It can be so frustrating when people advise you, “Just follow your passion!” Yeah, sure, you’d love to—if only you knew what your passion was.
People who know what they’re doing are unstoppable. But before you can become unstoppable, you need to know what you’re starting. Before you can follow your passion, you have to find it.
If you’re feeling stuck, The Muse gives you fresh ways to discover what you really want to do with your life.
Start With the Right Perspective
If you went into a restaurant with the strong opinion—“I’m not hungry. There’ll be nothing here I want to eat. I don’t want to be here”—the menu isn’t going to look appealing. You won’t explore it with due time or attention, and it’s unlikely you’ll find food you’ll enjoy eating.
The same principle applies to passion-seeking. If you’re convinced that finding your passion is hard, or that it’s not going to happen for you, you’ll remain closed to possibilities. After all, how can you expect to find fulfilling work if you don’t believe it exists? Choose to adopt the perspective that you can do what you love with your life. One of the best ways to strengthen this point of view is to surround yourself with people who are living examples.
Find Evidence of What You Love
Once you’ve decided that your passion is findable, it’s time to look for evidence of what you already love to do. If you scan the landscape of your life, you’ll notice certain experiences peak up. It’s so valuable to delve into these “peak moments” and extract the key ingredients.
For example, I like to teach. I assumed the key ingredient was being smart or intelligent. But when I paid attention to myself, it became clear that I just liked being a leader within a community, and teaching to them. That’s exactly what I do now in my work. Make a list of the ingredients that truly mattered in your peak moments; don’t be distracted by the counterfeits.
Connect the Dots
When you look at all that matters to you, they might at first seem entirely disconnected. Let’s say you love French, drinking coffee, puzzles, analysing and categorizing, and being a leader within a community. How could you construct a career from these?
This is the time to look beyond the ingredients and seek a connection; something that all of these ingredients can fit beneath.
Is it a Hobby or a Profitable Passion?
Through this exploration, you could fall in love with an activity that engrosses you. But now you have to ask yourself the next question: Who would benefit from (and pay for) this?
If you want to contribute your passion to society and make an income from it, you need to get realistic about whether this could actually turn into a career—and what you would need to do to make that happen. Moreover, think about if you would even enjoy doing those things; for some people a passion is just fun, and turning it into work changes it from a “love to do” to a “have to do.”
Be alert to who might need your newly emerging passion, and aim to have conversations with them to get you clearer on how, where, and when you can serve them.
Expect the Rebellion
When you seek your passion, there’ll be parts of you that go into rebellion. We all have a huge number of fears—around failure, success, visibility, and vulnerability—that speak in sensible voices, instructing us that we mustn’t do what we love.
If you let these voices win, your passion will remain out of your grasp. Instead, look for the fear beneath each supposedly reasonable voice. Uncover the years of conditioning and reassure the mutinying parts that your ship is sailing in the right direction.
Find the Limits of Your Bravery
You can’t find the new until you say farewell to the old.
With each step into the unknown—for example, handing in notice on my part-time salaried job to go fully self-employed—my announcement to the universe has been: I’m available. I’m serious about this.
Find your own version of brave. Discover what risks work for you. The path of passion is where you do things that scare you enough, without leaving you in a constant state of fear. Expand your comfort zone, rather than leaving it.
The world needs your passion, so decide right now that it’s possible to find it, and gain clarity. Be assured: Your Passion will always guide you right.
The PushCV Blog 