How To Discover Your Passion (even if you think you don’t have one)

Passion is one of those elusive words. It’s talked about so often that it almost feels like rhetoric at times. ‘Find your passion’ we hear from others following theirs. Those words can inspire, but they can also feel overwhelming for those of us not living our passion with little idea where to start.

One of the reasons living your passion can feel like such a heavy and far off undertaking is that so many of us have lost touch with what that is, completely. The realities of life often take us so far from our true desires that many people have no idea what their passion is.

I believe every one of us has a passion, regardless of how disconnected we may be from it in our present day lives. Thankfully, discovering what it is may be as simple as taking a journey back to the days when we led lives of freedom, imagination and play – our childhood.

Think back to when you were a young child. What did you love to do? Was it singing? Learning about the way the world worked? Doing arts and crafts? Building things with your dad in the shed? Playing doctors? Or something else entirely perhaps? Whatever it was, I think it meant something.

I believe our childhood passions mean a lot more than we give them credit for. They show our true innate desires in their most raw form. Before we are influenced by the expectations of our friends, family and society at large, we feel the pull of our truest passions.

As we grow older though, we often push these raw passions aside. We ascribe to them the label of fanciful childhood dreams. ‘Who am I to be an artist, doctor or astronaut?’ we ask.

We become so caught up in the idea of what we believe we are capable of and what we should aspire to based on other people’s assumptions and expectations that we completely lose touch with who we are.

If you’re sitting in a dull grey office right now thinking that this is not what you signed up for, or have just returned from a ten hour day serving customers you couldn’t care less for then maybe you can relate. I certainly could a few years ago.

I saw people around me pursuing their passions for music, art, study, travel and more. All the while I was working in a rather mundane and monotonous office environment doing the same thing day in day out. The problem was though, at that point I wasn’t quite sure what my passions were.

I have always been a creative person. As a child there was nothing I loved more than arts and crafts, particularly anything to do with fabrics, sewing and making things myself. As I grew up though I somehow fell out of touch with my creativity.

My journey of passion discovery took me from a simple five week introductory sewing course to living my passion as a fashion designer and blogger on all things creativity today.

Reconnecting for me was all about looking back at what I loved to do as a child and rekindling these interests in my life. When I did I found such true joy and passion that I wondered what I had been doing all those years without it.

If you’re feeling out of touch with who you are so much so that you don’t feel you have any passions at all, look back to when you were a child.

The interests you had as a child were free, uninhibited and full of boundless imagination. They are true and unaffected by restrictive beliefs, and they have the ability to set you free from the monotony that rules your life.

Discovering what your passions are when you feel so completely passion-less can seem daunting, but I believe the answers really are there already in our past.

Your true passions are within you, it’s just a matter of uncovering them. Once you do there’s no limit to where they might take you.

Posted in: Happiness, Self Improvement