Over the past couple of years, I keep hearing young professionals and millennials around me feel frustrated because they can’t figure out where to take their lives.
With your whole life ahead, of course, it’s going to be scary, there is no way to know how things will turn out. It’s completely normal you are afraid of the impact your choices will have. But, what you can’t do is to continue running away from figuring out what you want to do.
With everybody telling you to find your passion and change the world by doing what you love, it adds extra pressure. But in the end, it’s all up to you to do something with your life. You might as well make it something you love doing.
Then why is finding your passion so hard?
It actually isn’t that hard. As a matter of fact, most of the problem is not even in finding your passion. Most of it’s actually an ass problem. Yes! An ass problem! We just don’t put our asses on a chair and begin to do the work.
With half of the problem gone, the next challenge comes. Getting to know yourself…
Quick question: you spend a lot of time getting to know other people but, how often do you invest the time to get to know yourselves?
Once you sit down, it’s all about yourself, which can be very awkward if you have never tried it before. And believe it or not, most people haven’t.
But in order to find out what your passion is, you will need to self-reflect. You will need to go through a process of self-discovery and look into your life from an external perspective.
As scary as it may sound, it actually feels great as you begin to learn about yourself. With each step, you will feel your self-awareness skills improve and therefore, your emotional intelligence and finally your empathetic skills.
But first, you must deal with the ass problem. One step at the time, please…
Learning from experience.
Throughout life, crossroads will come and go, each will take you through new and exciting experiences you could have never imagined. They will be very rewarding, pushing you to grow and get out of your comfort zone and it’s only with time that they begin to get easier.
Only as you get to know yourself, making these choices becomes easier. That is why as for now, the best is to prepare yourself by making an action plan that will get you ahead.
By focusing on where you want to go, this will give you a plan of action that will allow you to evaluate your options. Does doing this take me closer to my overall goal? The problem is that many times we don’t have a clue what our main goal is.
Quick question: Life will throw opportunities at you all the time, so how will you evaluate them if you don’t know where you want to go?
At university, your goal was to graduate and that made it easy to make decisions and motivated as well. Most of the classes you didn’t go because of the class but because you knew you had to pass it if you want your degree.
And your biggest incentive is not the degree as such, but the idea of what you can do with that degree later in your professional life. So even if you didn’t like it, you just made sure to deliver.
Once you graduated, your goal was to get experience so you look for jobs. And now? I’m not saying you need to plan everything because you will change, things will change and plans will have to be changed. But, you do need a rough sketch to guide yourself.
Hitting the jackpot.
Finding your passion is the result of looking into yourself. Of asking yourself what are the things you love to learn and talk about? What are those things you find yourself reading about at 2 am? What are those things you do because you “want” and not because you “have” to?
What is it about these things that make you feel so fulfilled? Would you like to do them more often? Can you actually do them on a daily basis? I’m sure you will be able to make quite a list of things if you were taking the time to reflect on these questions right now.
As you can see, once you find a process that guides your thoughts, it gets easier and easier to come to the answers you are looking for.
If you can think of somebody who may benefit from reading this post, feel free to do them and me a favor by sharing it with them.
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Cheers!