KEYS TO FINDING YOUR PASSION

Most people try to justify their failures and uncertainties in life to not having enough passion in one thing or another. This causes them to be in a continuous cycle of pursuing boring and uninteresting things.

Contrary to popular belief, discovering what you love is not as challenging as it may seem. Passion is not a precious commodity that is reserved for a select few. Rather, it is a gift that everybody has been blessed with. The only thing we need to do to discover our passion is to have the right attitude. Work is supposed to be fun, so you must take the time to explore what you enjoy.

Rather than viewing yourself as hopeless because you have yet to discover your passion, begin to visualize yourself being surrounded by endless possibilities. The reality is that the only limit you have to be doing what you love is your lack of imagination. To break through from this prison of uncertainty and lack of passion, some simple and straightforward keys will lead you to discover your purpose and meaning in life.

Give Yourself the Opportunities

Giving yourself the opportunities to be passionate is often seen as an ordinary and immaterial step for finding your passion, despite its incredible significance. The reason why you aren’t pursuing what you love might be because you don’t believe you deserve to be passionate about what you do.

However, everyone has the right to be passionate about their pursuits in life. You need to wake up excited about your life because you have every right to do so. When you permit yourself to pursue what you do passionately, you will be in a much better position to help others as well.

You need to modify your mental picture if you want to resonate, accept, and love what you do. The moment you can align your identity with your passion, it will become much easier for you to find fulfillment in the things you do in life.

Allow Yourself to Explore

There exists one true passion for every one of us, and everything else is not worth the effort and focus. This creates the all or nothing mindset. Unfortunately, the danger with this perspective is that it makes you miss other opportunities in your pursuit to live passionately.

You have to understand that there is a spectrum of possibilities between your fulfillment and enjoyment in what you do. At one end of the spectrum is the work that you hate and can't do under every circumstance. The other end of the spectrum is the work that you love, and the mere thought of it brings you excitement and energy.

Between these two points is a huge range of possibilities for work that bores you, work that makes you feel indifferent, work that challenges and stimulates you, and tasks that make you come alive with excitement.

The best thing that you can do is to move toward the direction on the spectrum that makes you come alive. As you pursue what you love, you will come across options that will lead you to your ultimate life's purpose. The more aggressive and passionately you seek that work that excites you, the more efficient you will become at filtering out everything else that tends to drain your energy and distracts you from your desired outcome.

One important thing to note is that you will have to grow accustomed to liking work first before you love it. Don't spend too much of your time and energy with an attitude that dreads work because it will blind you, deplete you, and turn you away from your passion.

Look Closely at What You’re Doing

The opportunities to do what we love is right in front of us. Unfortunately, we tend to think that we can't make a meaningful living out of what we do. When you can change your perspective, you might find the things that you've been looking down on are actually the most fascinating and exciting.

Question Yourself

In an attempt to figure out what they are passionate about, most people fail to ask themselves the powerful questions. You need to give yourself time and let go of other activities to allow yourself to engage with your passion.

Often, we let other things take precedence at the expense of exploring the things that excite us. For you to succeed in finding your passion, you need to set aside quality time to figure out what makes you excited. Some of the questions that you need to ask yourself that can lead you to discover your purpose and passion are:
• What would you do, even if you won’t get paid for it?
• Do you have any gifts or skills that you can share with the world?
• When in your life did you feel most creative?
• What comes naturally to you?
• What have you accomplished in the past that was successful?

Asking yourself these questions will awaken your subconscious mind and allow you to start searching within yourself to discover your passion.

Always Test Your Passion

Before you take yourself down a certain path and incur expenses, you need to test your passion for establishing its credibility. You can accomplish this by taking courses online or at your local college to figure out if you have a true passion in the area that you want to specialize in. Going through this process of testing your passion will inform you whether it is real or just a fleeting fantasy
with no possibility for long-term fulfillment.

After you’ve found your passion, start living it the right way. It will pay for you to immerse yourself in a passionate and deliberate action rather than dipping your toe in forever. 

CHECKLIST

Finding your passion

 Give yourself opportunities
 Must align your identity with your passions
 Allow yourself to explore
 You may have more than one passion
 Look closely at what you’re doing
 Change your perspective
 Question yourself
 Set aside time to figure out what makes you excited

Setting Personal Goals That Fuel Your Purpose

 Goals help you concentrate your actions and energy
 Measures your progress
 A gap exists between setting and communicating goals
 Importance of Goals
 Reflect your purpose
 Point you toward the expected quality of performance.
 Affects your overall level of motivation
 Affects our capacity to perform
 Must meet three conditions for setting motivating goals
 Must have commitment to reach your goals
 Must set specific and unambiguous goals
 Must have goal-directed behavior and happiness
 Harnessing the Power of Setting Goals
 Self-efficacy
 The belief that you hold about your ability to perform
 Task complexity
 Must include short-term goals with complex tasks
 Provide immediate guidelines and incentives
 Goal commitment
 Two main categories needed to enhance commitment
 Prioritization
 Self-belief
 Feedback
 Timely feedback needed for effective goal setting
 Satisfaction
 As your success increase, your overall satisfaction grows
 Set challenging goals

Being Proactive

 Your own behavior is holding your back from finding your true purpose
 Your behavior is a direct product of your choices
 Take initiative
 Choose your responses to the circumstances around you
 Must be able to recognize your personal responsibility
 Become more aware of your proactivity
 Analyze where you focus your resources
 There are things you have no control over
 Only worry about those things you can control

Begin with the End in Mind

 Helps you align your life with your purpose
 Will enhance your personal understanding of your purpose
 Design or default
 Must develop a sense of self-awareness
 Must become responsible for your mental creations
 Otherwise you empower others to shape your life
 Write your own script
 More effective with your deepest values and principles
 Develop a personal mission statement
 Focus on what you want to be
 Focus on what you want to do
 Focus on your values

Leveraging Positive Visualization

 Visualization is instrumental in achieving your goals
 Your mind can’t differentiate between the real and imagined
 Building a foundation for your visualization
 Thoughts can create great change with visualization
 Creative visualization
 Mental technique
 Uses power of imagination to make changes in your life
 Can shape your character, habits, and circumstances
 Integrating creative visualization in your life
 Visualization requires persistence and patience
 Should practice for 15 – 20 minutes a day to start

Mastering Personal Management

 Helps in directing you on the right path
 The planning, organizing, directing, and coordinating aspects of your life
 There are four rules of self-management
 You must map your life
 You must review your assumptions
 Discover your strengths and weaknesses
 You must organize yourself
 You must develop your abilities
 Time management is also an essential personal management skill
 Helps you organize and execute your tasks

Learning to Overcome Negativity

 Will face challenges as you move toward your purpose
 Resilience can help you overcome negativity
 Personality characteristics of resilient people
 Optimism
 Independence
 Control and responsibility
 Developing personal resilience
 Incorporate positive affirmations in daily routine
 Enhance your communication skills
 Improve decision making skills

Leveraging Mentors and Coaches

 Has a tremendous impact on personal development
 Develop your skills
 Improve your performance
 Maximize your potential
 Become the person you want to be
 Learning to Live a Balanced Life
 Four dimensions of a healthy, balanced life
 Physical dimension
 Spiritual dimension
 Mental dimension
 Social dimension