Janet Attwood: Interview Archive

This conversation is part of The Psychology of the Future online summit, hosted by Eric Lenderman, a series of talks with people who apply psychology in practical ways. Eric opens by welcoming listeners and introducing his guest, Janet Bray Attwood, author of the New York Times bestseller The Passion Test: The Effortless Path to Discovering Your Life Purpose. He notes that Janet has guided hundreds of thousands of people through the Passion Test process across the globe, and has shared the stage as a featured speaker with figures such as the Dalai Lama, Sir Richard Branson, and T. Harv Eker. She thanks him and says she's glad to be there.

Eric asks her to describe, for anyone just discovering her, the broad shape of her work and how she ended up doing it. Janet laughs at the size of the question. At the moment, she says, she's constantly on the road. For about five years she had been traveling without a real break, carrying the Passion Test around the world. Her larger goal, as she puts it, is to assemble what she jokingly calls a passionate cosmic army: people trained and certified to run the Passion Test exactly the way she does, wherever they live.

The reason is simple math. Even traveling nonstop, she reaches only a sliver of the people she wants to reach. By her count there were already nearly 2,000 certified Passion Test facilitators worldwide, with the number still climbing, yet whole countries still had none. So she frames it as an open invitation: if you want to build some wealth while teaching others how to live a life they're excited about, her program is worth looking into.

Then Eric asks how the whole thing began, and Janet calls the story a strange one. Like plenty of people listening, she says, she once held a job she couldn't stand and wasn't any good at. More than thirty years earlier she had been recruiting disk drive engineers in Silicon Valley. The work before that had suited her far better. She taught meditation, loved it, found it genuinely fun, and made almost no money at it. She was sleeping on the floor of a meditation center that had no shower or bathtub. Every morning she climbed over a fence into a nearby apartment complex to use the pool showers.

Word of this got around. One day friends phoned her and said they had a terrific job lined up for her. She asked what it was. They explained that they recruited disk drive engineers, that their thirteen-person office had just lost someone, and that she'd be perfect for it. Her energy, her ease with people, her love of connecting them: all of that, they told her, would translate into the work, and she stood to make millions.