HAS YOUR LIFE LOST ITS ZING? DOES THE DAILY GRIND FEEL LIKE NEVER-ENDING DRUDGERY? IF SO, IT MAY BE TIME TO INJECT SOME PASSION. FIONA ZIEBELL DELVES INTO THIS ESSENTIAL INGREDIENT OF A REWARDING LIFE.

Passion is life's elixir. Simply defined, it is an overwhelming fondness or fervour for something - or someone - yet its power goes far beyond that. It has a magical quality that renews your fuel supply and gives your life meaning.

It's easy to spot someone living with passion - they're the ones bubbling over with energy and enthusiasm. They've tapped into something that fires them up - a way of spending their time that somehow gives back to them, propelling them forward with positive force. The good news is you can be one of them.

A Passionate Life
John Wood is a perfect example of someone living with passion every day. As told in his book, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, he was working as a marketing director for Microsoft in Sydney when he discovered his true passion on a soul-searching trip to the Himalayas. "My idea behind going to Nepal was all about escaping. Escaping from the daily grind... and just getting away," he says. "I went trekking looking for nothing but snow-capped Himalayan peaks and what I found instead was a school that had 450 students and a library that was a library in name only... it was completely devoid of books."

The headmaster at the school noticed Wood's concern and spoke a sentence that would forever change his life. "He said ‘perhaps sir, you will someday come back with books,'" Wood recalls. Soon after, Wood arranged a book drive and returned to Nepal with his father and thousands of books on the back of a yak. The children's reaction to the brightly coloured books - unlike anything they had ever seen before - touched his heart. "I thought ‘I am not going back to my desk to sell software,'" he says. "I am quitting my job and dedicating the rest of my life to building hundreds, if not thousands, of these rural libraries."

Wood made the difficult decision to walk away from his lucrative career to create Room to Read, a non-profit organisation that promotes education across the developing world. It aims to break the cycle of poverty through the lifelong gift of education by establishing libraries, schools, computer labs, publishing local language books and providing scholarships for girls. As a result, not only is he changing the world, he is living a passion-fuelled life. "I have found the one thing I always wanted - a career with meaning and about which I feel passion," he says. "I wake up eager to jump out of bed and head to the office, excited for whatever it is that the day holds."

Of course, it doesn't suit everyone to throw in their jobs and devote their lives to serving others - there are less dramatic avenues to inject some passion. "Tweaking", for example, could be the answer as discovered by Kasey Edwards, author of Thirty Something & Over It.

Kasey was well and truly over her high-powered career as a change management consultant - finding it harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning and next to impossible to feign enthusiasm in meetings at work. "Once I acknowledged to myself that I didn't want to go to work anymore, showing up each day became almost unbearable," she says.

She knew she had to do something but felt locked into her well-paying gig in order to finance her mortgage and maintain the lifestyle she had become accustomed to. The only thing that gave her any real joy, apart from her boyfriend, was writing - which she loved. "I was bemoaning my situation to a friend and he pointed out that my face lit up when I talked about writing," she says. "He helped me realise that writing was what I loved... it was my passion."

Eventually she took the leap and found a three-day a week consulting job. This allowed her to devote two days a week to writing and - with a little tightening on the purse strings - still earn enough to cover her mortgage.

She immediately had a new lease of life. She found her smile again... all because she made room for her passion. "All of a sudden I didn't resent going to work anymore," she says. It didn't take her long to adjust to her part-time income either, saying that after a couple of months she didn't even notice it anymore. "I still feel I have enough money to buy everything I need and want, and I have two days a week to write," she says. "It feels like a fairytale - three days a week to enrich my wallet and two days to enrich my soul. I can hardly believe I've pulled it off."

For many though, living a passion-filled life is a goal that goes out of focus as they get dragged down in bills, responsibilities and perhaps a reluctance to delve a little deeper. Thankfully, living passionately doesn't have to mean abandoning significant portions of your life for a new way of being. Small steps can trigger passion just as effectively as major adjustments.

Trigger Passion With Small Steps
Simply making time in your weekly schedule to indulge in the passions you know you have, or to explore potential new passions, is a worthy pursuit that will pay dividends in your contentedness. In fact, if we don't make time for our passions the ‘every day' tends to slowly lose its sheen... leaving you with a sense that your life has simply flat-lined.

According to professional coach and author of A Life of Unlearning, Anthony Venn Brown, a life lived without vision, purpose or passion is "a life half lived". "Most people live on autopilot ... the same motions day after day, week after week and year after year," he says. And, as a result, he believes "...mediocrity is maintained".

"Time and energy needs to be dedicated to your passions or otherwise your life is out of balance," he says. Venn-Brown says his clients are "looking for more in life" and he guides them through self-reflection and awareness-raising exercises to "discover there is always more they can be, do and have."

What's Your Passion?
So how do you know when you've stumbled onto one? Plainly put, a passion makes you feel alive. You often become animated when you talk about it and find you have seemingly endless reserves of energy to devote to it. It may be something that you loved as a child but have long since left behind in the mad rush and demands of adulthood.

If nothing springs to mind, it doesn't mean you are a passionless person - it simply indicates you need to put a little effort into discovering them. Try things - volunteer, do courses, read, talk to people about their passions. Inspiration is everywhere when you're ready to see it and you might just find a passion that will reinvigorate your life in ways you couldn't have imagined.

According to Venn-Brown, every human being has a purpose in life and "how that is individually expressed is up to you to find out. "Like water finding it's course, so passion will find a way to flow and express itself," he says.

He believes a sense of fulfillment is automatic when you follow your passions. Surely that's something worth searching for?

Hints You've Found a Passion:

* You get excited when you talk about it.
* You have an unquenchable thirst to find out more about it.
* It resonates with your values and you have lots of energy for it.
* Spending time on/with it makes you feel happy and contented.
* You miss it when you are unable to spend time on/with it.

7 questions to help find your passions:

1. What grabs your attention when you watch television, read the paper or simply go about everyday life?
2. What would you spend your days doing if money were not a consideration?
3. What are the types of activities you enjoyed doing as a child?
4. What are your strengths? Are you organised? Creative? Social?
5. What do others say you are good at? If you aren't sure, ask family and friends.
6. What activities seem to "fly by" when you do them or make you lose all sense of time, as you are so absorbed in them?
7. If you could trade places with someone for a month, who would it be and why?