives your passion. Feel like your internal purpose is to help people? Then perhaps your narrower passion is teaching in a non-profit. Or maybe your internal purpose is to tell stories? Then you might be passionate about professional photography.

One of the most inspiring tales of drive compelled by this sort of burning passion sprang out of a California startup called Little Passports. In 2009, Amy Norman and Stella Ma began pitching their new idea for a subscription-based product that drew on a passion they shared as moms. They wanted to raise a generation of global citizens by sending out physical geography-themed activity kits aimed at kids.

The project’s early days were enough to push entrepreneurs with lesser drive to quit. They pitched their idea more than 50 times to raise venture capital without success, and in the end they simply ponied up $25,000 each of their own money to get it off the ground. As they slowly built their product, they found that their passion met the need of thousands. Their product gained subscribers, and then investors, and then even bigger investors. 

By the end of 2016, seven years later, Little Passports hit $30 million in revenue and boasted 31 employees in a cushy office in San Francisco. It was a long way from boxing kits in Ma’s kitchen and hoping their passion was enough to drive them through.

The reason it did is because their passion was truly driven from an internal purpose. This didn’t allow their vision to let up, which fed their perseverance and kept their motor running even through the darkest days early in the process. When drive is engaged, this is exactly what it looks like. We need drive to remind us why we’re in it in the first place and to power us through the rough patches.

Take Jon Lucas, a mortgage advisor at IKON Mortgage, one of the fastest-growing small businesses of its kind in Texas. Like so many, Lucas was driven into the mortgage industry to reverse the perceptions created by the 2008 banking crisis and restore the pride, purpose and respect back to the industry. Lucas, along with hundreds of others, found his passion in creating solutions for people so they can improve their lives. Today, IKON Mortgage continues its growth and Lucas has been part of it because he found his passion. It was helping others.

The reason we go into a certain career field, or chase certain dreams, is because our deepest fear is wrapped up in our passion. My company FPG’s slogan is “I am enough,” which comes out of my shadow self telling me I wasn’t enough, that the college I dreamed of attending was beyond me. My internal purpose today is not allowing people to feel the way I did, to help them feel they’re “enough” and facilitate their drive toward success. This lesson was branded on my past to such a degree that it defined my passion. Today, as a result, the internal drive of my company as a whole is to coach thousands of people to believe they can achieve great things.

In fact, there’s a beneficial scientific trigger that goes off in our brains when we explore and connect with our passion. When we seek out new and exciting challenges, our brain releases an anticipatory chemical called dopamine. Think of this like the fuel and motivation chemical. It gives us a pleasurable sensation and scientifically encourages us to keep reaching as we explore, invent and conceive.

When we connect with those goals, that’s when oxytocin takes over. This is the soothing chemical that tells us we’ve done something that our brains deem worthy of passionate pursuit. If dopamine tells us we’re on the right track during a pressure-packed project, oxytocin is released when we finish. This is why different people feel intrinsically drawn toward certain things. Their brains are literally rewarding them with positive chemicals for finding a passionate pursuit.

We believe that true motivation and success in the workplace comes from this kind of intrinsic motivation, not from an external stimulus. What does this look like in the workplace? It’s important to connect your employees with what they do best and put them in positions that feed their passion. This means having a fluid view of job descriptions and, most importantly, knowing your team. Because when employees find and live into their internal purpose, your company will be a passion pursuit all the way down the ladder.

Jason Forrest is the CEO and chief culture officer at Forrest Performance Group in Fort Worth, Texas. Forrest is a leading authority in culture change and an expert at creating high-performance sales and best-place-to-work cultures through complete training programs. FPG has won five international awards for its behavior change programs in sales, leadership and customer service. Connect with Forrest @jforrestspeaker on Twitter, and on LinkedIn.

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