Are you living your life aligned to your passions?
Many of my clients come to me searching for more fulfilling lives. And all they need to do is have clarity on what their passions are. Once they have clarity, then they can know what to align their lives to!
However, what exactly is a passion?
Many get tripped up trying to identify passions. Most people confuse interests with passions. So how to tell the difference?
I tell them that passions are things that you would rather do more than anything else. You will want to do them every day and all day long!
If it’s a true passion, you will find yourself scheduling everything around it.
When you think about engaging in your passion, you will find rising energy and emotion surrounding that thought.
When you actually engage in your passion, you’ll find all sorts of positivity like joy, fulfillment, growth, even more energy.
In fact you’ll be thinking and dreaming about it every day!
So it’s more than just intellectual curiosity. It’s about something deeper and involves strong emotions.
When I take clients through an exercise in passion discovery, they often list their interests. A sport. Video games. Reading a book. An exercise.
Then I push them on it. When you wake up in the morning, do you leap out of bed with anticipation for doing that interest? Do you wonder when you will do it next? Do you find yourself scheduling everything else around this interest? Would you rather be doing this interest every hour of each day?
Usually not.
But yet something about it does attract them to it.
And it’s usually something higher level or yet uncovered.
For example, if someone says a passion is for golf, I ask them the above questions and they say hmmm no….
But when I ask about other aspects of golf, we find out that they say they “love” golf not because they want to be Tiger Woods and that’s their dream, but that they love hanging out with their buddies and drinking beers for a couple of hours outside. So it’s more about community and not the actual activity. The actual passion is connecting with friends and other loved ones and it doesn’t necessarily matter how or where it’s done.
See the difference?
Now if you were Tiger Woods and you said you loved golf, maybe I would believe you… But for the rest of us, likely not!
So if you’re living a life that feels passion-less, take a look at what you’re doing. What about it keeps you doing it? Is it just some kind of intellectual spark? If so, where is the emotion surrounding it? And if there is no emotion, what in your life could create greater and deeper emotion for you?
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