October 14, 2019 - 10-12pm @ Kirkland Library with optional Lunch and book signing at a local restaurant.
Presented by
Gregg Levoy
1.0 Core Competency & .5 Resource Development CCEUs
CCEU cost: ICFWA Members $10, Non-members $20
Hosted by ICF Washington State
Description of Course
Passion is a concept that’s talked about a lot in the business, career, coaching and leadership arenas—employee engagement, mission statements, finding a calling. But passion is much bigger (and deeper) than what happens M-F 9-5. It’s a life skill—a stance—that helps bring vitality to all our engagements: from work life and school life to creative life and even spiritual life.
Passion is the impulse toward growth and aliveness, and not only helps awaken us from the trances and torpors of daily life, but is a survival mechanism, because our attachment to life depends on our interest in it.
This presentation—designed around a series of self-reflective questions—is about what inspires passion and what defeats it, how we lose it and how we get it back, both for ourselves and those we coach and counsel. It’s not just about finding "a" passion, but living passionately. Not just passion as a place we get to, but a place we come from, whether in the arenas of creativity and self-expression, service and spirituality, adventure and discovery, or relationship.
Some of the principle we'll explore:
- Passion can be cultivated. Turned on as well as turned off.
- Passion is in the risk. In the willingness to step from the sidelines onto the playing field.
- Passion breeds passion and disinterest breeds disinterest. If we lack passion in our own lives, our other relationships will be denied that energy—our clients, partnerships, friendships, communities, classrooms, corporations and congregations.
- Passion isn't just exuberance, it's endurance.
- Passion is intimately related to health. To the degree passion is vitality, honoring our passions enhances our vitality.
Some of the principle we'll explore:
- Passion as not just a goal but a life-skill.
- The role passion plays in the vitalizing and revitalizing of vocational and creative endeavors, as well as health and relationship.
- How passion turns into dispassion—and back.
- The difference between harmonious and obsessive passion.
- The role passionate curiosity and ‘beginner’s mind’ play in success and vitality.
- How to identify and work with the downward-pulling forces that rob people of passion.
- The endless tug-of-war between security and passion, inhibition and exhibition.
- The state of passion and vitality in their own work/lives.
- Gaining a greater degree of responsiveness in their own professional life—a keener feel for what wants to emerge or happen in any given situation or with any given client, starting with themselves.
- Developing a better understanding of the misalignments that often exist between passions and actions, so that both they and their clients can push past the limits they’ve set for themselves.
About Gregg:
Gregg Levoy is the author of "Callings: Finding and Following An Authentic Life" (Random House)—rated among the "Top 20 Career Publications" by the Workforce Information Group and a text in various graduate programs in Management and Organizational Leadership—and "Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion" (Penguin). He is the former "behavioral specialist" at USA Today and a regular blogger for Psychology Today.
He has keynoted at the National Career Development Association Conference, International Association of Career Management Professionals Conference, International Career Development Conference, NACE Conferences, ICF chapters in New England, Chicago, San Francisco, Minnesota, Dallas and others, as well as the Smithsonian Institution, Environmental Protection Agency, National League of Cities, National Conference on Positive Aging, Microsoft, British Petroleum, the Universities of Washington/Texas/California/Colorado/Arizona/Nevada/Wisconsin and others, the American Counseling Association, and has appeared on ABC-TV, CNN, NPR and PBS.
A former adjunct professor of journalism at the University of New Mexico, former columnist and reporter for USA Today and the Cincinnati Enquirer, he has written for the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Omni, Psychology Today, Fast Company, and many others. His website is www.gregglevoy.com.
