xSELeratED: Heart Work - Choosing a Passion-Driven Life

23 hours ago
7 min read

Updated: 5 minutes ago

This piece is from the xSELeratED SEL initiative on The Worthy Educator, led by Leigh Reagan Alley, Heather Lageman and Walter McKenzie.

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"Heart work" and "hard work" are terms representing different approaches to effort, fulfillment, and life. While "hard work" emphasizes sheer effort and resilience, "heart work" also implies passion, purpose, and alignment with one's values, often leading to distinct benefits. While some question the value of hard work in this age of easy answers, heart work is something to which we can all aspire. Like clean air and clean water, it’s hard to push back against doing the things we love.

Why "Heart Work"?

While it’s easy to buy into heart work, what are the benefits of choosing a passion-driven life? “Life,” you say? Yes. We’re not talking about a separate nine-to-five self (okay, in education, eight-to-four? Seven-to-three?) that is competing for time and attention with our off-the-clock selves. Nope. Today we aspire to be one consistent self, putting our heart and soul into everything we live, do and experience. It’s healthier and better suited for a fulfilling existence.

Heart work leads to a number of key advantages:

Increased Motivation and Engagement

When we are deeply passionate about a task, we are intrinsically motivated to give it our best effort and enjoy it in the process. This allows us to give it a more sustained effort, giving ourselves permission to be creative, and a deeper level of engagement with what we choose to pursue.

Greater Sense of Purpose and Fulfillment

Heart work is done by choice. We are not working for someone else just to collect a paycheck. Rather, we seek work that aligns with our values and priorities that give us a strong sense of meaning and contribution, that shifts our priorities to overall life satisfaction and happiness.

Improved Well-being and Reduced Burnout Risk

Engaging in heart work helps us to feel less stressed and have a lower risk of burnout. The energy expended is often restorative, as opposed to soul-sucking, because the work is rewarding and compels us to continue to make a difference in our lives and the lives of others. It often doesn’t feel like work at all.

Enhanced Creativity and Innovation

Passion-driven work often encourages thinking differently, experimenting and taking risks, because we are more personally invested in exploring new possibilities, seeing things through and achieving outcomes that are within a sphere of influence. In short, plugging into our passion makes us game-changers.

Stronger Resilience

A deep connection to our chosen work's purpose helps us bounce back from setbacks more easily. Challenges are seen as an integral part of our journey, seeking meaningful impact rather than just working over, under and around obstacles. Instead of robbing us of things we’d rather be doing outside of the workday, heart work is enjoyable time well spent.

The core distinction is that hard work is a mechanism for effort, while heart work is a motivation for effort. "Hard work" emphasizes effort, discipline, grit and perseverance, valuing character and a strong work ethic. It is based in the idea that putting in consistent, arduous effort is essential for mastering complex skills and expertise, and it is directly linked to monetary rewards, material gains, and career progression. In contrast, passion aligns how we work with why we work. Both paths can lead to success, but heart work leads to success and fulfillment. It’s more sustainable and rewarding. Ideally, combining the discipline of hard work with the passion of heart work yields the greatest benefits in both professional and personal life. Heart work just feels better.

Heart and Mind

Doing passion-driven work isn’t just doing as we please. It requires us to follow the "Three-Factor" Rule: a combination of loving what we do, being naturally good at it (or willing to develop necessary skills), and finding a cause or an organization that values what we bring to the work. Passion alone is not enough. Neither is chasing money and titles and power. Heart work brings opportunities and rewards as natural responses to being our authentic selves.

All this being said, while passion provides the spark, structuring it through habits and routines leads to consistent progress. It doesn’t happen automatically or overnight. It takes time for passion-based living to reveal our way forward. In an age of uncertainty, being able to live with this kind of ambiguity is key to being successful while remaining true to who we are and want to be. When we love what we do, it all falls into place. Believe in this.

Passion is not just an intense feeling of excitement; it is the energy derived from contribution and using our strengths. It is a slow-building, consistent practice. Not every day will be fulfilling. Passion-driven work still requires discipline, patience, and dealing with mundane tasks. Passionate people also embrace the high emotional stakes of putting our genuine selves out there, but it’s a net positive for them because it pushes them through challenges and setbacks. Finally, our passions can evolve over time, so it’s critical to remain adaptable and allow our goals to evolve as we grow.

Finding Our Way

Successfully accomplishing passion-driven work involves aligning personal interests with professional actions, resulting in higher resilience, success, and satisfaction. Examples range from creative pursuits to organizational leadership, where genuine enthusiasm drives exceptional results. But what are pathways to heart work? Needless to say, no two paths are the same. Examples include:

Trailblazing

Creating transformative solutions because we are personally invested in outcomes rather than just profits.

Growing

Instead of waiting for mandated training, take classes, volunteer simply for the opportunity to learn new skills, and coach others to practice leading.

Creating

Know our creative talents and how to use them so that we bring our talents to bear and our vision to life.

Impacting

Commit to social change and charitable causes that make a difference where we live and work, and bring others along to do the same.

Persevering

Pushing through failed experimentation, seeing it as opportunity to learn and try again rather than to quit.

How do we know when passion work becomes transformational? It begins within:

We see obstacles as puzzles we can solve rather than barriers stopping us.
We work to exceed our expectations rather than meeting our minimum goals.
We look forward to work because it’s enjoyable, it’s fulfilling, and it feeds our souls.

Positioning Ourselves

Creating the conditions for passion-driven work involves aligning personal values with tasks, fostering a supportive, low-fear environment, and adopting a growth mindset that sees challenges as opportunities.

Define Our "Why"

Reflect on what truly motivates us, and align our daily tasks with our core values and interests. Passion thrives when our work has clear purpose and meaning.

Leverage Strengths over Weaknesses

Focus on what we excel at rather than addressing shortcomings to boost confidence, engagement, and find the positive flow of possibilities.

Build a High-Trust Bubble

Craft a culture where it is safe to fail, experiment, and take risks with colleagues, mentors and leaders who support our long-term passion.

Ensure Autonomy

Allow for flexibility in how we show up, how work is done, and how we allow others to engage with us in our heart work.

Schedule "Passion Time"

Dedicate specific, non-negotiable time to work on those things that feed our passion, above and beyond our everyday roles and responsibilities.

Continuously Learn and Grow

Seek opportunities to meet new people, embrace new thinking, learn new skills and take on new challenges.

Embrace Openness and Structure

Keep that healthy tension alive between breaking through the conventional and practicing regular rote routines and personal accountability.

Reflect on Intent and Outcomes

Be aware of scope creep and how our work remains aligned with our passion, how it benefits others, and how it leads to positive change.

But What does it Look Like?

This all sounds well and good. In fact, we may already know all this. So why are we still thinking about doing our heart work in some future state? How about choosing a role model to emulate? Great role models of heart work in action persevere through challenges to align their values with the way they experience work and life by demonstrating resilience, creativity, and a willingness to start small and pivot.

Consider these role models for inspiration:

Brandon Stanton - Humans of New York began as a bond trader before being fired. He followed his passion for photography to NYC with a goal to photograph 10,000 people, eventually creating a worldwide phenomenon.

Mark Rober - YouTube is known for his videos on popular science and do-it-yourself gadgets, after working as an engineer for NASA and a product designer for Apple, in authoring patents for virtual reality in self-driving cars.

Jim Koch – Samuel Adams is a Harvard graduate and consultant who left his stable career to use a family beer recipe to launch Samuel Adams, now the largest American-owned brewery. He is a founding father of the American craft brewing movement.

Steve Jobs - Apple famously stated that the only way to do great work is to love what we do. His journey from starting Apple in a garage to being ousted and eventually returning to save the company illustrates deep-seated passion and resilience.

Alan Page – State Supreme Court was defensive lineman for the Minnesota Vikings who later pursued a career in public service and law, eventually becoming an associate justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court.

Malala Yousafzai – The Malala Fund risked her life to advocate for girls' education, eventually becoming the youngest Nobel Prize laureate in history and starting her own organization, serving as a role model for passion in activism.

Melinda French Gates – Pivotal Ventures enjoyed a successful corporate career when she shifted to philanthropy, leading efforts to advance the issues important to women and families worldwide that create lasting change.

Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam - Urban Amenities in Rural Areas became known as “The Missile Man” as an Indian aerospace scientist, and became the president of India where he focused on youth, education, and inspiring students.

Anthony Cody - Network for Public Education is a former teacher who co-founded the Network for Public Education with Diane Ravitch to focus on protecting public school systems against privatization and high-stakes testing.

Hanan Al Hroub – Palestinian Teacher became the second winner of the 2016 Global Teacher Prize awarded by the Varkey Foundation's Global Education and Skills Forum for her efforts using play to help students overcome trauma and violence.

Ben Nelson – Minerva Project worked for Snapfish and Hewlett-Packard before he left to launch his own organization to transform higher education through critical thinking and global experience rather than traditional campus models.

As we celebrate the heart in our personal lives this month, we invite you to consider the heart work you do when you honor your authentic self. How does it look and feel? When and where does that shift begin? What’s stopping you? How can we help? Connect with Team xSELeratED and let’s talk!