The 4 Passion Principles

The Passion Principles – 4 Ways to Find Your Passion as a Mom

Love your body.
Manage your energy.
Embrace your sensuality.
Pursue your dream.

How to Find Your Passion as a Mom, Wife, and Busy Woman

Sometimes life feels a bit dull. You’re not unhappy – exactly – but you feel a bit dissatisfied. Something seems to be missing. Maybe you had that something in the past and lost it, or maybe you’ve seen it in other women but haven’t been able to find it for yourself.

You find it hard to describe that “something,” but you know it when you see it. It looks like my friend Ana, who is running her business, loving her husband, and caring for her family and friends, all while exuding an amazing amount of joy and passion. (And expending zero energy on nonsense!)

You’ve seen glimpses of that kind of energy, enthusiasm, and zest for life too. It looks like a joyous family life and a fun and enjoyable marriage. And it looks like time and energy managed well, so that the most important things in life take priority, while less important things take the sidelines.

In other words – a passionate life. It’s the thing that most women want, but it’s also the thing that many wives and moms struggle to achieve.

And if you’re one of them, you’re definitely not alone.

Many women find that they’ve lost their passion, and they’re longing to get it back. If you’re in that position and aren’t sure where to begin, I encourage you to consider the 4 Passion Principles. These are actions you can take in four areas of your life that might need some TLC if you’re going to create the opportunity for passion to take root, grow, and thrive.

These are areas that tend to get away from us as life gets busy and hectic and complicated. Losing touch with one of them makes it hard for us to live with passion or to pursue a passion. And when we lose touch with two or more of them, embracing passion becomes just about impossible.

If you’ve lost the passion in your life, or if you can’t remember if you’ve ever felt passionate, it’s likely that one or more of these four parts of your life has gotten out of alignment. In order to find your passion as a mom or reignite it as a busy woman, you’ll need to figure out which one and take some steps toward getting it back into alignment. (Includes affiliate links)

1. Love your body. When your body is strong, healthy, and energized, and when you’re in touch with how it feels, it becomes easier to experience physical passion and to feel energized to pursue passion in other areas of your life.

But when your body is neglected in some way, when you feel tired or unhealthy, or you’re just not sure exactly how it’s feeling, pursuing passion becomes a challenge.

For example, if you rarely get enough sleep or never take a few minutes to slow down and decompress, you’re going to struggle to feel energy and passion in your body.

If you’re subsisting on a diet of fast food, processed food, and meals on-the-go, your body isn’t well fed, and you’re not going to feel your best – and passion will likely be hard to find.

And if you’re sitting at a desk or in a car most of hours of most days and get very little exercise, your body is going to feel sluggish – not energetic, and certainly not passionate.

So take a look at how you’re treating and caring for your body. Slow down long enough to pay attention and listen to it. What does it need? What’s missing? What’s getting in the way? What’s the one thing you know you need to start doing, in order to take better care of it?

2. Manage your energy. The second action you may need to take is to balance and maximize your energy, so that you can put it to work to create a more passionate life, is to manage your energy. A big part of this involves your time – how you use and manage the hours in each day.

But it’s more than just time management. Because the goal isn’t simply to manage your time better – allocating the right number of minutes or hours to each of the tasks you need to do.

Instead, the goal is to spend your time in the best, most effective way possible, in order to maximize your energy. Because maximizing your energy will allow you to do all of the things you need to do and pursue passion in your life.

The friend I mentioned earlier, for example, works hard. She’s busy all day, every day. She gets tired and feels worn out at the end of many days, like we all do. But yet she lives with a great deal of passion, in part because she focuses her time and energy on the things that matter most to her and her family.

What about you? Where is most of your energy going? Is it focused on the things that matter most to you and your family? Or is it scattered among a bunch of different tasks, many of which don’t really matter?

3. Embrace your sensuality. The third action is to take steps to embrace your sensuality. This involves sex, but it’s much more. Becoming a sensual woman and learning to enjoy your sensuality means embracing and paying attention to your senses.

It means taking the time and learning how to appreciate the things you see, feel, smell, hear, and taste. It means noticing the things your senses are telling you, rather than pushing those things to the side because you don’t have the time or energy to pay attention to them.

I have a friend who embodies this kind of sensuality, not in a flashy or sexual way, but in a “full of life” way. I think it’s because she notices and embraces her senses.

She loves and pays attention to color, takes time (even though she’s very busy) to sit outside and enjoy a glass of wine, loves eating delicious food and trying new foods, spends time enjoying art and music, and wears clothing that perfectly suits her body and personality.

Honestly, I feel like a complete sensuality failure when compared to her!

But there’s no need to compare. Her personality is completely different from mine, so I need to figure out ways to nurture my senses and embrace my sensuality that make sense for me. And you need to do the same, figuring out what works for your that will help you embrace your sensuality and build more passion into your life.

4. Pursue your dream. The final action is to pursue your dream. For many women, getting married and raising children means the end of any dreams they wanted to pursue. As demands on their time grow, and withdrawals from their energy reserves increase, dreams tend to disappear.

And, of course, in some ways that makes sense. Because becoming a wife and a mom changes a woman’s life in many ways. To a large extent, her time and energy and schedule are no longer her own – the control she has over them plummets dramatically!

But, that doesn’t mean that all of her dreams should lie dormant in the back of a closet until her youngest child leaves for college! It’s entirely possible to create a strong marriage and raise a healthy family while also investing some time and energy in a dream. In fact, for any woman who wants to live a more passionate life, it’s probably a requirement!

Pursuing a dream doesn’t mean abandoning your responsibilities. If you have a passion for art and really want to become a painter, you don’t have to leave your family and go study painting in Florence for 6 months! Instead, you can just – paint. Or take a painting class at a local art store. Or take an online course.

If you love making crafts and really want to start selling them, you don’t have to risk your family’s finances by starting a brick-and-mortar crafts store. Instead, you can make crafts and sell them to people you know. Or open an Etsy shop. Or enter a local craft show.

The point is, just because you’re a wife and mom, with responsibilities and constraints on your time and energy, doesn’t mean you can’t pursue a passion or follow a dream. In fact, unless you follow at least one of your dreams, even if it’s just in a very small way, you’ll probably end up feeling resentful and frustrated, and the day-to-day tasks of your busy life may end up feeling more burdensome than they need to be.

Author and speaker Jon Acuff puts it this way – “Talent you don’t claim turns into bitterness.” I think that’s true, and that the definition of “talent” is very broad. It includes not just specific talents in art, music, or writing, but a wide range of things we’re good at and/or like to do.

Or as Stephen King says – “I think people are extremely hard to live with when they have a talent they aren’t able to use. Boats were built for water. You’ll figure out what’s next when you get there. Don’t worry about it now.”

If you want to add more passion to your life, and if the need to take one or more of these actions make sense to you, you may be wondering how and where to begin. Because at this point, you probably can’t see how any of this is going to work out. Living a more passionate life sounds good, but the reality is that your plate is full and your energy is nearly depleted.

So, now what? This is easier said than done. If you want to find your passion as a mom, where do you begin? What can you do?

Here’s a suggestion –

Just start. If you’re ready to reclaim passion in your life, the road is likely to be challenging. After all, if challenges weren’t getting in the way, we’d all be living passion-filled lives – like some sort of romance novel queen!

But most of us aren’t (that’s why we’re here!) So let’s acknowledge up front that the road will not be easy.

But, actually stepping onto the path and beginning to move toward passion – that’s not hard. In fact, I can sum up what you and I both need to do in just three words – take one step. Or as John Acuff says in his book Start, “Just start.”

Nothing will happen until you take one step. Of course, you’ll need to take more steps over time, but at the beginning you only need to take one.

Don’t wait until you “know what you’re doing” (does that ever happen?!) As author and songwriter Cathy Heller often says on her podcast, “Clarity comes through action.” You can’t figure out the path to a more passionate life by trying to work it all out in your head. You figure it out by doing. ( I really hate that, because I love to try to figure everything out in my head – even though that approach rarely works out well for me!)

Is that messy? Yes. Is it easy? No

Let’s say, for example, that you really want to create more physical passion in your body and more sexual energy in your marriage. That’s a great goal, but not a simple task. You’re going to be working to change patterns and habits that you and your husband have developed over years. It may involve awkward feelings and conversations. But you don’t have to figure all of that out now. You just have to start – to take one step.

Maybe that means figuring out a way to end your day an hour earlier than usual and using that time to relax, drink a glass of wine, or take a long bath. Maybe it means wearing something that makes you feel sensual. Maybe it means using sensual essential oils or scents that help you feel sensual. Or maybe it means asking your husband for a massage or for something you’d like to try in bed.

Or perhaps you want to start managing your energy, so that you can add a few things to your life that will increase your joy and enthusiasm.

If so, what’s the first step you need to take, in order to start? Maybe you need to evaluate your schedule and begin saying “no” or “no more” to some things. Maybe you need to talk with your husband about priorities and then let go of one or two things that didn’t make the list. Or maybe you could redirect 30 minutes of social media time and use if for something that nourishes your body, mind, or spirit.

These are just a few examples of the many ways you could just start and take the first step toward loving your body, managing your energy, embracing your sensuality, or pursuing your dream.

The best first step will be different for every woman. Your best first step will depend on the change you want to make in your life and the area in which you want to embrace passion and live a more passionate life.

But regardless of what that looks like for you, the way to begin is the same – Just start. Just take one step in the direction you want to go.