Harold Whitman described why passion is so important to all of us when he said, “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go and do that, because what the world needs are people who have come alive.”

We’re going to be interviewing someone whom the world absolutely needs and someone who is completely alive. Barbara DeAngelis is one of the most influential teachers of our time in the field of relationships and personal growth.

She’s the author of 14 bestselling books which have sold over eight million copies and have been published in 20 languages. Her books include How to Make Love All the Time and the number-one New York Times bestseller, Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know and Are You The One For Me?

Barbara’s latest book is called How Did I Get Here? Finding Your Way to Renewed Hope and Happiness When Life and Love Take Unexpected Turns.

Barbara has written regularly for Cosmopolitan, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Reader’s Digest, Redbook and Family Circle.

She’s also a frequent guest on “Oprah,” “The Today Show,” “Good Morning America,” “The View,” “Geraldo,” and “Politically Incorrect,” as well as a regular contributor to “E Entertainment” and “Eyewitness News” in Los Angeles.

She appeared weekly for two years on CNN as their Newsnight Relationship Expert dispensing advice via satellite all over the world. She’s also hosted her own daily television show for CBS TV and her own popular radio talk show in Los Angeles.

Barbara’s also produced and starred in a one-hour special for PBS entitled “Love Secrets.” She’s known for sharing her inspirational presence, authenticity and passion with her audiences.

Janet Attwood: It appears that, in many ways, your whole life has been about passion. The first question I have is what role have your passions, the things which are most important to you in your life, played in leading you to the work you do today?

Barbara DeAngelis:The truth is that I would say passion is at the source of everything I do, not just professionally, but personally as well. Most people think about passion as tremendous enthusiasm or an ability to get excited about something.

To me, passion is that light, that spark, that cosmic, divine energy that awakens us and, in a sense, charges us to do something. For me, that passion took the form and always takes the form of love.

It’s love for people, tremendous love for the transformational process, passion for the ability that every one of us has to transform ourselves, to free ourselves of things that get in our way, that limit us, that keep us from doing our cosmic assignment—what we’re here to do.

Really, at a very young age I was so passionate, first, in working on myself and trying to know who I am. As I say in my book How Did I Get Here?, I was passionate about digging deep for wisdom and being willing to ask difficult questions of myself.

And then I was passionate about helping people supporting people in getting rid of whatever it is that is not allowing them to live the life they want in any arena. I’ve been very blessed to have the abilities, the gifts, the vision to be able to see how to help people do that.

That’s been my passion, whether it’s as I started out in my career in the late 70s and 80s talking about relationships, or as it continued and developed more into really talking much more about our emotional and spiritual breakthroughs, as my work focuses on now.

It is that same passion for freedom, the freedom that we can all have. It is the passion I have and the love I have for people that really wants to embrace them, help usher them through that transformational process.

Janet Attwood: Will you share the story of how your very first national bestseller How to Make Love All the Time came to be?

Barbara DeAngelis:It was really the same thing. I was giving a seminar at the time called Making Love Work, which is what you attended. It was a very successful seminar in Los Angeles, and people would fly in from all over the country.

I did this for 12 years and finally put it all on DVDs and CDs, so I didn’t have to do it in person anymore. It’s nice people now can just sit at home in their own bedroom and work through everything.

But at the time, I was doing it, everyone would come up to me and say the same thing, “My aunt needs this but she lives somewhere and she can’t fly in. Why don’t you put it in a book?” I had been a writer since I was a child. I’d been writing poetry and prose and had published my poetry.

I knew that being an author was in my destiny and was just trying to figure out how to do it, what to do. Eventually, I realized I had to write a book, and it was very interesting because all the agents and publishers I went to said, “There are too many books about relationships. We don’t need any more.

Really, you should pick another subject because you’re not going to be successful.” And I was turned down over and over again. I just was so absolutely committed to doing this, and I knew. I kept trying and trying and trying, and I absolutely, finally got an agent for How to Make Love All the Time.

Then it was published, and everything kind of exploded from there. But I wasn’t one of these people who had an idea for a book, instantly got an agent, instantly got a publisher, and the next thing you know, it was the number-one bestseller without my working on it, and then my whole career skyrocketed.

I have been a long, slow, steady success with a lot of commitment and my undying passion for what I did that finally convinced everybody else to believe in what I was doing. But if I hadn’t had that passion, I would have just been one of these people saying, “If only I had written a book.”

Janet Attwood: Yes. I think it’s so great. You really must have learned so much during that journey at the same time and became even more resolved in what your own knowledge was, what your own feelings were about your own self, your own passions, what you were about, and what you were doing.

Barbara DeAngelis:My whole life has been about emotional courage. Emotional courage is a phrase I created. I haven’t heard a lot of people ever mention it. Emotional courage means the courage to really live passionately.

It’s the courage that comes from really being committed to what’s inside of you, being willing to risk, being willing to shift, being willing to change, being willing to, as I said, dig deep for wisdom, and to face whatever it is that you need to face so that you can live with freedom and love with freedom, and unfold into the fullness of who you are.

That emotional courage is something that I really try to help people develop and find in themselves, because with it you can do anything or deal with anything. Without it you can do nothing. That courage comes from being in touch with your true passion.

That means your passion for what you’re really doing here, whether it’s being a wonderful mother or creating a business or taking care of animals or being a minister. It doesn’t matter what it is. It is our passion that really is our charisma.

I train speakers and writers a lot because they want to do what I do. One of the things I tell them is, “Forget technique on one level. If you are passionate when you speak, when you present—or for anyone listening when you give a presentation at work, when you’re out on dates, it doesn’t matter what—people will love you.

What they’re loving is that aliveness in you because we all are attracted to the light of aliveness. That passion, if you can touch it, if you can find it, and then if you can radiate it, will be absolutely like a magnet that attracts all kinds of things to you.

I don’t really know how people function without it. It’s very hard to be successful without it, so finding a way to tap into it, which is what I do in my work with people, is like finding a gold mine. It’s like finding something that is the source of everything.

Janet Attwood: I really, really love all of this. What I especially, really appreciate hearing you say are the two words ‘emotional courage’ because my own experience has been that you can really have your passion, and you have to have that courage to go along with it.

Here’s a question for you, and I’ll ask it in a question. Do you think that just because one is aligned with his passion that he’ll be able to fulfill his goals of that passion?

Barbara DeAngelis: No, of course not. That’s one of the things that I talk a lot about in How Did I Get Here? There are millions of people out there with dreams, whether it’s the dream of happiness, the dream of a certain career, the dream of creativity.

What determines whether or not you’re going to be able to manifest that is a lot more than just feeling it, knowing it, believing it. It takes tremendous emotional courage to really, as I say, come out of the closet with who you really are and what you’re doing here in life, because the road of really manifesting who you are is not an easy one.

It’s not an easy one. There is a lot of resistance in the world. There is a lot of challenge. Every successful person who has really gone out and lived the life of their dreams has met tremendous adversity. If you don’t know how to move around that, to navigate through it, you will just come to a complete halt every time something comes into your path.

That’s what happens to a lot of people. We end up actually sabotaging our own happiness without realizing it. We misinterpret the signs. We don’t know how to navigate around them and through to the other side.

There is a great quote that I always share about all of us who are trying in life to become something or do something: “We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. But the amount of work is the same.” Isn’t that fantastic?....

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