On Finding Your Passion..

Passion is a big word that gets banded without cease around internet and coaching circles and pretty much anywhere where people are looking for success and fulfilled lives.

But I think there’s a huge mistake which is inherent in the phrase “find your passion”.  This kind of implies that it’s out there somewhere and you have to look for it.  Perhaps it’s like treasure on a desert island and only a lucky few may ever find it.  Or God forbid, your passion is actually located inside you!  How the hell are you going to find it now?  Maybe a six-month trip around India will do the trick, and once fallen fowl of the local food and your insides are being churned up outside it may pop out in the wreckage.  It’ll be one of those Eureka in Nirvana moments where love and life and identity and cosmology realign themselves to propel you along a path to happiness and stardom and saving the world, springing out of bed at 5am every day in order to move things along.

But it seems that the nature of Passion is very different indeed.  I think I can proclaim that I’ve found my passion, here, on the internet, doing my job, and talking to you.  This is not Romeo and Juliet Passion (sorry baby), but what it is is a slow realization looking at events that have led up till now.  Just like you can better judge a lover not by what they say but by what they do; you can better find a passion not by what you think but by what you repeatedly happen to do.  I thought that Coaching would be a nice job, something that aligned with my beliefs, values and lifestyle desires.  But it wasn’t until the end of 2009 when I realized that I hadn’t taken a holiday all year because I’d spent all my cash on training that I realized something bigger was up.  Social media didn’t exactly get my juices gushing but when you’ve spent the three last consecutive Friday nights in because you’ve found another interesting source of information, things start to add up.

Maybe for a lucky few finding a passion is some kind of volcano moment: one that growls and rumbles and spectacularly spits lava into the air, stopping flights for three weeks as far away as the other side of the continent as the realization is confirmed.  Maybe for others it’s like a stone that drifts down a wintery mountain, collecting snow and momentum for a fair time before someone’s awake enough to see it and shouts “avalanche”.