Think back to a time when you were talking passionately about something to your friends. Did you notice that all of them gave you their full attention? Recall how you not only commanded attention but you probably spoke confidently, articulately, and with self-assurance in your voice.
As image consultants, we spend a lot of time figuring out what makes an individual attractive, charismatic, and influential. Our goal is not just to give you the latest fashion tips, but to give you an honest and holistic picture of what really matters when it comes to self-expression.
We’ve found that one of the greatest ways to have a magnetic and attractive personality is to be
passionate about something.
What is Passion?
Simply put, it’s what you love.
It’s not what society says you should love. It’s not what your friends or family say you should care about. It’s what you, at the deepest and most honest part of yourself, love.
For example, what I love more than anything is studying style, social dynamics, and the human potential. I’m constantly questioning and testing ways to reach new levels of success in each area, and sharing what I learn with as many people as I can. Almost everything I love to do and talk about has to do with getting me closer to understanding these areas.
My Passionate Friend…
One of my close friends lives with more passion than anybody I know. He simply follows whatever he loves, and doesn’t mind whether it’s popular or not. He likes bands I’ve never heard of, reads books that I would have never picked up, and his favorite dishes are things I didn’t even know were served at restaurants. He always has strong opinions about everything, but isn’t stubborn about them either.
People are always eager to hear him talk because if you spend just one day with this guy you’ll feel like you’ve met fifteen people at once. This is what makes him so fun to hang around, because it’s so rare to meet someone who’s passionate in their own ways.
Whenever someone is passionate about something, doesn’t their confidence almost sell you on whatever it is they are talking about?
Why Passionate People Are So Attractive
We tend to gravitate towards people who seem to have taken the time to become certain on things that we are uncertain
about.
Passionate people usually come off as having a lot of self-assurance and
certainty in the things they say
. They seem so clear on all their values and goals, and where they stand on the issues that are important to them.
Have you ever listened to someone speak passionately about something and you became totally unaware of what was going on around you, lost track of time, and became absorbed by their presence?
For example, take a guy like Tom Cruise. He seems to get a lot of bad press over the scientology stuff, but I don’t pay attention to that. What I admire about him is that he always seems to act authentically through what he
truly loves and
believes in.
When he was proclaiming his passion for Katie Holmes by jumping on Oprah’s couch, he told her
“I’m not going to pretend, this is how I really feel.” He was totally expressing himself without holding anything back. If you ever saw clips of that episode, the entire crowd of females went into an uncontrollable frenzy of excitement as he captivated the room with his raw and uncut passion.
The Current State of Passion in the World
Many people don’t
live, but merely
exist. They follow the trends and live reactively to their environment, instead of taking the time to really connect with what they truly want. They get so caught up in trying to be accepted that they miss tuning into who they really are inside.
For example a man may want to proclaim his passion for his girlfriend or his wife just like Tom Cruise, but instead chooses to act stoic and aloof, thinking that’s what is more attractive. He may feel like freely singing and dancing, but holds back because he thinks he should “act more his age.”
Most people lock their passions up in a box, letting only a little bit out when the environment seems safe to do so. We live in a society that is so far from true passion that people release their tension by screaming into their pillows at night, and locking their room doors to dance where nobody can see them. People work at jobs they hate, staying there only for the money to buy things they don’t really need, hang out with people they don’t really like, and to do things they don’t really like to do. It’s amazing, and they continue to follow the rest of the crowd, and it’s almost the blind leading the blind.
This may be an extreme case, but every one of us still holds back on many of the positive things we truly desire.
Women don’t want a man like this, they would do anything to meet a man who knows what he wants and does whatever it takes to get it.
We are all unique individuals, but most of us let the world tell us what we should like and enjoy, what we should buy and believe. Most of the time we don’t even realize this is happening to us.
Deep inside we want to express all our unique desires fearlessly, and as we move through the world we lose connection with our hearts and trust in our intuition.
This doesn’t mean that we should deliberately go against what is popular. It’s just about finding what you love and being
true to yourself – if that means enjoying the same things as other people, great, but it has to be coming from a genuine place.
Passion is something you can’t fake, so it doesn’t serve you at all to pretend to care about something you don’t. Even someone with the smallest amount of intuition can sense a lack of authenticity in someone.
If you go out with your friends to eat at a restaurant and you really didn’t like the food, don’t tell them it was good, be honest. If you absolutely loved a movie but your friends hated it, don’t restrain yourself from expressing that joy, express what you really feel. If you find a woman attractive, don’t act like you don’t, because she can probably already sense it through your non-verbals. Just express how you feel.
“You look fantastic today.”
If you really want to learn something, start a business, become an actor, then you should move towards nothing else except what your heart yearns for.
Everything else is a distraction.
All the most charismatic and magnetic type of people live by following their deep passion.
Everyone has passion within them, but most of the time you have to dig to find it.
In a café that I frequent, many people will come in and start complaining to the baristas how they hate their job, or their spouse, or all of life in general.
There seems to be no passion at all there, they seem to be sucked dry, lifeless and dead. There seems to be nothing real to them, no foundation of unique personality. But I realized that everyone has passion within them, it’s just sometimes buried underneath a lot of junk.
For example, you may know someone who usually complains about life, acting helpless about their situations. We all know how unattractive these people can be, but have you ever seen them talk about something in a positively passionate way? It’s like the clouds of darkness split for a moment and you see a ray of hope.
Sometimes I’ll be talking to a depressing person and once they talk from that passionate and pure place in their hearts, their mannerisms sharpen, they speak with more certainty and clarity, and exude a positive energy that captures my attention. They seem so at ease and confident in who they are in that moment. They become magnetic.
The most attractive people are those who practice coming from this place
all the time.
flickr photo: by fares_VETO
Being passionate is when you express your feelings, ideas, and values without restraint. I’ve found that this is the key to living passionately.
Those who aren’t living passionately and authentically are like the walking dead. Anything else we do that isn’t on the path towards our passions are lies.
When we were young, we lived passionately and fearlessly, until we started to compare ourselves with other people and started to hold back on things we wanted to say or do.
Through our years, passionate relationships may have ended in suffering, and risks that were taken with passion may have burned us. Passionate ideas may have been shut down, and values may have been ridiculed. The razor sharp edges of our character that cut through life become dulled. We stay safe, comfortable, careful not to offend anyone. We slowly become more lifeless, and uninteresting.
But the most charismatic people are those who practice acting positively in line with their true intentions, with child-like enthusiasm. They’re able to tap into that passionate enthusiasm and imbue every moment with it.
For example, a non-passionate man will see a beautiful woman walking towards him on the street, and what he really wants to do in that moment is to meet her, tell her how fantastic she looks, and ask her out. But he won’t, because he’s afraid she may have a boyfriend or be married, or she might get angry and tell him to get lost. He chokes the true desires of his heart, and in that moment, his soul dies a little.
A man who lives passionately will positively express his feelings for a woman right when they surface, and not apologize for it. This is the secret of the great natural seducers out there. They delight in the presence of all women and directly let them know how they feel about them. They do not lie, manipulate, or try to take anything from them by pretending to be someone they’re not.
When you act through your true passion, you become highly attractive to women. Even if you compliment a woman and she says she has a boyfriend, she’ll still find it refreshing that have met a guy who isn’t afraid to be honest. Try it next and you’ll see that your confidence will rise, and you’ll attract more women into your life.
Women want men who are confident, and you will never reach your highest level of confidence unless you are acting authentically and in tune from a place of unbridled passion.
There are some guys who will talk to a girl about a whole bunch of things they care very little about, thinking that it will impress the girl. They will try to create commonalities with a woman that aren’t really there, pretending to enjoy similar music, theater, and art. Women will get bored of these men quickly, they will always sense that there is nothing
real about them to hold onto, and so they feel like they are not dating a real man but a lifeless casing of a man.
What’s attractive is not what you do specifically, but your level of passion in the doing of it.
How often is it that when you’re talking to a girl, you’re thinking about what they think of you, instead of simply expressing what you truly love in this life?
flickr photo: by Beangirl
How to Live with Passion
Are you tapping into that passionate part of yourself? It may be deep down, under all the junk that inevitably gets piled up on it. Sometimes we have to stop and remember to brush off all the false stories that hold us back, and get back to that raw and pure form of expression.
Inside each and every one of us, is one, true authentic swing, something he was born with. Something that is ours, and ours alone, something that can’t be taught to you, or learned, something that got to be remembered. Over time, the world can rob us of that swing, and it can get buried under all our would-haves, and could- haves, and should-haves. Some folk even forget what their swing was like.” – Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance
Passion isn’t something that just
happens to you one day. It’s something that you have to continuously dig to connect with. It’s like a never ending well that has life-giving water, which will never run out until you stop lowering the bucket to draw from it.
The easiest way to stay connected with it is to ask yourself, “What is everything I love, and what is everything I hate?” All you have to do is do
whatever it takes to move towards everything you truly love, and cut yourself off from anything that you don’t. Everything else will fall into place.
Everyday I ask myself if what I’m doing is what I truly want to be doing, and if the answer is no for too many days, then I know that I’m off course.
Passion is especially important when it comes to our careers, which is huge part of our daily lives. You have to be devoted to something you love and enjoy — something you believe in. Everyone has heard that you should be doing something you love, but this is true for all areas of life. The longer your true passions are suppressed and ignored, the more you forget the way back to them.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs [Stanford Speech 2005]
In our society, we tend to identify people through external things such as their age, their job, the clothes they wear, the car they drive, etc., but while our outer appearance is important, an external casing becomes irrelevant if there isn’t much value underneath.
It’s your level of passion that leaves your unique thumbprint on the hearts of others.
Don’t you ever find yourself remembering others by their passions?
Oh yeah John, he’s the guy who loves to travel the world and immerse himself in different cultures. He has some crazy stories about his travels. I wonder where he is right now…”
Oh Tom, this guy lives to party. He’s so much fun. We have to call him out this weekend…”
What moves you, excites you, keeps you up at night and wakes you up in the morning? What are some things you can’t stop thinking about, daydreaming about? Deep down inside, what do you truly want for yourself? If you had all the money, time, and resources you needed, how would you live your life? What would you stand for?
Block off some time this week to reassess if you’re living in full congruency with your passion.
If you’re doing anything right now that’s not in line with what you truly want, you are not living with passion.
Without passion, you’ll never be your most charismatic, attractive, and influential self, living a life you enjoy and being someone that others enjoy being around.
So stand for what you believe in. Express the things you love, and what you hate – if the time calls for it. Be clear on what you want, and what your values are. Don’t compromise, and never settle. Say what needs to be said, sing when you feel like singing, dance when you feel like dancing. Don’t apologize for it either. This is your birthright.
As you live passionately, you unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
You can’t be truly attractive, unless you express what you are truly attracted to.
And for anybody that’s coming up with excuses, it’s never too late to start living passionately:
