Recently, a client said to me, “ I am so bored with my life, how do I find my passion?”
The idea of finding your passion feels daunting, even intimidating for some, including me for many years, but it doesn’t have to be.
Many of us set out to create our lives per the typical prescribed formula established by society, our families and friends: we go to college, get ‘the’ ‘perfect’ job, get married, have 2 kids, a boy and a girl, with a white picket fence, but somewhere in the mix we never took the time to ask, what do I want to do? What do I love to do? What makes me come alive? What thrills and excites me? What comes naturally to me?
While I offer a traditional sequence to discovering your passion and purpose in my 7-Days to Success free Mini-Course, finding your passion is as easy as thinking about what your friends, co-workers and family talk to you about more often than anything else. Like, what are you the go-to person for? Why do they ask you about this thing, and not someone else? When people think of you, what are the common descriptors they say about you? If they had to distill you down to one word, one idea, one thing about you, what would they say?
In her most recent blow-my-socks-off with near-every-word-written-book, “Big Magic,” Elizabeth Gilbert oh-so wisely says,
You’re not required to save the world with your creativity … it also doesn’t have to be important,” just “do whatever brings you to life. Follow your own fascinations, obsessions, and compulsions. Trust them. Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart.”
And that revolution lives inside you right now, but you might not think of it in this way!
When you identify with this thing that already lives in you, with this thing that already brings you to life, what excites you, what preoccupies your thoughts, what angers you, oh yes, please don’t underestimate the force of passionate anger … the rest will work itself out.
As a great example, my friend Chris Littlefield, founder of AcknowledgementWorks, an international training and consulting firm literally began his company by simply asking people on the T in Boston, and then around the world, what their experience was like when giving or receiving acknowledgement. A fascination. An interest … pulled him to garner global opportunity to help corporate teams and individuals develop the critical skills and self-awareness needed to produce extraordinary results at work and at home, by ‘just’ an inquisitiveness with the ways acknowledgement makes a difference for people.
Send an email to a few of your closest friends and ask them what they think you are better at than anyone else. Ask a few of your co-workers, or those you spend the most time with what they like best about you. With just a few questions asked and answered, you’re well on your way to bringing to life what lights you up most!
And while we’re at it, would you like to dive right into your passion, into what makes you most come alive? If you’re ready to revel in all the ways looking and feeling your best plays out in a life driven by your passion, let’s have a conversation to see if coaching might make sense for you. Email me at: carol@carol-egan.com
