Passion is a funny thing. Everyone wants it, but not everyone knows how to get it.
Passion is what you devote your time and attention to. It is the thing you do that makes you feel happy and fulfilled. It is how you contribute to the world and do things that matter.
What Passion is Not
Passion is not something you put your life on hold for as you search it out. In fact, it is only by living that you are actually able to find what you are passionate about in the first place.
In today’s society, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to find our passion. We get so caught up in finding just the right job or creating a business that lives up to some grand standard. In many cases this prevents us from taking any action because we are afraid of taking the wrong action.
We debate about our college major because we are afraid we will make the wrong choice that will doom us to an unfulfilling career. We stay at jobs we don’t like because we are waiting to discover our true passion before we are willing to switch careers.
Passion is not something that will just magically come to us. It’s not something that if we sit and think long and hard enough or meditate enough, it will just float into our heads.
The true method of finding your passion requires much more work and a willingness to fail.
The other misconception about passion is that you can only have one. You can have many passions throughout your life. One passion doesn’t have to last you forever.
You can work at a dog shelter and become passionate about finding loving homes for lonely animals. Then you can have a kid with a learning disability and become passionate about figuring out how to best help them to learn a grow.
Then maybe you become passionate about sharing what you learn with other moms so they can help their own children. You can lose a ton of weight and then become passionate about helping others do the same thing.
There is no limit on the number of passions you can have in a lifetime. You don’t have to stress that if you try something now, you are doomed to do it forever. There is nothing wrong with doing a job that pays the bills while you try to discover what your true passion is.
Having a job that just pays the bills will only stop you from achieving your passion if you let it. The only thing that will truly prevent you from finding your passion is being so afraid of taking the wrong action that you take no action at all.
How to Find Your Passion
The first step in finding your passion is to do something that you think you might enjoy. This doesn’t have to be something that you think will make you money. It doesn’t have to be something that has massive impact. Just something you have wanted to do but haven’t done.
Once you do this thing, think about your experience. Did you enjoy it? Would you want to do it again? Was there anything you didn’t like about it?
If you enjoyed it and wanted to continue doing it, try it again. Could you see yourself doing this regularly? Do it again and see if it is sustainable.
If it is, figure out how you can incorporate it into your life and livelihood.
If you didn’t enjoy it, or you did but couldn’t see yourself doing it for the foreseeable future, go back to step one and try something new.
It is only by living and experiencing that we can possibly figure out what we are passionate about. Passion follows action. Stop putting so much pressure on finding your life passion and instead just try things you think you might like and see if you do.
Maybe you like certain aspects of one thing and some aspects of something else. Can you put these together to create a career that you enjoy and works for you?
Experiment and be willing to try things that might not work in the name of finding what does.
I hope that this helps you take some pressure off of yourself and gives you permission to try things in the hopes of finding something you can be passionate about.
If you found this helpful, please let me know in the comments so I can create more content around what you enjoy!
Cheers,
Emily
