By Premium Writer Denise Turney (www.chistell.com)

Consider your passion. This is an activity that you absolutely love engaging in. Could be in the creative arts, business, technical, scientific, social or educational field. For instance, you might love spending hours working in a dark room, developing new photographs. Even if you made a lot of money from your passion, there may be no bigger reward than the joy that you feel while you’re deeply involved in your passion.

Avoid The Trap

No amount of money may center you in that type of joy. If you already pursue your passion, you probably are familiar with this. Yet, in this world, you could miss this fact and start chasing external approval, awards or titles. Even more, you could start seeing your passion as primarily a means to bring more and more money into your home.

For certain, you wouldn’t be the first to do this. As much as I don’t like to say it, I fell into this trap, lingering in the trap for several years. If I didn’t sell a lot of books, I told myself that it wasn’t worth it to write a new book.

Fortunately, I shifted out of this trap. After I was out of this snare, I realized that the more important thing was to “do the work”. Makes good sense to me now.

After all, without the work, there are slimmer chances of getting to the book sales success that I want. But, there was another lesson that was birthed in the realization that “doing the work” was the more important goal.

It’s So Simple

And, that other lesson was the importance of valuing how engaging in my passion helped to open me up to joy. Spend five minutes in joy and you might come to see that there’s no better feeling than joy. Add to that how easy it is to get into joy simply by engaging in your passion.

Talk about your passion being a blessing. For this reason, be encouraged to return to your passion. Should you not return to your passion, you could rob yourself of a lot of joy and satisfaction. Let that occur and no amount of work, food or sleep might feel like enough.

Sounds simple.

However, it’s not always so simple.

Stop Avoiding Passion

This is a busy world, full or responsibilities, deadlines and distractions. Get distracted or caught up in other “safe” or “comfortable” pursuits and years could pass without you even thinking about your passion, let alone engaging in it. In fact, you might even convince yourself that you just don’t have time to pursue your deepest passions.

Should this be where you are right now, consider pausing. Think about the power and the importance of joy. There’s a wealth of power in joy. Then, start to search for activities to spend less time with, making room to engage in your passion. Of course, do this with love. In other words, don’t cut down the time that you spend with your family.

Find The Time

Instead, carve out “meaningless” activities, things that you do merely to fill up time. Take this rediscovered time and focus on what you truly love to do. The payoff might be greater than you could ever imagine.

You have to make the shift though. It really is true that you won’t know what could come of your passions if you don’t work them. What you do could bless you, those around you and generations to come.

Here’s to finding the time to pursue your deepest passions.