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Lately, I’ve been seeing something repeatedly that scared me, shocked me, shook me to the core as both a person & as a creative career coach. During talks with clients, & in their written responses to the question, “What are you passionate about?”, I started getting answers like these:
“I like a lot of random things but I’m not passionate about anything in particular. I think.”
“Is it OK to not feel Passionate? I don’t think I’m passionate about anything.”
“ ” (Michelle’s note: Yes, it’s blank!)
“I always get stuck when it comes to questions about my passion. I guess I never really understood what it means.”
“Passion is a really loaded word for me. I don’t like to use it.”
Now, as someone who spent my early adulthood (& lots of time, energy & money!) chasing a passion to be on Broadway and who then, when I finally came to terms with not wanting to pursue an acting career, made it my one & only mission to find a new passion & make that into a career, I was floored. Flummoxed. Flamoozled. Also, confused. I mean, people decide to work with me because they want to find a career that they love, that are aligned with their skills & their interests & their values as grown-ups. Why the heck would you spend your hard earned money on working with me & not believe that you can find a passionate career, nonetheless that passion even exists?
So, in addition to getting feedback from my clients, I took this question to the streets (in this case, “the streets” is my blog), & got amazeballs insight into many of the Vampires that exist around the word “passion”:
- There’s immense pressure that comes with your “passion”. If you decide you have a passion, then you must do it every day for the rest of your life, and you must stop doing everything else you like to do for the rest of eternity, because that’s how long you must work on your passion. Also, if you decide you have a passion & then “fail” at it, you must kill yourself because you’ll never be happy in your life. Ever. No matter what. Even if a money tree grew in your backyard & you never looked older than 18. Even then.
- You’ve never liked anything enough to be “passionate” about it, and/or you’ve never felt that “spark” that’s supposed to come with finding your passion. You might really like painting or Lost or planning your wedding, but you didn’t necessarily want to do it all day every day for the rest of your days (see above). Since you can’t picture that One Thing you would want to voluntarily do forever & always, then you must not be passionate about anything.
- You have too many passions, which probably means you have none. Obviously, it ain’t possible to love to do lots & lots of things, so you’re just really scattered & unfocused & will never get anywhere with anything because you can’t commit to just doing one thing. Obviously.
- You decide not to believe in passion because you’d like to think you’re not missing out on anything awesome. If you’ve never experienced it, then it doesn’t exist…right?
- You haven’t let yourself think about what you even remotely like doing, because, as a grown-up, you’ll never be able to do it as a career. I mean, you might be passionate about shopping or gossiping with your friends, but that’s not valid. How can that translate into a career? It can’t. So it doesn’t count. So let’s not even think about it.
If you find that your Vampires whisper some (or all!) of these things to you, let’s play a game of What If. What if…you didn’t have to make a career out of your passion? What if…you believed that passion ebbs & flows over time? What if…you can be passionate about many things at once without burning out or spreading yourself too thin? What if…you decide it’s a greater risk to not try to live a life of passion that to try it & fail? What if…you use the word
