Searching For Your Passion

Searching for your passion and yearning for your true calling seems to be an integral part of the human experience. Here is what I have learned from my search – you can’t strategically discover your passion through some intellectual scavenger hunt.

Passions are born out of experiences.

Think about experiences that left a mark on you. You’re crazy about that one movie because of how it made you feel when you watched it for the first time. You cry whenever you hear that sad song because it was the first song you heard after you broke up. You love surfing because you like the taste of salt on your lips, water in your hair, and sun on your back. The emotions that they conjure up — the passion that you feel — only came after that initial experience.

Discovering your passion follows that same pattern. If you want to discover your burning passion, then put yourself in a position to have a burning experience.

Read something new, talk to someone new, go somewhere new. Maybe you know a lot about dolphins, but you’ve never been to Hawaii where you can swim with them. Go there. Try it out. See where it takes you. Have a new experience — whether that’s around a familiar topic or an unfamiliar one.

Before discovering your passion, be curious and take action. Make different choices. Search out new opportunities. Create new experiences. It is in the act of creating new experiences that we discover who we are.

If you’re searching for your passion now and haven’t found it, what makes you think continuing your search in the same way will magically bring your passion to you? Change your actions if you want to change the outcome.

If you want a new passion, then you need to create a new experience. Most people will tell you to start with what you know. I disagree.

If everyone only did what they already knew, then we would never learn new skills, change careers, or try anything different.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with utilizing your current skill set. I encourage that. There’s no reason to waste the talent you already have. But don’t choose a new path simply because you can do it.

Your choices should be based on what you like and not what you know. What you like is different than what you’re passionate about. Likes may turn into passions eventually, but they are simply interests right now. Everyone has an interest in something.

To find your passion, you need to dedicate yourself to a cause.

Eventually, the new experiences will deliver you to the next step: finding a goal to work towards. Just the simple act of having a goal and striving for it, whatever it is, plunges you into a strong current that carries you to places you could never have expected or believed were possible.

The value in having a goal and pursuing new experiences is as much the journey it leads us on — the experiences we have, the lessons we learn, the doors it opens — as it is the accomplishment of reaching it. You cannot predict where a journey will lead and what passions it will reveal. You can only start the journey and let the passions evolve naturally.

The pursuit will bring your passion to you.

I’ve been fortunate to have perfect moments when I have said to myself, “This is it, and this is what I am meant to do.” I can tell you that you don’t find moments like that, they find you.

And when you show up every day and dedicate yourself to a cause and continue your journey towards new experiences and new goals, those perfect moments have a tendency to find you more often.

Finding your passion isn’t about knowing with certainty that you have chosen the right direction for yourself. It’s about picking a direction and pursuing it with urgency, consistency, and enthusiasm.

And if you do this, then the experiences that you have will bring your passion to you.

Are you wearing the best colors for you? According to the ancient art of Feng Shui, each of us has a power color based on the five elements and the day we were born. Sign up for my email list and provide me the day, month, and year of your birth and I will send you your birth element and power color!