I listened to Mel’s Session on Discovering Your Passion today. I appreciate the methods she suggests for helping find your passion. I’ve watched and listened to other speakers and writers talk about pursuing passions, and more often than not, they suggest exploring the things you love to do and finding a way to make it a career. Well, for me, this alone didn’t work. This restates the obvious thing we all “know” to do, but it does not give real direction or steps to do it. I have a lot of different interests and passions. I struggled to narrow those down and to figure out how to use those as building blocks for a career. How could I fit my love for animals, wildlife, the environment, innovation, discovery, helping others bring out the best in them, problem-solving, art, design, creation, and my ongoing list of new interests, into a career that I enjoy and stay passionate about and is a realistic option? With my list, most of the passions are very low-paying or would be not-for-profit hobbies.
I hear a lot of motivational speakers talk about how if you follow what you’re passionate about, the money will soon follow… my thoughts to that are how soon? Weeks, months, years? And how am I to feed my pets and pay my bills, in the meantime, while I wait for that money to start rolling in?
All of these thoughts about how large the task list is for finding what I’m passionate about, following those passions to narrow down options, creating a career out of one or more of those passions, and building a career that makes enough money for me to survive and even thrive… well, to say the least, is very overwhelming. Mel Robbins’ 5 Second Rule and her follow up in her sessions, on her blog, and on her videos, help show and explain how to break down the process of finding what your passionate about. I believe these techniques will be tremendously helpful. When one or two small steps forward are taken, like the ones she suggests, the next step in the process will manifest, and then the next, and then the next, until you are already there (in the career you’re passionate for) and wondering how it happened.
In my next post, I’ll dive deeper into the first task I am going to work on to begin the process of finding what I’m passionate about.
E.L. Rehmann