Personal Development Tips: Seven Criteria for Recognizing Your Passion and Purpose

Your passion will fuel the engine that powers the manifestation of your dreams. You need a passion that will drive you to personal growth and business success.

Do you know what your passion in life is? Or are you still looking for it? Many times people are already living their passion and they don't recognize it.

On the other hand, you may think you are doing exactly what you were meant to do, only to find there's something else that calls to you more powerfully.

If you're looking to discover your passion, the following questions will get you started before I reveal the seven criteria. I suggest that you write each question on its own sheet of paper, which will give you ample room to add brainstorming ideas.

What really excites you in your life?

What do you do that gives you so much pleasure you lose track of time?

What topics do you read about or see on the news that get you fired-up?

What do you love doing so much you'd be willing to do it for free?

Many people wonder, "How do I know what my passion is?" "How do I know this is my life purpose?" Now you can put your passion to the test. Here are seven criteria for recognizing your passion and purpose. You'll want to write these down in a place that you can refer to often.

Seven Personal Success Criteria for recognizing your passion and purpose:

Personal Success Indicator #1: What you do makes you feel good about yourself.

Personal Success Indicator #2: You would do it for free.

Personal Success Indicator #3: You lose all track of time when you do it.

Personal Success Indicator #4: You love to talk about it to anyone who will listen.

Personal Success Indicator #5: You are happy to teach it to others.

Personal Success Indicator #6: If this were how you spent all of your time, it would be a good thing.

Personal Success Indicator #7: It makes you want to get out of bed in the morning.

This simple process to identifying your passion and your life purpose will help you focus so you're not creating a business about a subject you're going to get sick of in a few months.

Unfortunately, that occurs more often than you'd think. Misdiagnosing passion happens to many people. Using the above criteria will prevent this from happening to you. If you can say "yes" to all seven indicators, then you've verified that you're passionate about the subject.

So, what do you do once you think you've uncovered your passion? Well, the first step is to start visualizing your end result. Many people share the same passion and purpose, yet each one approaches it differently and contributes their own unique talents to it.

A major part of what I teach my clients is to turn their passions into information products. I had spoken on that topic at Mark Victor Hansen's Mega Book Marketing University, and later had a conversation with a plumber who was attending the event.

We discussed creating a product describing how he's made his plumbing business more successful than his competitors. I thought, "Well, yes, that could be a great product."

But then I asked him, "What gets you so excited about teaching, that you'd do it for free?" He immediately gave me a different answer. What got him enthusiastic was the work he did with kids, and he could have talked about that for hours.

His brain thought, "Well, I'm really good at X. X is probably what I should do as a product." But X is not what makes him happy. It's not what fulfills him. It's not what he's passionate about. He'd soon be bored and moving on to something else if he went ahead with X.

Sometimes we just need to clear our minds, ask some questions and give ourselves creative space to recognize our passions and purposes. Start identifying your own passion and purpose by putting the seven steps in motion for your personal success.