Mysteries of your 3 P's: Passion, Potential and Purpose

#LeadandLift | Episode 42 | Ana Berdecia

We have these blindspots within ourselves — mysterious unknowns — but other people see them in you and can encourage you to identify with them.

Sometimes the blind spots prevent us from seeing our true passion, potential, and purpose, so we continue forward on auto-pilot yet are missing out on truly living a fulfilling life. When we go through life in this auto-pilot mode, we’re not walking with purpose and therefore have dissatisfaction. When we walk in our purpose, we feel great joy.

To guide us on our journey of discovering our true passions, true potential, and true purpose, I introduce you to Ana Berdecia, a Maxwell Leadership Certified Coach and CEO of Potential Pathways.

As a child, Ana always had teachers and mentors tell her she has so much potential, but she didn’t know what the word meant until she started to work with a mentor who saw things within her that she didn’t even see herself. Encouragement from her mentor helped her find her potential and her gifts so she could walk in them. Ana loves working with women to own the mysteries of their 3 P’s — Passion, Potential, and Purpose — through a proven system.

How to Discover Your True Passions

To keep it simple, Ana says: “Passion is what you love to do, and it leaves us clues.”

During my interview with her on the Lead & Lift Podcast, she speaks of a tugging in our hearts — something that doesn’t go away and keeps coming back to us every single day. That passion you have is what you love to do, but sometimes we get stuck in a job we don’t like and feel there has to be more. It’s that nagging feeling that you’ve left something uncovered, undiscovered, and unused.

Sometimes our passion starts giving us clues in our childhood. You may have been a child who loved to draw, loved to build, or loved to write. Those are things that may still hold true to who you are today.

So while we can look for those clues from our childhood and in our current everyday life, Ana also shared with us an actionable tool: Passion Inventory. She suggests taking a piece of paper and writing down all the things you love to do and what those things have led you to do. For instance, maybe you love cooking which led you to join a cooking class or even write a cookbook. Write not only about your passions but where each passion has led you.

I believe the Passion Inventory is an amazing place to start because so many of us get caught up in the job. We may know we don’t like the job, yet we don’t take the time to spend a few minutes to write out our own Passion Inventory to see what it is we truly love doing.

Something as simple as taking the time to do that can show us something we have not yet realized. Don’t allow yourself to believe you’re too “busy” to make time to discover your true passions because we’re not really busy, we just find other things to fill our days with and those may not be the things you love to do.

So take Ana’s great tip of creating a Passion Inventory to begin your journey of discovery.

How Potential Gives Life to Your Passion

For a lot of people, the J-O-B pays the bills, but they may be passionate about something completely different. So I asked Ana to share her thoughts on the next steps for when you make your Passion Inventory and see something you love to do, yet still have bills to pay. This is where I learned Potential has a place in the mysteries of The 3 P’s.

For Ana, potential is one of her favorite words. We both share John Maxwell as a mentor, and in his book, “The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth: Live Them and Reach Your Potential”, he says potential is one of the most wonderful words in any language. It looks forward with optimism. It’s filled with hope and promises of success. It implies fulfillment. It hints at greatness. Potential is a word based in possibilities.

Ana broke it down even more in our conversation by saying potential is your talents, your capacity, and your capabilities. She suggests looking at your potential and where it can lead you because those pathways are your possibilities.

One example she shared is when a person is passionate about writing poetry, the possibility within that potential is to go to a poet’s night and recite poetry or write a book or an article about something the writer is passionate about. Passion is born when we catch a glimpse of our true purpose.

Our conversation about passion and potential provoked me to think back to the corporate space. Many of us in the corporate world don’t use all of our talents. Sometimes that can cause a person to feel unfulfilled or lacking in their role. Too often we get caught up in the J-O-B and ignore our other talents that can bring us fulfillment while also getting paid to follow your passion. Who doesn’t want that?

The Benefits to Discovering YOUR Purpose, YOUR Calling

We’ve touched on passion and potential discovering some intersection between those two, but we still have a third mysterious P to dig deeper into. Purpose.

According to Ana, purpose is really your calling. It’s your sweet spot, your reason for being alive.

Each and every one of us is created uniquely and there’s no one else on the planet that has the grace to do what you can do. Two people can have the same skillset, but there purpose shows up very differently and they can each do things that only they can do because their DNA is different. Their passion is different. Their potential is different. Their values are different.

 When you find your purpose and walk in it, you will walk with joy and satisfaction that you’re in your strength zone. You’re in a zone where you can create, imagine, and wonder. This will bring you great satisfaction. It will become your reason for getting out of bed and when you lay your head on your pillow, you’ll feel like you’ve done what you were born to do.

I love how she touched on feeling like you were born to do what you’re doing when you find your purpose because a lot of people go to bed with far too many worrisome thoughts. Thoughts of: I forgot to do this. I didn’t send that email. I should have done that. I’m not happy with this, I’m worried about that.

If you know what I’m talking about — and I’m certain many of you do — then I encourage you to begin your journey to discover your passion, potential, and purpose. We’ve already discussed how to find your passion and how to consider and take action on the potential so now let’s move into Ana’s explanation for how to start finding the purpose. 

Solving the Mystery: How to Find Your Purpose

Ana shared with us that our purpose is always speaking. It’s prompting you. It’s pulling you forward. But the question is: Are you listening? Are you paying attention to those things in your heart saying you’re supposed to be a writer, an entrepreneur, an inventor, etc.? Those things come to our mind and our heart repeatedly when we’re paying attention. When we step into that purpose and start doing what we’re designed to do, we’re given great satisfaction and can’t imagine a day without doing our very own purpose.

While I hear her and fully support her, I also know we live in a busy world. If you’re a mom you have a family to take care of, and if you’re in corporate you’re putting out fires all day. If you’re a small business owner, you may be lucky to have a team but you’re still constantly thinking of the next steps. Because of all this “noise,” we may not even hear the whisper of “hey, you should be writing” or “you should try this or that”.

So how do we get some quiet to hear our passion speaking to us, driving us towards our purpose?

Reflective Thinking — Have a sit-down on a bench to think about your life or take an inventory of how you show up every day within your passion, within your potential, and within your purpose.

Journaling — When you write your ideas down, it’s not only to put it on paper but also to read it to yourself to develop a purpose statement — like a mission statement. Read your purpose statement every day. Remind yourself of who you are and what you are becoming.

It’s so important to stay within your purpose because sometimes we talk ourselves out of our purposes by saying things to ourselves like, “That’s ridiculous. I’m never going to be a writer. I don’t have time to write. Who’s going to read my stuff?” So we have excuses about how we shouldn’t walk in the line of our passion, potential, and purpose. Don’t hold yourself back from living the fulfilling life you were born for.

Ready to start finding your purpose but not into writing it out?

I’ve heard from other coaches that if you observe yourself during the day, there are some tasks you do effortlessly without realizing time is passing. You just do that task naturally. It comes easy. It’s like you’re in a flow.

I presented this tidbit of advice to Ana and she agreed that those types of tasks are worth digging into deeper to determine if they are your purpose. Ana calls that type of personal observation: Confirmation. Confirmation that you are on the right track. Confirmation that the particular, easy, natural task is a part of who you are and were made to be.

When Ana is teaching, coaching, and encouraging people, she is within her purpose. She knows this because at the end of the day, she has a sense of fulfillment in knowing she’s truly being who she is and is truly being alive. She strives to be able to remember her life and all the things she’s done that confirmed who she was created to be.

I love how Ana’s passion, potential, and purpose are aligned in such a way that she is joyfully walking within her purpose. Even more, I love how Ana’s purpose is her passion which allows her to reach her maximum potential.

Bonus Resources for Solving the Mystery of Your Passion, Potential, & Purpose

What an absolutely amazing goal for all of us to strive for: To live within our purpose.

To help us get started solving the master of our own personal 3 P’s — Passion, Potential, Purpose, Ana invites us to join her Facebook Group, “Purpose Partners”, where people support others with their dreams, discussions of what passion and purpose are, and just supporting one another on this road to purpose. She recommends allowing yourself a Purpose Partner such as a mentor or a hired coach to help you discover what your purpose truly is. The art of conversation helps you hear your own voice and come to the realization: “That’s what I’m supposed to be doing. It’s always been in my heart, and it keeps coming back to me. I’ve ignored it. I’ve put it off.” But having that conversation with a coach can be very helpful to uncovering what’s in your heart and in your mind leading you towards taking action steps to make your purpose part of your every day life and not just a dream deferred.

Our final piece of advice from Ana Berdecia is to understand your purpose has checkpoints. Whether it’s through a dream, watching a movie and identifying with the character, or reading an article or book, it’s always speaking to us. It also reminds us we’re not connected or aligned with our purpose and often people in our lives will see the purpose inside of us and will remind us. Those are the clues — the checkpoints along the way — telling us we have some work to do to get on the road to our purpose and to live within our purpose.

The interconnection of The 3 P’s create a vision of 3 circles that intersect in the middle — the sweet spot.

To dig even deeper into the mysteries of The 3 P’s, I invite you to visit Ana’s website for Potential Pathways and to keep an eye out for the upcoming release (Summer 2022) of her faith-based book, “The Road to Purpose: The Twists and Turns of God’s Positioning System.” The premise of the book is that we don’t have enough time to think, plan, and do our purpose. So it really breaks it all down. The book includes a Passion Inventory along with some guided exercises about where to take your passion and how to know the pathways your passion can take you. It also offers reflective pauses and blank pages within the book to encourage you to think about your passion, your potential, and your purpose. It acts as a guide to being able to write a blueprint for how you’re going to connect with your purpose every single day. The book is like a little journal for you that will remind you of the brilliance inside you just waiting to be developed and unleashed.

Remember, you have the ability to lead and lift others along your journey.

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Links mentioned in this episode:

• Ana Berdecia Facebook
• Ana Berdecia LinkedIn
• Ana Berdecia Website

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Chabidaye Facebook
• Chabidaye Instagram
• Chabidaye LinkedIn
• Chabidaye Website

Ana’s Book Launch Summer 2022:  The Road to Purpose

There is something extraordinary inside you waiting to be unleashed. God wastes nothing in your past and in your present to set you up for a glorious future. This book provides a roadmap to connect with the mysteries of your 3Ps: Passion, Potential, and Purpose.

• Take a passion inventory.
• Create a mind-map of potential pathways and possibilities.
• Develop a purpose declaration to inspire you forward on your journey.

For more information email: [email protected] or visit www.potentialpathways.com

Purpose Partners; Teaming up for your Success: https://www.facebook.com/groups/533259245034938