Barrie Davenport

Today I’m really excited to bring you something different.

We often talk about the subject of passion on The Start of Happiness, however I want to delve a little deeper into that.

Passion is everything in life. Passion brings out the best in you. Passion brings out the person that you are meant to be. Passion leads to success.

Today, you’re going to get some insight into how to find your passion and live it. I decided to invite one of the biggest experts in the space of passion to talk with us at The Start of Happiness.

Barrie Davenport is a life coach and entrepreneur who specialises in helping people find and live their passion. A pretty cool occupation, don’t you think?

Watch the video below to find out how to live your passion on a daily basis.

The video goes for about 24 minutes.

Some of the topics we cover in the video include:

  • How Barrie discovered her own passion
  • The internet as a tool for discovering your passion and making a difference
  • What exactly is passion and what’s the feeling that can be felt?
  • Is it best to focus on just one passion, or to pursue as many passions as we can in life?
  • The benefits of pursuing your passion
  • How to find your passion
  • How to overcome any fear or doubt about pursuing your passion
  • Law of Attraction vs Law of Action
  • How a one degree of change in your path now can lead to huge change over time
  • The most common challenge faced by people trying to find and pursue their challenge and how to overcome it

There’s also a nice little bonus below the video for anyone that is serious about pursuing their passion.

 

 

Barrie’s Path to Passion Course is Available Today

I highly recommend you check out Barrie’s Path to Passion course which has just launched today!

As a special bonus to all readers, if you decide to purchase the Path to Passion course you will also get our very own Change Your Life program thrown in for free! This is a limited time offer ending this Sunday, 3rd November. When you click through from this page and if you decide to purchase, it will be tracked and I will be notified, enabling me to setup you up with the Change Your Life program.

 

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TRANSCRIPT

Brendan: Hello and welcome everybody to another day at The Start of Happiness!

Today I am here to interview someone I admire and respect very much for the work that she is doing in the world. I am here with Barrie Davenport who is an entrepreneur and life coach, who has dedicated her life to helping others find their passion and live their passion.

So if you want to discover your passion and learn how to incorporate it more into your every day life, then Barrie is your go to person. I’m very very pleased to have you here with me today, Barrie, so thank you very much for joining me.

Barrie: “I’m delighted, thank you for having me”

Brendan: So, I gave the start of Happiness community a bit of an introduction to yourself, but could you please give us a bit more of an introduction on your background and how you came to doing what you do now?

Barrie: Yes, absolutely! As you mentioned, I’m a coach and I run an online business with 2 different sites – Live Bold and Bloom and BarrieDavenport.com, both personal development sites and one focuses specially on helping people find their passion.

Before I started that which was about 4 years ago I was a Public Relations Executive and raising 3 children and my oldest daughter was an aspiring ballet dancer and I spending a lot of years helping her achieve that passion herself, driving her to and from dance classes which was about a 60 mile round trip every day and focused a lot on that. When she left home I had more time to focus back on my PR career and realised I had no more heart left for it. I had been so focused on her and helping her with her passion and helping my PR clients with their passions and I just woke up one day and realised that I don’t have a passion myself.

So I started a search on my own and I didn’t know what I was doing and it was that restlessness inside of me that kept urging me to find something that felt more physic and more of who I really was. So I did a lot of reading and researching and taking assessments. I had a bit of a strange path to finding my own passion.

Ultimately, I determined that coaching and counselling was more what I was best suited to. So, I started taking coaching courses and got certified and that led me to blogging. I started a blog to market my coaching business and I discovered how much I loved blogging and writing and communicating with people all over the world. It just pulled a lot of passion threads for me that led me to this point.

Brendan: I can relate to that as well. My background is in the corporate world, having spent 7 years in the field. I was in Human Resources so I was helping other people go on leadership programs or training programs or helping them do things that would benefit them in the corporate world. At the same time I was thinking to myself ‘is this really what my true passion is’?

Even though I was helping people in the corporate space, what I really wanted to do help people in the broader sense of life, such as with relationships. So what I’ve done now is I’ve discovered that passion and I feel I’m still developing that passion as I recently left my corporate career. The fact that I’ve now embarked on a journey of discovering my passion and pursuing my dream just makes me feel so much more energetic, more alive and more a part of life. It’s absolutely fantastic.

Barrie: It is fantastic. I can see it in your face! As you were talking about it your face came alive!

You’re really fortunate Brendan, I don’t know how old you are but I can tell you are younger than me, and you’ve been able to discover this at a relatively young age. We now have so many opportunities on the internet right now to create businesses and live our passions each day and reach so many people it’s not something that I had availability of in my 20’s and 30’s and now we do have that and it’s really exciting. It’s really so great that you’ve been able to do this.

Brendan: I think it’s part of human nature, where (and it’s what I talk a lot about on the Start of Happiness) is that we all want to make a difference in the world. The internet has become this tool where you can reach so many people in the world. You don’t even know these people but you can touch their lives. That to me, is so empowering and energising. It’s motivating and aligns with my own passions of wanting to make a difference and helping others. I think if everybody pursued their passion and took a journey of making a difference in the world it would be an absolutely fantastic place.

Barrie: Yes, it would be, it would be. You know, you and I would have never met or be having this conversation if it wasn’t for having the internet.

Brendan: So we talk about passion quite a lot, but I guess it’s hard to define. How would you define what a passion actually is? How would you describe it?

Barrie: Well, there’s two ways that I describe it. The traditional way is to find that thing that makes them come alive from the inside out, that pursuit, whether it’s through their work or an avocation or a hobby, it’s that thing that you can’t not do, that their so excited to get up in the morning and go after it, that it feels like play. For most people that’s their work.

Passion is also how you view your day. Even if you haven’t found that one thing. How you bring passion to what you’re doing right now.

It takes some time to find your passion. It takes energy and self-work to get to that point. While you’re doing that work you don’t need to put your life on hold or put your passion on hold. The process of finding your passion builds a lot of enthusiasm anyway because you’re working towards something wonderful. So you can make that process a passionate process itself. It’s sort of a mindset shift to make. I know I made the mistake of waiting to be happy until I found my passion, but there were many great things that were going on in my life otherwise that I put on the back shelf because I was so hyper-focused on finding my passion.

So they are the two ways that I look at finding your passion and living passionately, if that makes sense.

Brendan: Definitely!

Something I find is that, as humans, we all have a range of different passions. You might have a passion to spend time with friends and go to the beach, or it might be playing sport and health and fitness, or you might be passionate about self-development and self-discovery, or you might be passionate about developing a successful career. So, we tend to have a number of different passions. do you think it’s wise to try focus on one passion and really develop that passion, or try spread yourself and try live as many passions as you can in your life?

Barrie: I think it really depends on what your passion is and what your personal goals are with that passion.

You have heard the line that it takes 10,000 hours to become truly proficient and an expert in something. If you have a passion that you want to make a career out of and really want to become the best at it, life defines that we have to focus on something because there is just so many distractions in other things puling us away from the things that we love to do.

So if you have a passion that requires a lot of time, energy and focus then I would say focus on one passion at a time. But there are passions that are complimentary, such as my passion for coaching and my passion for blogging work well together. You can find ways to integrate your passions.

You could also focus on one passion for a few years and then move on to something else. But it’s pretty much defined by the type of passion that you are living. For example, if you have a passion for drawing and a passion for playing guitar those are two things that you can do simultaneously because you don’t have to spend all day drawing and all day playing the guitar. You kind of have to weigh it up for yourself.

Brendan: I guess if you’re looking to turn your passion into a business or career, that’s when it’s wise to focus on the one passion and really develop that and develop your expertise, and as you’re saying, it takes 10,000 hours to become that expert and that’s when you can start to get an income and make a lifestyle around it. As you’re saying, you can definitely incorporate all of your passions right now by simply incorporating them into your life into different areas.

Barrie: Yes, that’s right. You couldn’t have started your business online if you were also passionate about opening a store. That would have been too much to focus on and be successful at both things!

Brendan: I’ve felt that in the past, where you have two conflicting ideas or two conflicting passions, and do you go down the left path or the right path, and you get pulled in both directions and get paralysed because you’re stuck between the two and reach a stage of indecision. That’s why it’s important, as you’re saying, to find your passion and pursue.

So what would be the benefits of pursuing your passion?

Barrie: Well, the benefits of pursuing it are finding it and living it. That’s the main part.

The pursuit of it and the way I teach the pursuit involves a lot of understanding of things inside of yourself, learning about who you are, your personality and your intelligence. You learn a lot about yourself and I don’t think people take the time to really do that work that kind of work with themselves.

You also deal with a lot of the roadblocks and the mental things that get in your way of finding your passion and as you clear them up it helps with your self-confidence and all other areas of your life.

Then, once you find your passion and start living it, I equate it to the way you feel when you first fall in love. Everything is brighter. Everything seems happier. You have this wake up to and you’re excited to run to it. Even when something is difficult it doesn’t seem as hard because you have this other great thing going on in your life. It infuses all aspects of your life with a lot of joy and enthusiasm.

That’s the closest way I can relate living with passion. If you haven’t felt that way before it’s hard to describe it. But most people that don’t live with passion realise that their missing something. That’s what they’re working toward, that joy and sense of excitement of waking up every day.

Brendan: Yeah, I think that’s the best way of summing it up. When you wake up from your bed you’re energised, you get that sense of energy running through your body and you’re motivated. You don’t have those days where you go ‘here we go again, I have to do that report’ or whatever it may be that you don’t want to do. I also find that when you’re passionate about something you become more successful at it too.

Barrie: Absolutely

Brendan: You put more time and energy into it. You’re involved in it so much more. You’re engaged in it in whatever the activity is that you’re doing so you become more successful.

Barrie: There isn’t that resistance. You don’t have the resistance with you like something. When you’re not happy at your work or whatever you’re doing it’s like slogging through mud. When you’re happy with what you’re doing you feel like you’re in the right place and you’re just sailing along.

I had a really hard time with computer technology when I first started my blog. I’m really not skilled at it. It’s not my most favourite part of my work, but I was able to do it. I made myself do it because it was the means to my passionate end. I had to learn it to achieve what I wanted to achieve and it’s so much easier knowing that I was working towards something that I love.

Brendan: It’s also about just thinking more positively and thinking more open minded as well, so when you’re thinking in that state you just take on opportunities as they come and incorporate it into your everyday life.

Barrie: It’s pretty cool isn’t it?!

Brendan: I’m loving it! I’m loving it. It’s fantastic.

So I guess for a number of people they, and I’ve felt this a number of times in the past, there’s things holding people back from pursuing their passions, such as fear that it might not work out, or it might be financial commitments or it might be that you have children and a family to look after or you have a mortgage or you’re feeling stuck in a job and you want to feel that security. Sometimes pursuing your passion takes a leap of faith, particularly if you’re wanting to build it into a career.

So what would be your advice for people who are feeling that way and how can they get unstuck?

Barrie: Well, there are some fears that are legitimate and there’s some fears that are not.

I think the fears that are not legitimate are often the ones that stick us the most. Because we start to build these monsters in our brain about the ‘what ifs’ – “what if I fail?” “What if I don’t make enough money?” “What If I make the wrong decision?” A lot of those fears are not grounded in any reality, or any research or anything of substance. It’s really just our minds going out of control.

If you can enter the process of setting those fears aside for now and go through a logical process of figuring out what’s going on in my life right now, what my life will really accommodate, and what changes I need to make in my life to make my passion work. It will make the search a lot easier.

I ask clients to set their fears aside at the beginning. First, do the work of finding what you love. Find what you love first. Assume that the world is your oyster and you can do anything. Don’t think about those limitations. Once they find what they love all this enthusiasm comes with it. You’re so excited so a lot of those fears disburse naturally. But then you do need to deal with a few things like saving some money, maybe you need to move to a different city, maybe you need more education or maybe you need to wait till your children a little older. So, you need to figure those details out.

People are smart enough to figure that out, we’re all smart enough to figure out how to make something happen when we want to make it happen. When you want to do something really badly, it’s amazing how you can bust through those walls of perceived difficulties.

So, yes there are some real things that people need to deal with, but once they find their passion, they’ll find it’s a lot easier than what they first thought it was.

Brendan: I guess what it comes down to is that when there’s a will there’s a way.

Barrie: Absolutely! That’s the short way of saying what I just babbled about.

Brendan: It’s so true. You have that side of it, but you also have the law of attraction side – where the more you focus on something, barriers start breaking down and those things just start coming into your life. You start becoming more aware about the opportunities that are presented to you on a daily basis.

Even though the opportunities are always there you become more aware that their there because you’re focused on and passionate about it and you want to incorporate it into your life.

Barrie: You know I call the law of attraction the law of action.

Brendan: I like it!

Barrie: I do think that you can use positive thinking and affirmations as a supportive measure for making things happen in your life. There is real science behind that. If you’re thinking positively it creates chemical changes in your brain that can support the work you’re doing to create life change.

I think the most powerful thing you can do to really change your life is to take some forward moving action every single day. That’s where you see a real shift of what’s going on in your life. At first, it feels like you’re not doing much, perhaps it’s a little reading or research or taking a course or whatever. Then, 6 months down the road suddenly you realise you’ve done all these things and things are shifting in your life and you assess your life and you realise ‘oh I’m kind of where I want to be’. Taking committed action every day has huge, huge power.

Brendan: That reminds me. Something I like to talk about is trajectory.

Barrie: What is that?

Brendan: I don’t know if you can see, but if you can take just one degree of change. One degree of change over time will lead to a big change over 6 months or a year. So one degree of change right now, which might be very small, just a single step, but if you keep going on that particular path over time, 6 months to a year from now…

Barrie: Yeah, absolutely! I’ve read a lot about that but I’ve never heard it called that. It’s so true.

Brendan: As you’re saying, all it takes is that one step every single day and it becomes part of your life.

So as your time as a coach and helping people find and pursue their passion, what would you say is the most common challenge faced by your clients and how do you help them overcome it?

Barrie: It’s the fear thing. The fear that they won’t be able to do it, they won’t be able to find it, they don’t have a passion or if they do have one they won’t be able to make it real in their lives.

That’s really the biggest challenge I see faced in people. It’s such a prohibitive thing it’s unfortunate as we get to be adults, especially as older adults being midlife, you become so conditioned to the life that you have and you have all of these should in your head. “I should be living this way”, “I should have all these things”, “I should be doing this with my kids and my family”, and so it’s hard to think outside of the box. It’s hard to break away from our routines.

Really, it comes down to a fear of dying. I know that sounds a bit over the top, but if we feel we let go to something comfortable and safe that something bad will happen. It won’t. It won’t happen. You have to take that leap of faith and let go of the bar and let the universe to catch you. You are smart enough and talented enough to make it. That’s what I remind people is just in that moment where they have to releases their hand to do that that they’re going to be ok.

Brendan: Something that puts me in comfort when I think of that is that you can always go back to what you were doing before. There’s no harm in trying and taking that single step and moving in that direction. Even if you’re trying to build it into a career or just incorporating it into your everyday life, there’s no harm in trying and testing it out to see how it goes. You can always go back to your comfort zone, or where you were prior. That’s how I personally help deal with it.

Barrie: I also think surrounding yourself with people who are passionate themselves and immersing yourself in that environment and seeing successful people doing what you want to do is a huge motivator. We can get isolated in our crazy little thoughts, in our fears, but seeing someone who is living that kind of life and studying how they do it and asking questions and looking for a mentor even, that’s hugely helpful.

Brendan: That proves that it can be done. When it comes back to the fears that you were talking about before, it might be the fear that ‘I can’t do this; or ‘it can’t be done’, but when you see other people doing it, it makes you ask the question ‘well if they are doing it, why can’t I do it?’ It’s actually possible. It proves to you that it’s possible.

Barrie: Yes, totally,

Brendan: Plus, as you’re saying when you surround yourself with other people you start to bounce ideas around and it incorporates it more into your everyday life.

Barrie: Yes, that creative energy gets going. You become more expansive.

Brendan: Exactly. So, you have a course as well that has just been released today. Can you please tell us a little bit about it?

Barrie: Sure, it’s called the path to passion course and I’m releasing the self-guided version of the course.

It’s an 8 module course that takes people through the process of first, learning about themselves which is really the foundational work of finding your passion and understanding your personality, your aptitude, your skills and your intelligence and all of that kind of ground work that you need to lay.

Then it deals with the limitations and the roadblocks and addressing those and breaking those down. Then you start doing the work of experimenting and researching potential passions. A lot of people feel that passion falls from the sky or should show up at your doorstep or announce itself in some way, but you really have to look for it and test different things to see whether it is a good passion fit and if it really engages you enough to make you want to continue on with it. So that’s a big part of the course, helping people figure out the best, strong interest for them and then how to engage with those interests and get deeply involved with likeminded people and mentors to support you and help you figure out if it is the right place.

Also, it’s about understanding that you can test a lot of different things that you’re not failing if you go down a path and it turns out it’s not your passion. That’s all part of the journey. It’s testing different things, pulling information from what you’ve learned as you go down these different paths, applying that information to the next test. So, you’re kind of honing all of this information and pulling it all together until you uncover that thing that you really want to lay your hat on.

Brendan:  It’s a great course. I’ll make sure I have a link below this video for everybody to check it out.

Is there anywhere that people kind find out more about you? Where’s your home on the internet?

Barrie: Yes, they can find more about me and the course at barriedavenport.com and at pathtopassioncourse.com. They are certainly welcome to email me and ask questions. I’d certainly love to help them with the passion course. There’s two different versions of it.

One is an audio version mostly and has some other things with it. The other version has a lot of different components, audio, video, articles, teleseminar speaking guest excerpts so there is a lot to choose from.

Brendan: Sounds absolutely fantastic. I encourage everybody to check it out and take action and pursue their passion. That’s what life is all about. Pursuing your passion and waking up energised and motivated everyday there is nothing that feels quite like it.

Thank you very much Barrie, I really appreciate your time.

 

Limited Time Offer: Change Your Life program for FREE

Just a reminder, the Change Your Life program will only be thrown in for free for any purchase of the Path to Passion course before Sunday, 3rd November.

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Enjoy!

Brendan

About the author 

Brendan Baker

Brendan Baker is Australia's leading personal development blogger and and helps people build and grow online businesses based on their passions. He has created the Launch Your Life Academy and Your First 1000 Subscribers. Connect with Brendan: Twitter, Facebook, Google+

Brendan Baker is Australia's leading personal development blogger and and helps people build and grow online businesses based on their passions. He has created the Launch Your Life Academy and Your First 1000 Subscribers. Connect with Brendan: Twitter, Facebook, Google+

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  1. I have viewed that seinbsle real estate agents all over the place are warming up to FSBO Promoting. They are knowing that it’s more than just placing a poster in the front place. It’s really pertaining to building associations with these vendors who at some time will become buyers. So, once you give your time and efforts to assisting these dealers go it alone : the Law regarding Reciprocity kicks in. Great blog post.

  2. Great interview Brendan – and great choice in Barrie.

    I like her “one degree of change” – it reminds me of Leo Babuta’s 1% change. Though the logic surrounding each differs, they’re both elegant ways of understanding the butterfly effect even the smallest change can create.

    And thanks for including a transcript, my connection is way too slow to load video.

    1. I absolutely love the concept of trajectory and the fact that a 1% change in direction now can lead to a huge shift over time. It’s absolutely true. All it comes down to is a simple decision you make, and the first step you take. Once you’re set on the path, momentum can take over.

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