Patrick Harbula Asks: Are you Living Your Passion?

By Casandra Spencer

A screenwriter, a carpenter, a minister. A professor, an aspiring florist, an office manager. Ranging in age from their early 20s to 80s, these people and more form an intimate circle on a late Saturday morning, drawn together to discuss their life purpose and careers. An artist runs a bookkeeping service to pay her rent, but the bookkeeping takes up so much of her time that she no longer paints. An editor charges his clients far less than his services are worth. They are frustrated and looking for answers, answers that they are discovering in a new, rapidly expanding national movement, Live Your Passion: Life Purpose in Career, which has brought this diverse group of people together.

Patrick Harbula, Los Angeles-based author of the acclaimed book, The Magic of the Soul, life coach for more than 20 years, and founder of the Living Purpose Institute, created the Live Your Passion: Life Purpose in Career workshop—and its ongoing Life Purpose Network support group—to help people discover ways to manifest their grandest dreams and create financial success doing what they love to do. In fact, that is how Harbula defines “purpose”: what we love to do that creates a better world. The workshop is offered several times each year.

Even in these times of economic challenges, of war—one might say especially now—the pursuit of meaningful work remains high on people’s wish lists. The key, Harbula stresses, is for each person to define—and refine—his or her purpose by focusing on the relationship between career aspirations and service to others. At his all-day workshops (held once every other month), a participant will move far beyond talking about her personal dream of being a successful actor. Through visualization techniques, discussions and written exercises, she will work to uncover the seed of that desire by explaining what she wants people to receive from her acting. That seed—distilled in a small phrase or a word—represents her purpose, her gift to others.

People with vastly different careers—or career goals—may share the same purpose: to create beauty, for instance. To transform, to educate, to give joy. The life purpose lists are long—and succinct. Somehow, by the end of the workshops, each person has cut through the weeds of their career dilemmas and carved out their word or phrase. Blind spots, emotional wounds that often trace back to childhood, and blockages, such as fear, are revealed. “I had been working on discovering what was blocking me (in my job),” says Ava Coye, who took the workshop in January 2004. “What I hadn’t been able to do in several months was done in an instant” at the workshop.

After taking the Life Purpose in Career workshop, members become part of the Life Purpose Network, which meets once a month. Those who are in the program report phenomenal successes—in their corporate jobs and in their entrepreneurial endeavors. A woman who had been unemployed for two years and had not received one phone call on the many resumes she had sent out got a fantastic job as a medical sales representative within one week of doing the Life Purpose workshop. Within six weeks of doing the workshop, a massage therapist’s number of clients more than tripled.

Harbula uses the life purpose phrases to show people how they can begin implementing purpose in their careers and lives right now. “Most people think, ‘If only I could get out of this job or if I only had more money, I could do what I really enjoy,’” Harbula says. “When we learn to fulfill our purpose on a consistent basis, in the here and now, in whatever situation we find ourselves, the path to success in our dream career will become more and more clear. As we touch people’s lives with our life purpose in the present, the excitement that results will fuel our creativity and ultimately our greatest success in whatever career will be most rewarding.”

Harbula, who leads a plethora of workshops and seminars and appears regularly on local and national radio and TV, has fulfilled his life purpose through many careers: as an author, as former Corporate Director of Sage Publications (a world-renowned academic publisher), as founding publisher of Meditation magazine, as a former tennis professional and as host of the television show, The Next Step.

For more information on the workshops and other activities of the Living Purpose Institute, interested parties can call 805-469-9849 or visit www.livingpurposeinstitute.com.