It’s the greatest challenge for anyone: how do you find and maintain your passion for living?

Passion is a Faberge egg – delicate, fragile, and beautiful to behold.  Once you find your passion, you must guard it and not let anything harm it.  If you’re looking for it, it’s an act of courage and tenacity, but once it’s within your grasp, your life will be changed and enhanced.

Mothers who are passionate share similar characteristics.  Here are just a few:

• Passionate mothers do not lose their sense of self when they’ve had children.  Despite the added responsibilities of raising well-mannered, curious, and delightful individuals, passionate mothers are sharp and well versed in a myriad of topics.

• Passionate mothers know that if they’re happy and stimulated, their children will be happy and stimulated.  They set the right example by maintaining friendships, pursuing their interests, and setting challenging goals that keep their neurons firing.

• Passionate mothers limit their contact with negative and dyspeptic people who can see the bad in every situation.  To keep their passion tank full, they prefer to be with upbeat and positive people who lift them up instead of putting them down.

• Passionate mothers live in the moment.  They do not dwell, worry, or obsess about incidents that took place in the past. Rather, they throw their energies into enjoying their life and looking at the future with hopefulness.

• Passionate mothers are purpose-driven.  Whether it’s a Halloween block party or preparing for their transition back to the workplace, these super-achievers are always on the go with vim and vigor to spare.

• Passionate mothers are self-aware and if they catch themselves feeling low or out of sorts, they address it immediately for two reasons:  They don’t want their children to be concerned about their mother’s state of mind. Secondly, it’s harder to dig yourself out of a trench rather than a little hole.

• Passionate mothers take pleasure in the little things.  Sure, it’s wonderful to renovate a house or plan a European vacation, but those things don’t come around too often.  The people who are happy and passionate go crazy discovering a new cheese, learning how to bake bread, or watching their children go off for the day brimming with self-confidence.

As I write in The Essentials of Fabulous, “We are not born with passion; we acquire it…like the measles.”  Modern moms are quite familiar with contagious diseases – go acquire this one!

Ellen Lubin-Sherman got her start in business feeding gossip items to Liz Smith, the esteemed former gossip columnist at the New York Daily News. Those early days of name-dropping were the perfect foundation for her later work in cultivating and branding identities for some of the country’s most luxurious products. Ellen went to work for some of NYC’s top communications firms, advising top tier brands including The Gap, Perrier Water, and Martha Stewart. Today she uses that expertise to coach corporations and business leaders in the art of creating a polished presentation. She does this through LAUNCH, her coaching and consulting firm for business leaders and corporations who need to craft the visuals and the messages that will burnish their reputation as leaders and differentiate them in the marketplace. Today, in addition to executive coaching and consulting, Ellen is a sought-after speaker for companies and groups that are desperate to know how they can become fabulous.