Between passion and interest

A person with a passion to excel will always outperform the 99 others who merely have interest to do the same.

I have been in the leadership training business for so long. And while many people who went through the training would rate the session as high and describe it as:

• Life-changing seminar

• It drives me to improve

• Can’t wait to go back to work and apply the lessons

• Challenges me to become better

Many of them do not actually build up the passion to do what they have learned even if they have the tools to do it.

But there are very rare people who would take the learning investments seriously, put the principles they learned into practice and then one or two years later, they would send me Facebook messages happily telling me how they have been promoted and how well their performance have improved and their family relationships restored.

What could possibly be the difference between the two groups of participants who attended the same program that was facilitated by the same person and yet produced two different results?

Here’s how I see it. While one group of participants simply expressed the interest to improve, it is the other group who will carry the passion to make it happen. And when their efforts finally paid off, when they finally reached their success goals, those who merely expressed interest were left wondering why they never had the same “luck” as the winners.

My family and I go out of the country to visit relatives every December. This is also the time for bonding, fellowship and simply enjoying the moment.

In the past, I told myself I will refrain from eating fatty foods and increasing my body weight. I am interested in maintaining my weight and this includes an exercise routine.

But this time, I took a different course. Before we left, I made a resolve to bring down my weight by at least three pounds.

So basically, create the passion to be healthy and to stay healthy.

Throughout our stay, I used the treadmill and exercised regularly, slept accordingly and looked away from the sight of oil dripping, multi-layered beef hamburgers, milk shakes and ice cream and concentrated only on leafy vegetables and never neglected my daily vitamin intake.

I was not surprised at all when I saw my goal weight when I stood on my weighing scale.

I wasn’t only interested; I built the passion to reach my goals.

I always look at the New Year with great optimism and hope.

You need to be intentional in your desire to improve.

Do not be satisfied with simply being interested, you need to build the passion to make things happen.

Speakers, trainers and teachers can only teach and provide the tools but they cannot make people learn by heart unless people are committed to do so.

Subscribe to a mindset of continuous learning. Be committed to self-improvement and stick to the discipline of making things happen.

As the famous speaker and respected writer Zig Ziglar would say in his seminars, “You don’t pay the price for success, you enjoy the benefits of success. But you actually pay the price for failure.”

Let the process of improvement begin now. Let this year be a year of major improvement in all areas of your life.

(Start the New Year right with Francis Kong learning leadership and life skills as he present Level Up Leadership on Jan. 21-22 at EDSA Shangri-La Hotel. For further inquiries, contact Inspire at 09158055910 or call 632-6310912 for details.)