Following Your Passion

Key Points:

• Our purpose doesn’t have to be loud and huge and in your face. It can be quiet and simple and sustaining, too.?
• Our passion is simply what lights us up from the inside, what drives us to engage and get curious and commit our energy to something.
• Invest our time in what makes us feel good, in what brings us joy and meaning and purpose; and it will allow living within our values as well help us to feel most aligned and authentic.

I want to tell you about the next phase in my resiliency trajectory model. It’s called RISING.?I will share with you my evidence-based principles and practical tools that will empower you to move from grasping to stretching. To transform yourself from a state of coping to the state of growth. Together, we will learn how to rise from our adversity into a greater sense of ease, spaciousness, and pleasure once again.?

I am glad you found your way here.?

This is the final and fifth part of my article series adapted from my newest white paper, discussing the next phase in my resiliency trajectory model.

FOLLOWING YOUR PASSION

We want to invest our time in what makes us feel good, in what brings us joy and meaning and purpose. Living within our values helps us to feel most aligned and authentic. But the meaning we make from our experiences and the purpose we feel is a very personal matter. It is different for everyone. We can find meaning in many places.?

I have noticed that our culture tends to put a lot of pressure on finding and then living our purpose. That pressure to find our purpose can sometimes lead us to feel inferior or like a failure, if we haven't managed to stumble upon it yet. The idea of purpose can also conjure up grandiose notions of obtaining fame and fortune or having wild adventures. But just because we are sold that idea of purpose doesn’t mean it is aligned with what we value. Our purpose doesn’t have to be loud and huge and in your face. It can be quiet and simple and sustaining, too.?

Ultimately, finding our purpose may be a path of exploration, experimentation, play, and following our passion. Our passion is simply what lights us up from the inside, what drives us to engage and get curious and commit our energy to something. When we feel vibrant, energized, and connected with what matters most to us, we likely have stumbled upon our passion.??????

THE CALLING SCALE

To the side is an adapted version of The Calling Scale by Dobrow and Tosti-Kharas. It is a handy tool to assist us in experimenting with finding our passion. In the spirit of play and with a healthy dose of humour, I like to plug in one work task that seems to take up an unfortunately large amount of my day – answering emails. If I fill in the blanks of the calling scale with the activity that I find myself doing so often, it becomes clear that I might need to readjust somehow to live in more alignment with my values, my passion, and my purpose, which for me is being of service.??

Reflection Questions:?

What am I passionate about? What fuels me??

What is most meaningful to me??

What feels essential to who I am or who I want to be?

How can I put more emphasis and time on this??

Side note: For me, it is not email.?

If I can leave you with one final thought, it is the simple fact that you and I and all of us are, by our very nature, creative. We were born to create lives filled with joy through the curious exploration of what makes us and those around us feel good. This season of rising from the collective adversity we have just experienced is a place of possibility.?

I invite you to hope-forward even as we are still building new familiars. Remember, this is not the new normal. We are co-creating new familiars. And in time, they will feel like the new patterns, routines, and rhythms of our daily lives.?

We can choose to create time in our lives right now for creative self-expression and to mindfully tend to our emotional wellbeing. The smaller… the simpler... the better…

We can choose to make meaning of all we have been through by getting curious about what we may have discovered about ourselves and our community through the ordeal.?

Better days are ahead.?

Take good care my friends,

Dr. Robyne

Interested in this topic? Please join me next week as I discuss how to cultivate resilient leaders and teams.?