6 Real-Life Skills You’ll Learn Through The Passion Institute

A conscious leader is someone who's in touch with her worth, values, intuition and creativity. She’s in tune with nature; trusts her intuition; is skilled in transformative and relational methods such as assertive communication and empathy and leading from ‘we’ with clear boundaries.

She is deeply connected to both her own inner power and a higher power. It’s a potent mix that helps her navigate issues in business, opportunities, relationships, conflict resolution, creative solution thinking, social-impact, innovation, team cultures of meaning, time and energy management, productivity, money and health without anxiety and with clarity, intent and authentic power.

My purpose, through my work at Refresh Agency during the past 14 years, has been, and still is, to support socially and environmentally progressive entrepreneurs and business executives drive positive planetary change through business, passion, values, conscious leadership and a deep purpose. My team and I continue to do so through communication, brand identity, key messaging workshops, PR and marketing. It takes both business acumen and conscious leadership skills to be the change.

Starting on February 9, with the Passion Warrior Conscious Leadership training eCourse at The Passion Institute, I will be sharing insight on how to connect with your passion, passing along methods to help you find your purpose and increase your inner and outer skills to become the person you need to become in order to lead and create the business vision or career your envision and long for.

With participants from around the world, from 20-something professionals to social-impact entrepreneurs and international business executives, it’s clear that the hunger to bring fulfillment, passion and meaning into life and work while making a positive difference for humanity is in high demand.

Here are six real-life skills you’ll learn at Passion Warrior Conscious Leadership Training at The Passion Institute.

1. Inner passion and purposeful connection

From an early age (problematically), we are taught to lead our lives according to external expectations. That’s why most people have developed antennas to tune into their surrounding environments, but lack a strong connection to themselves. When the inner compass is broken, we will always, and unconsciously, create a life and choose a job that’s less than ideal and, at worst, entirely unfulfilling.

We create meaning in our lives and work when we listen inside, feel what uplifts us and choose actively and intently to spend more time on our passion and on creating purpose in alignment with our values.

2. Building strong long-term relationships for mutual success

Business happens at the person-to-person level. Our ability to connect with people and make them feel seen, heard and respected and to decipher the motives of each person to know who has good and synergistic intent and who we need to stay clear of, will dramatically change the trajectory of our careers and businesses for the positive. Learning to say a clean no without feeling guilt or anxiety is one of the most important skills to being a successful leader and creating a work life of fulfillment and meaning.

3. Managing your energy (and time)

Our lovely though out-of-balance right-brain heavy business world is focused on productivity and linear time – not all bad - but it’s much better when you are able to behave and have a mindset in a multi-context, where you manage your energy in relation to tasks, projects, people and time. Your experience of life and your own power will increase as you learn to safeguard your energy, and you’ll find contentment in understanding and knowing how to access and deploy your very own inner strengths to best serve you.

We have a finite amount of energy; you can call it vitality or life force. When you work on projects or spend time with people not aligned with who you are, you allow your limited energy to be drained. Learning energy-management techniques requires refining your self-observation, inner body connection, self-assertion and presencing skills.

4. Reframing failure and success

Perfectionism, procrastination and “busy work: are all founded in fear. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of not being good enough, fear of our own power, fear of being visible, fear of rejection. Processes around fear and courage will come up throughout the course, as recognizing, managing and choosing above our fear and stepping into our courage is a primary mind and behavior tool that conscious leaders master.

Rather than being afraid to fail, let’s reframe it, and instead consider this: What if you never try to connect with your passion and create meaningful purposeful work that matters to you? Now, that would be failure. With this in mind, failure creates motivation and passion for forward movement. Now that’s a mindset that really serves you.

5. SWOT analyze yourself

The SWOT analysis is a fantastic marketing tool, and any self-respecting company and brand uses this analysis tool frequently to assess how the business is going and where to set in to ensure growth.

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. To apply the SWOT tool to assess ourselves and our leadership skills is a method I learned from my business advisor Steve Demos, co-founder of White Wave, Silk and Goodbelly. Identify threats and weaknesses in your own personality and your skills, or lack of skills, to set in to stop the self-sabotage is a must. Having an advisor and supportive teacher in this process is highly advisable, as we tend to have blind spots regarding our own threats and weaknesses.

“The biggest obstacle to increasing your self-awareness is the tendency to avoid the discomfort that comes from seeing yourself as you really are.” ― Travis Bradberry, Emotional Intelligence 2.0

6. Lead yourself and others authentically

The course is packed with terms and processes like intuition, sensuality, silence, inner knowing, growing edge, shadow work, intentional choice, radical self-responsibility, right action, self-care, zone of genius, authenticity, empathetic assertive communication (right-brain peeps, believe me, you need this!).

In a process that unfolds and deepens throughout life we master leading ourselves in a straighter line towards our vision and goals, and, synergistically, our business, career and relationships align. As you learn to choose better and more intently in alignment with your authentic self, your outer experiences will mirror your transforming inner skills.