It Isn’t About Finding Your Passion

When you feel discontent with your life and people keep telling you to just reconnect to your passion, but you know that’s not it. 

It’s the start of the New Year, and we often take this time to evaluate our lives and the direction they are taking.  This is an important time to consider these reflections, and to consider, not what isn’t working in our lives, but, rather, how we can shift practices in our lives to create more of the life we want. 

A lot of times, people talk about the need to find your passion, and to follow that passion into your job, your career, and then you will find your source of happiness.  The reality is this passion path doesn’t work for many people, and often leads to burnout. 

For many of us, we want to look at our lives and think about what currently brings us joy or would bring us joy.  We then evaluate our daily ways and look for how we can bring that joy into our life, if it is not already there. Sometimes, yes, the passion for our career brings us our joy and fulfillment.  Sometimes, the career supports us so we can do the other things in our lives that we value more.  Everyone’s path is different, and we need to allow and create space for everyone to discover their own path that brings happiness into their lives.

If you are reading this, then you have probably entered into a space where you know you want something more in your life and are not quite sure how to make that happen.  When I work with people on these questions, we start by looking for what we value, considering the seeds of our values while stepping away from societal and familial expectations.  This lets us begin to find what we each individually want.  We unearth both the simple and complex things that we want to bring into our lives, and then we can begin to create the path that allows for more of this joy.