Burning with passion this Valentine’s, or feeling a little too cool?: How do you throw yourself into your dream when you don’t know what it is?
Do you have the belief and passion to take the leap? Photo by Kid Circus on Unsplash
“I would give it my all and just go for it, if only I knew what ‘it’ was”
By it’s very nature, making a positive impact in the world and changing things for the better, (perhaps starting with your own life), is likely to mean doing things differently – differently to what you’ve previously done, maybe differently to what people around you do, or what society thinks you should do. You are also likely to come up with a lot of obstacles. There will be fear and rejection, and fear of rejection.
How do you keep going - or even start - in the face of all this? The passion, of course. Having a strong connection and alignment with your values, a conviction and belief in your path, generally being ‘fired up about it all’.
And herein lies the problem for most of us.
This blog post is going to turn up the heat and talk about passion. How it helps, why you can’t find it, and how to find it.
But don’t worry, no one is suggesting you jump into anything (unless you want to), get burnt or burned out – the first step is just allowing yourself to connect to a possibility and giving that possibility a little air and space.
Is there a small flicker of something that you can nurture? Photo by Liset Verhaar on Unsplash
The power of finding your passion
Psychologist Angela Duckworth is well-known for her work on the power of grit. The word ‘grit’ makes me think of clenched teeth and sheer will power, but when you look at Duckworth’s work, passion and interest are at the heart of what makes that grit possible – you’re unlikely to be able to muster up grit about any old thing.
In Daniel Pink’s book ‘Drive’ he argues that motivation comes from goals being aligned with mastery, purpose and having autonomy. Yes, it’s still hard work and things can still go wrong, but the engine of finding your intrinsic motivation will power you along a lot more easily than trying to drag yourself along to meet others’ expectations.
Robert Greene, author of Mastery, when talking about the process of people gaining mastery, says that being aligned with an ‘intense connection and desire allows them to withstand the pain of the process – the self-doubts, the tedious hours of practice and study, the inevitable setbacks, the endless barbs from the envious. They develop a resilience and confidence.’ Although for Greene the goal is mastery, and here the goal is making a difference or making an impactful change, I think there is enough overlap: mastery increases the potential for impact, and both are served by that passion and connection.
And what about your passion, connection or desire? Maybe you know you want to do something but don’t know what it is. Or you know that you don’t like the way things are, but you aren’t drawn towards a ‘better’ way. Or you have an idea, but you don’t really know, and without that conviction, it seems too risky to rock the boat and go through the challenge of change. In the meantime, you are just stuck with the sense of things being not right, of frustration, unfulfillment or life passing you by.
Passion makes you strong enough to do hard things and persevere. Photo by Sarah Cervantes on Unsplash
Why is it hard to connect with our passion?
Maybe part of you questions whether you even have a passion. Wouldn’t it be obvious if it was really there?
Our society and upbringing, for many of us, has not been conducive to finding out what it is that we are passionate about, what we really want, or what has enough meaning for us that we can give it our all and ‘just go for it’.
Many of us experienced expectations and pressure from the people and systems around us (even if they were delivered with the best intentions), being strongly guided to ‘suitable paths’, told what ‘good’ looks like, and not given much space for exploration and discovery.
As an 80’s child, I do get a sense of there being a ‘go for your dreams’ message (maybe from Barbie??) which might have been more than previous generations got, but there were also stronger messages like ‘do the right thing’, ‘do the responsible thing’, ‘don’t rock the boat’, ‘do as you’re told’ etc. Perhaps this is familiar for you. And if you don’t have enough clarity, or know how to get that clarity, about what your dreams are, it’s really hard to ‘go for’ them, or to accept the risk of things going wrong, or disappointing others. So it makes sense to take the sensible path, try to line your dreams up with others’ expectations, make the ‘right’ choices. Maybe you told yourself it’s just temporary and it’s just until you work out what you really want to do.
Daniel Kahneman, renowned economist and psychologist says that because of ‘Default Bias’ we expect to experience more regret if things don’t work out when we have chosen a path that differs from the norm or default. So, unless we feel really sure of a positive outcome, we tend to stick to the default, even if the default is actually less likely to lead to success. He argues that this is because we are irrational decision-makers. As Duckworth and others’ work shows, choosing a path that excites us personally would increase the chances of motivation, grit and inspiration, that would then increase the likelihood of success. But because of default bias, we are often cautious about even exploring those options to discover what they might hold in store for us, favouring the default. The more you go down this route, the harder it is to even remember what lights you up.
We tend to follow the sensible tracks that are laid out for us for lack of a better idea. Photo by Lisha Riabinina on Unsplash
So how can you start to reconnect with that flame?
1. Get out of your stressed-out brain
Modern life for most people seems to result in living in a state of chronic stress and pressure. And when it comes to your dream or the idea of making changes, it feels like the stakes are high, and you don’t want to get it wrong – especially if you are feeling very responsible, or you are someone with traits of perfectionism and people pleasing. In that state of physiological stress arousal, you are:
More likely to want certainty and be risk-adverse so it’s hard to even think about change
More likely to see problems and why it won’t work
Less likely to be able to see possibilities or think creatively to find a way of making it work.
When you are trying to connect with your dream, you need to get out of that frazzled ‘I need to know what my dream is and I don’t know what my dream is aaargh’ state. Take some time to calm yourself, get out of your brain and into your body. See what comes up. It might not be much, but give it a little space without breathing down it’s neck and see where the idea goes.
A stressed-out brain finds it hard to be creative, take the pressure off. Photo by Sami Matias on Unsplash
2. Ask yourself whether you know more than you think
In my experience, when people say they don’t know what their dreams are, or they don’t know what they are passionate about, or they don’t know what path to take, it quite often turns out that they do know something, but it was more about finding the courage to fully voice it or even fully complete the thought. The barrier isn’t necessarily because it’s a crazy or risky idea, but often just because it means altering the tracks that were laid all those years ago or you feel under pressure to make the ‘right’ choice.
So do you really, really have no idea, not even an inkling? Don’t worry about it being realistic or meeting any of the requirements that a ‘good dream should have’. There’s always time for you to stomp on your dream later. Don’t worry if it is not fully formed or whether it ‘makes sense’. Just, out of interest, follow any little whisp you notice lurking there. Once you’ve allowed the idea to emerge, you still don’t have to go chasing after it. You could just take a closer look, maybe imagine what one little step towards it might look like, or see if there is one part of it that seems more feasible, or just look at what it is about it that appeals so perhaps you can just tweak your existing path. Your idea might be shy so please don’t scare it off with talk of ‘being realistic’ or ‘practical’ too soon.
3. Discover your calling
Robert Greene says that we all have things that we have a deep and core connection to, that even from birth we have a preverbal attraction or inclination that might be more like a sensation of ‘deep wonder, sensual pleasure, power and heightened awareness’. These inclinations appear before we have been overly influenced by society, parents, beliefs, baggage, so he says ‘dig for signs of such inclinations in your earliest years. Look for its traces in visceral reactions to something simple; a desire to repeat an activity that you never tired of; a subject that stimulated an unusual degree of curiosity; feelings of power attached to particular actions.’ If you can’t come up with anything, don’t worry, here’s another version:
4. Look at your sparks and narks
Go chronologically through your life noting down experiences that stand out to you from your earliest memories –jobs, hobbies, voluntary work, or any particular events / activities (eg involvement in the school play, having a stall at the car boot sale) that pop up in your memory as you go through, and pick out the ‘sparks and the narks’ – what was it in those experiences that gave you sparkly feelings of being ‘you’ (feel free to choose a different word to spark ((and nark)), but use whatever represents that feeling that you are looking for). Then go through the list of sparks and narks (separately from their context) to see if you can spot any patterns. Then get curious about what you can learn from that, or just let it simmer. I did this myself a few years ago and it was majorly illuminating. Watch out for surprises that sneak in the side way – for example, was the special feeling of sitting and writing essays actually about the essay-writing, or the music that you were playing while you wrote?
5. Explore and interact with the outside world
Angela Duckworth says: “Interests are not discovered through introspection. Instead, interests are triggered by interactions with the outside world. The process of interest discovery can be messy, serendipitous and inefficient. This is because you can’t really predict with certainty what will capture your attention and what won’t. You can’t simply will yourself to like things either…. Without experimenting you can’t figure out which interests will stick, and which won’t.”
You might need to create some space in your current situation to give room for curiosity and exploration here, but also bear in mind that doing things that are not in-line with your passion can be draining, whereas doing things that you enjoy (even if they would be stressful for someone else), could be invigorating for you. So, you don’t necessarily need to wait until you feel energised enough to start trying the things that you think you want to do – by doing them you might get the energy to make the changes you want. I would also add, try to let go of the end-goal when trying these things and keep it open and exploratory if possible.
Exploration comes before discovery. Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
6. Stop trying to ‘know’, find courage instead
You might know as much as you can know now, without taking a step forward, giving it a go and experiencing it. So it could be that now is the time for courage more than clarity.
If you’ve been trying to find your passion you might not have the right answer yet. But perhaps asking for ‘the’ answer, the ‘right’ decision, the ‘best’ choice, is putting unrealistic restrictions on yourself. If there is a ‘right’ decision for you at this moment in time, you will probably already know it if you are honest with yourself. Otherwise there probably isn’t a right one because no one can predict the future.
It doesn’t have to be perfect – it usually takes some degree of mastery to get to that delicious, creative, flow state, and on the way there will be some slog. So don’t expect it to feel perfect at the start as a marker of whether or not it’s ‘right’. But does it have potential to be something you could be passionate about? Something that would be worth the warts? This may not be your life-long path and we can’t ever really know how things are going to turn out, but is it something that feels worth a shot now?
Making a change might not be as scary as you think. Trying to do what is expected of you can be harder than something that you feel personally connected to or motivated by. And trying to juggle different, conflicting expectations is even harder, and you can end up disappointing everyone. You might find that it is actually easier when you do make that change to your own path. Or at least more rewarding.
7. Get support
There are resources available to help us connect to our passions, dreams and values, make courageous decisions and choose our own path, so you don’t have to work it out by yourself. Aside from books and webinars, coaching is increasingly democratised and becoming available for anyone (as discussed in a recent International Coaching Federation webinar). Coaches are increasingly certified, qualified and continuously accessing training and support to enable them to navigate the complexities of the humans in front of them. And this increasingly means integrating the emotional, physical, psychological, material and practical, and helping people to connect to their inner wisdom in a way that equips them for the present and the future. And I am one of these ICF accredited, trained coaches, with a Psychology MSc, who is obsessed with learning more and more about how to help you access that inner wisdom – so please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Ready to get passionate?
Which point resonates with you? Are you one that already knows and just needs courage? Or like Robert Greene suggests, can you now start to connect with a visceral early memory? Or is it going to be about experimenting? If it’s a matter of getting some support – don’t be shy, send me an email. I’m all for helping you make this valentines the kick-starter for a life of passion.
