Three Reasons You Can't Find Your Passion
Posted on July 30, 2013 by Jessica Sweet LICSW, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.
If you've been looking everywhere for your passion but coming up empty-handed, one of these three things may be at play.
As a life and career coach focused on helping people to do work that is more meaningful, you might imagine that I’ve worked with many people who can’t find their passion on their own.
They wonder if they even have a passion, but of course they hope they do. After all, doing something they love sounds like so much fun. The good news is, you don’t need echolocation to find it.
If you can’t find your passion, usually one (or more) of these three things is happening. Take a look, and see if there’s something familiar here.
Where did it go?
Sometimes we find our passion and then we just forget about it. Our busy lives get in the way and we no longer have time to pursue whatever it was we were once passionate about. Sometimes a passion strikes when we’re three years old, and our adult selves dismiss it as a childhood whim.
Go back through your mental archives and see if you can recover a passion you once knew.
Also in this same category of “losing” a passion: it may be that you remember your passion, but you just don’t feel the way you once did about it. If you’ve had a change of heart and can’t rekindle the flame, move on and keep looking for something new. It may be closely related to an old passion, or it might be something totally different.
Choices
We have so many options available to us today that it’s just staggering. There are probably as many different passions as there are people in the world, so if you haven’t hit upon yours yet it’s not completely shocking.
If you’ve just never found a passion, try some passion finding exercises (you can sign up for my free 7 Day Live Off Your Passions eCourse for some good ones).
You might also start to think about your talents and what you enjoy doing for others most. Interestingly, we often find what we love to do when we understand how we enjoy serving others, because many people find service to others inherently meaningful.
Now You See Me. . .
Maybe you’ve experienced passion before and maybe you haven’t. But either way, your passion may be eluding you because you’re scared.
You see, passion calls upon us to do, be or give more than we are today. Your passion will call on you to step up your game and put yourself out there. And that’s scary. So it may be, in the complicated way we all have of using psychological defenses, that you are protecting yourself from the demands your passion will place on you.
If you suspect this might be the case, you’ll have to explore your fear. Ask yourself what you’re afraid to feel responsible or compelled to do. Whatever it is, no matter how scary, moving in the direction of passion and personal growth is almost invariably the right move.
Action
Whether you’ve found your passion but lost it, you’ve never even heard of the thing you’ll end up being passionate about, or if the idea of finding your passion scares you more than Christopher Walken (even if you’re not consciously aware of it), you can have passion in your life again.
Today I challenge you to identify where you’re blocked. Which of these reasons speak to you? What’s getting in your way of finding your passion?
