Even before the first tip, you simply must get out a notebook, journal, piece of paper, napkin…SOMETHING to write on to save your discoveries! These tips will only help if you pursue them, so please either take a moment to find writing tools NOW or print this out and promise yourself to complete this exercise later. It may take you some thinking time to get it done……and now….here are your tips…..

1. Find Your Joy Factor Look at the whole of your life history. When did you experience the most sustained period of Joy? What were you doing then? Where were you? Who were you with? How did it feel?

2. What Are Your 3 Most Favorite things to do? If you had a free day with NO commitments, where would you be found? What would you be doing with whom?

3. In what area do you excel? (NO MODESTY ALLOWED HERE!)Truly, what are you complimented on a lot? This could be ANYTHING.

4. What do you most want to be remembered for? If you were designing your epitaph, what would you want it to say? (NOT what your Mom wants, or your SPOUSE wants or your third cousin twice removed, but what do YOU want your headstone to say?)

5. If you had a magic wand, what would you change about your life TODAY? How would it look compared to how it looks now? Which aspects of your life ARE changeable, both short term and long term?

6. How does your Joy factor overlap with your favorite things and the areas in which you excel? Do the areas in which you excel bring YOU joy, or are they really for someone else…..do you see which are obvious matches, and which do not fit? Those that overlap, that bring YOU the most Joy, are most likely the things that would bring you into Passionate Living.

7. What is the first even teeny tiny step you can take to living out your Passion as you have defined in #6? Take some time to really think this one through… concentrate and focus, and then you will be able to start the next step…BUILDING YOUR ROADMAP.

By Julie Jordan Scott