Chocolate… an amazing food. The food of the gods. A food that is mysterious. Sensual. Respected. A food that brings people together in shared delights, offers brief pauses to our hectic lives. A food for the senses and the soul. The platform the West Coast Chocolate Festival was created on.
Passion is the currency the West Coast Chocolate Festival was founded with. The desire to make a difference. To offer youth the opportunity to gain experience. To mentor our next generation in seeking knowledge, develop resume building experience, career path guidance, to offer a well rounded base or platform to build the next steps of their lives.
Chocolate. Passion. Talent. Hard work. All attributes of successful artists, great business leaders; in fact any flourishing business or person. However, without opportunity, and the chance to gain experience, the path to success can be extremely challenging.
Chocolate seems to transcend careers, to take people to the next level. Who would expect someone who studied nuclear physics and engineering at university to become a leading expert in chocolate and fine foods? Growing up in the food industry, the lure of great chocolate, in fact great food, carved a successful career path for Mr. Yves Farges, founder of Quaifirst Foods and epicurial.com. Mr. Farges is one of the business leaders supporting the West Coast Chocolate Festival.
Passion is especially important when it comes to our careers, which is the major part of our daily lives. You should be devoted to something you love and enjoy — something you believe in. 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.
In 2005, while speaking at Stanford University, Steve Jobs said this: “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]
What is it about your life, careers or hobbies that moves you, excites you, keeps you up at night thinking about them; wakes you up in the morning excited to get to them? What are some things you can’t stop believing is possible, daydreaming about making happen? 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? The West Coast Chocolate Festival creates opportunities for you to perhaps find out.
The one suggestion we have: stand up for what you believe in. Express the things you love - end what you don’t love. 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.
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. Stay connected to your passion. 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. Even the money will follow…
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, and 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 minds and hearts of others. If you’re doing anything in your life 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, joyful, and influential self, you will never live a life you fully love or be the someone that others always enjoy being around.
Do you ever find yourself remembering others by their exuberance, their passion, their joy of life? As you live joyously, you unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. You can’t be truly living or truly yourself, unless you express what you are truly passionate about.
And for anybody that’s coming up with excuses, it’s never too late to start living, And to have some fun doing it…
Happiness, wellness, enjoyment, love of life is your birthright. It may not be easy; in fact it may be a bit scary. 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 really want. 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. Some of us never had the opportunity to see what is out there for us.
Why have I chosen to connect the West Coast Chocolate Festival, our artists, performers, speaker, volunteers, sponsors and partners with the message of passion? Because passion breeds excellence; at the very least the pursuit of excellence. And the chocolate festival is about passionate volunteers, mentoring and being mentored, understanding and supportive - volunteers choosing to develop excellence in so many ways. Flavours, tastes, goals, life, leadership, team work and the arts, our volunteers have chosen to create an environment that mentors excellence, new paths and career building opportunities through the message of chocolate…
The Chocolate Festival is completely run by volunteers. Governed by a volunteer Board of Directors, a fabulous volunteer Advisory Council, a truly devoted group of mentors and team leaders, this successful festival thrives on team effort. Individuals sharing their strengths, skills, visions, and positive influences, guiding others to their level of success.
The only paid staff are our wonderful summer interns, thanks to a Service Canada Grant. Each year our summer interns create the platform for the festival; most years our interns come back to volunteer, to complete what they started, to be the team leaders. And to continue on as volunteers for the next year. As with all successes, individuals always contribute to the whole.
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 negative influences that hold us back, and get back to that raw and pure form of expression.
When I am not volunteering full time as the Festival Director of the West Coast Chocolate Festival, I find time to manage my own company, Go Golf Events Management, an event production company that specializes in charities and not for profits. I wish to share a quote with you, from Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance. This has particular meaning for me, and will be loved by the golfers in the audience. For those who don’t golf, substitute the word song for the word swing…
“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.”
I hope each and every one of us never lose our swing. We created the West Coast Chocolate Festival to offer our youth the opportunity to find that swing. Over the past years I have seen the festival offer opportunities to high school students, university students, new graduates, people re-entering the work force; to adults, mentors and all our fabulous volunteers – the opportunity to find their swing.
We look forward to many more years of offer a “hand up” through the message of Chocolate.
Dawn Donahue, West Coast Chocolate Festival Director
http://www.chocolatefestival.ca/
President and CEO
Go Golf Events Managagement
http://www.gogolfevents.com/
