For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.
People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality. I learned never to underestimate someone’s capacity for growth. Some changes were phenomenal. Each experienced a variety of emotions, as expected, denial, fear, anger, remorse, more denial and eventually acceptance. Every single patient found their peace before they departed though, every one of them.

When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me

This was the most common regret of all. When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people have had not honored even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.
It is very important to try and honor at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realize, until they no longer have it.

2. I wish I didn’t work so hard

This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings

Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.

We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends

Often they would not truly realize the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.

It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip. But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physical details of life fall away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It is all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier

This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.

When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying.

Life is a choice. It is YOUR life.

Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly.

Choose happiness.

One day she saw a poster for a success seminar. Something about it struck a chord.

Sitting up front at the seminar she listened as a beautiful, articulate woman spoke about how easy it can be to enjoy success. The speaker said you just have to find those things that light you up inside, your passions.

As Janet listened to this remarkable woman, she felt a growing excitement inside. This was it! This was her passion, her purpose in life, to be a speaker like this amazing woman.

The next day when a friend casually asked her how she was doing. Janet answered with excitement, “I’ve found my calling! I’m going to be a speaker.”

Knowing this was her destiny; Janet left her job at the recruiting company. She travelled across the country attending each of her new mentor’s seminars and was finally hired by the woman, Debra Poneman. Today, Janet and Debra are best friends, and she’s living her passion of being a speaker and transformational leader.

Along this long and winding road she learned there is one key secret to living a happy, fulfilling, rewarding life:

“Whenever you are faced with a choice, a decision or an opportunity,
choose in favor of your passions.”

There are two parts to this. First, you have to know what you are passionate about, what it is that matters most to you in your life. That’s why Janet and her business partner, Chris Attwood wrote The Passion Test – The Effortless Path to Discovering Your Destiny. The Passion Test is a simple, yet powerful way to clarify your top passions in life.

The second part is to choose in favor of those passions. When you do this consistently with every significant decision, you will be guaranteed a passionate life.

Stewart Emery, Mark Thompson and Jerry Porras wrote a fabulous book called Success Built to Last – Creating a Life That Matters. They interviewed over 300 people who have enjoyed enduring success for more than twenty years. People like former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, Senator John McCain, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Lance Armstrong and many others.

All of these very successful people had one important characteristic in common: when faced with a major decision in their life, they always made their choice based on what held deep meaning for them. This is what we mean by choosing in favor of your passions.

Sometimes, when you listen to all the advice that’s available about what is necessary to create a happy, fulfilling, successful life, it can be a bit overwhelming. When you boil it down, if you are able to do nothing else, clarify your passions and then choose in favor of them, and you will discover your life unfolding in exciting, new, unexpected ways.

As I pondered this for myself, I noticed that one of my top passions is “Doing work that inspires me and brings value to thousands of people”. Over the past 6 months in my roles as a small business marketing coach and a Passion Test facilitator I found myself doing work that inspired me but noticed that I wasn’t having an impact on thousands of people (more like a few dozen). I knew I wanted to bring value to more people but didn’t know how to do it.

Then I remembered something that Chris Attwood taught me. He said that making a living while following your passions requires 4 things to line up in your life, and they are:

1. Your Passions
2. Your Skills
3. Your Talents
4. You must offer value to other people

Armed with this advice I took an inventory of my passions, skills and talents and realized that I enjoyed the detailed work of producing training programs, designing websites and writing marketing copy. So I approached Chris with an idea: “Would you be interested in partnering with me to develop a program to bring The Passion Test to thousands of people via weekly online video trainings?” Chris said yes and “Passionate Life Secrets” was born.

Two months later this content-rich program was launched.  We’ve kept the 4th thing on the list above in mind throughout the development of Passionate Life Secrets by constantly asking, “How can we offer the most value to people?” If you have 5 minutes, check it out.

Now I’m on my way to living one of my top 5 passions of doing work that inspires me and bringing massive value to thousands of people!

Based on research, there are a number of benefits to be gained from increasing employee engagement. The correlation between passionate, engaged employees, happy customers and profitability is strong.
Passionate, engaged employees have been shown to have a strong, positive effect on customer engagement. The research has shown that engaged employees grow in their ability to positively affect customers.
Overall, most companies have three kinds of employees :

1. Passionate and engaged – Employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the company forward and creates at least $32,000 per year in additional revenue for the company.
2. Not engaged – Employees are essentially “checked out.” They are primarily at work for the pay cheque and they only do what they have to in order to get by.
3. Actively disengaged – Employees who aren’t just unhappy at work; they are actively acting out their unhappiness. Every day these workers undermine what they’re engaged workers accomplish. Disengaged employees cost their companies about $16,000 per year.

In average companies, the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is 1.5:1. In world-class companies, the ratio is 8:1. Our intent is to help our clients get to at least the 8:1 level.

What Can be Done?

Using an innovative model called “The Passion Test for Business” can help management to:

1. Help you clarify the company’s unique value proposition that your clients pay you for.
2. Help senior management identify the things that matter most for the company to deliver that value. We call these the company’s passions. This is about what you do to deliver your unique value to clients and customers.
3. Help employees identify their own top five work-related passions. These are things that matter most to them in their life at work. We also help employees identify their core passions, which means “why” they consider their top five work passions to be so important to them.

The idea is that when you match employees’ passions with job roles that reflect the company’s need to deliver it’s unique value to it’s clients, you create the opportunity for employees to be fully engaged in delivering that value.

Workplace Application

For successful talent management and succession planning, including meaning and passion in the formula for long-term success is the basis for identifying and culturing tomorrow’s leaders. Passionate employees are more engaged. If employers can identify the core passions of their people then jobs and career paths can be planned that align the individual’s core passions with the needs of the organization.

Are you looking for ways to improve your organization’s performance? Leading edge companies now realize that employee engagement can be a huge competitive advantage. Contact Geoff Affleck to see if your business can benefit from this innovative approach.

While attending a seminar in Calgary with my wife, I had the opportunity to hear a presentation from Janet Attwood, co-author of the NY Times Bestseller, “The Passion Test”. The Passion Test is supposed to be “the effortless path to discovering your life purpose”. According to Janet, we all have a unique purpose or destiny to fulfill and our passions are clues to finding it. That made sense to me because everyone I’ve ever known or heard of who was successful, fulfilled and truly happy was also very passionate about their work, sport or cause (think about Warren Buffett, Wayne Gretzgy or Mother Teresa).

In my case, I was very passionate about snow skiing and for 25 years I was a ski instructor, ski school director and even owned my own ski and snowboard school business. I sold the business in 2007 because I was no longer passionate about it, or about skiing for that matter. Then, faced with reality of reinventing my life and not really having a new passion to put my energy into I dived headfirst into the world of personal growth courses with Peak Potentials Training and real estate investing education with Greg Habstritt. At first I thought that I wanted to be a professional trainer of something (but what?). Then it was a full-time real estate investor. After a year or so I became a self-employed marketing coach and over the past 18 months have built a successful business called Small Business Makeovers that helps self-employed people increase their sales.

Geoff with Janet Attwood, Co-creator of The Passion Test.

Anyway, back to the Passion Test. I was in that seminar that day attending Greg Habstritt’s SimpleWealth seminar in Calgary. Greg gets some of the best speakers in the same room and puts on a great event. When Janet Attwood took us through The Passion Test, I realized that one of my top 5 passions was to figure out what I was passionate about! I had been on that quest for a couple of years and felt like I was getting close to the answer. Although I’m not sure that the Passion Test was “effortless”, it definitely was an elegant and simple process that gets you to write down the things that mean the most to you and then narrows it down to your Top 5 Passions.

After taking the Passion Test, I realized that I still had some work to do because some of my Top 5 Passions felt like “shoulds” rather than passions. For example, “Enjoying perfect health” came up as my #2 Passion but I soon realized that although I want to be healthy, it is not a true passion. I’m quite happy to be in good health but don’t feel inspired to work out every day and put a lot of attention on healthy lifestyle. So I re-took the test and came up with a new Top 5 and this time, the “shoulds” didn’t make the list.

One of the secrets that Janet shared with us was to choose in favor of your passions when ever you have a decision to make or an opportunity come up. So when Janet invited us to go deeper and become Certified Passion Test Facilitators I knew it was the right thing for me since one of my passions was to discover my passions! After completing the 3 day certification program, my wife and I are now helping other people to discover their passions and it’s very rewarding for us. I’ve held 8 workshops and given about 20 personal consultations so far and most importantly have helped many people discover their passions. I’ve also made some great new friends and business connections with other facilitators.

I highly recommend The Passion Test if you want to discover your passions and life purpose.