Finding your true passion isn’t something you can consciously pick. Finding your true style isn’t something you can consciously pick. Finding your true voice isn’t something you can consciously pick. Designing your dream career isn’t something you can create overnight.
Sometimes, what you’re passionate about is not what you’d like to consciously do. You might know what is “best” for you right now on a surface level, but it might not be what is meant for you to do. Unfortunately, what we think is “best” for us is often a result of what we’ve conditioned ourselves to believe.
I’m not going to stop you if you disagree with me. Go ahead, you CAN consciously pick them. But I can’t guarantee it will feel 100% natural with you. There will be something unnatural and fake about it, like you are depriving your true self of what it is carried out to do. There might be something that you feel is missing. Or, if you deny it long enough, you might think it doesn’t even exist anymore.
There are a lot of talented people in this world who I admire greatly, and I’d love to experience what it’s like being them. I love their vision, voice, and mission. They truly inspire me. But I’m not going to try to be like them because that is not on my path.
Some people find their passions early in life. They know what they want to be when they’re a kid and keep at it for the rest of their lives. But for those of us who find our calling at a later age, it can be scary.
If you haven’t found it early on, don’t worry. It’s not like one day you wake up and are hit with a thunderbolt and you’ve decided what you are meant to do for the rest of your life. And even if you did, you’d still be evolving on your journey. This process is never stagnant. You’re always putting together puzzle pieces and making sense of the bigger scheme of things.
The only way to find out what you’re called to do is to really, deeply know yourself and allow yourself to explore. If you don’t give yourself space to explore and experiment, there’s nothing to help drive the process.
Finding your passion is not all sunshine and roses. You might try to run away from it. You might try to deny it. You might dismiss it. It doesn’t pay the bills, you say. I have a different career I need to pursue, you say. It doesn’t make any sense to my plan, you say. I need to appear this way, you say.
You might do this for twenty years, late into retirement, or your entire life. (I truly hope you don’t do this for your entire life, which is why I’m writing this!) But it will always try to seek you out in some ways. If you haven’t found your passion now (or think you haven’t), the answer is actually sitting with you, but it’s at the very back of your mind and hidden away.
If you find yourself running away from it for whatever reason, I plead with you to stop, look at it in its eyes, and give it a chance. It has things to teach you on this journey of discovery.
At the end of the day, it isn’t about finding your passion. Your passion finds you.
