This is our monthly e-message to people who are interested in leading their lives with passion. Each month we will send you a short note with information, stories, examples, and practical things you can do to lead your life, work, and organizations with passion.

Leading With Passion
We like the term ‘leading with passion,’ because it has two very significant, but related meanings. The first suggests leading off with passion. That is, making the very first priority in your life to live, work, and play passionately, and to fully embrace every possible moment. Second, it means that we can lead our organizations, teams, and projects with passion – creating passionate work environments by transferring our own enthusiasm for the organization to all others who come into contact with it.

What We Can Learn From Sarita Loehr
As Vice President for Operations and Engineering at Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM), Sarita Loehr is responsible for the company’s natural gas distribution and electric operations, the company’s regional electric operations, transmission system planning and general engineering activities. Her career has been diverse. She served as PNM’s Vice President of Human Resources, and most recently was Vice President of Customer and Market Services, where she led the turnaround of the call center, which moved to number one in customer satisfaction in a benchmarking study of utilities in the country (see the July issue of Leading with Passion).

Sarita has a wonderful husband and children. She teaches aerobics three times a week. She is a leader in the Albuquerque community. She loves life. She enjoys her work immensely and makes work both fun and meaningful for herself and others. But she has had to overcome major obstacles to achieve her success. There are at least three key ideas for passionate living we can learn from Sarita.

Never Walk Away - Personal
Sarita used to go to her sister’s house and see her sister’s two children and knew she wanted children too. But at the time, she didn’t think she could have them and was devastated. But she didn’t give up. “You search and search and search and you take it one step at a time and that’s what we did. I lost two (children)” she says. “And every attempt seemed to be worse, but I didn’t want to give up and I wasn’t going to give up. So I’d go through any lengths, any doctor appointment, any test, anything to reach that vision.” “You don’t walk away,” she says. “You can’t walk away. If that’s what your desires are in work, in life, you have to understand that deep inside you.” Now, she has two children she loves dearly.

She could have given up on school too, but she didn’t. It took her 15 years to get her college degree. She started going to school when she was 26. “I didn’t understand what I was getting into and I didn’t know if I could make it all the way through.” She told herself that she wasn’t going to walk away, and “once I started it I wasn’t going to stop. You know what? I’m really proud of that. That was one of my biggest hurdles – starting from scratch, working full time, going to school at night and starting a family all at the same time is very hard for anybody. I’m not the only one – you could do it, you could accomplish that and you should. You should do those things if you find it in you.”

Never Walk Away - Work
Learning to persevere personally helped her develop the ability to do the same at work. When she first became Vice President of Customer and Market Services, the PNM call center had low productivity and morale. Sarita looked at organizational and management structure, policy and compensation. She hired a new call center director. She made sure there were competitive salaries. She aligned previously unconnected goals with pay incentives. She met personally with every employee in the call center and the customer service department.

One day in April, early on, she found out that the probability was slim to none that the call center would make its incentive pay goals for the year. “That lit a fire under me,” she says, “because, honestly, I’ll be damned if employees have to suffer a consequence because we (management) didn’t pay attention to what’s wrong. I wasn’t going to do that.” And it inspired her to create the environment that allowed success to occur. “I felt very responsible. I felt like if I couldn’t turn this around and help people, I didn’t know if I could walk out of the building every day.”

Do you walk away from your problems, or do you face them head on?

Head Down The Hill – Act With Confidence
“You know,” she says. “it’s like skiing. I’m not a good skier but I don’t mind the challenge of going down the hill. But if I think about it too long and I look down and I think about those moguls or I think of that hill I’ve never taken before it gets harder, and I don’t do as well. Sometimes you just have to say, one way or another, whether it looks pretty or not, you’re going down that hill.”

Sarita has gone from one assignment to another where she knew very little about the job. “Every job, every assignment I have had has always been surrounded by challenges,” she says. Her biggest leap may have been from an analyst position, not even a director, into an officer role. “I was very green, but very excited. But you know, you just have to believe and you have to convey that belief around you.”

How does she get that confidence? “I try to talk issues through. That helps me out a lot. I share my concerns. I share ideas and test them out. And I do convey to others that ‘We’ll get through this.’ I don’t have the answer but I’m persistent. I’ll keep trying and trying until I get it right.”

Do those around you sense your confidence? Are you heading down the hill, or are you standing around, watching others live life to its fullest?

Why Not You?
Being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at the age of 32, after her first miscarriage, drove her to tears. “I was just so scared and upset because I watched my father grow up with rheumatoid arthritis and a lot of people don’t understand that it could be very crippling and create an enormous amount of disability. I’m still scared of that.”

She got to such a low point, asking herself the question, ‘Why me?’ that she talked to a minister about it. And he told her “Why not you? What makes you so special that you don’t think you deserve a life challenge?” That turned her whole way of thinking around. “Why should any one of us be exempted from whatever cards are dealt to us?” she asked herself. “I had to struggle with that. Why not me?” She began to believe that, through challenges, people have a set of experiences that they can share with other people who can benefit from your journey.

Her disease will never go away. There are risks in her medication. She knows how easily her health can deteriorate. “But why not me? I owe it to someone else to help them through whatever difficulty they have in adverse situations. I have to set my sights on how to keep myself happy and how to keep going and why it’s important to do that. So I hope that I can contribute to others and sort of be a beacon.”

Why not you? Are you bitter about your lot in life, or are you a beacon to others?

So, she’s passionate about her work…..…and she’s passionate about her life.

And she’s done it by not walking away, by heading down the hill, and by changing “Why me?” into “Why not me?” Why not us, indeed?

Leading with Passion is a regular communication from Michael Kroth and Patricia Boverie. Michael and Patricia have been researching passionate work since 1999, and their book, Transforming Work: The Five Keys to Achieving and Sustaining Trust, Commitment, and Passion in the Workplace, is about the indispensable necessity of passion for personal and organizational success in the workplace.

© Copyright 2003, All Rights Reserved Patricia Boverie and Michael Kroth