How to Find your Passion - What did you do as a child?

How do you find your passion - Part 2

Here's a quick task, that follows on from the previous post 'Remember Your Successes".

1. What did you do when you were a child and you had free time?

2. What did you do as a child that made time fly? When you were 'in the zone'.

3. What did you look forward to most as a child?

Maybe it was playing with other kids in the play ground - playing what? Were you directing events, or being in the background? Or that quiet time alone at home making things. What type of things? - crafty, technical, large, outside? Or reading a book. What sort of book? Did you collect things? What sort of things? Were you always on the go physically? or preferred to sit in a corner somewhere?

The idea here is to drill down a bit into the detail. What was it about the activity that you enjoyed? How did you show up in that activity? What sort of skills were you using? What sort of interests were they? Maybe playing with dolls is not going to provide a life passion now, but were you being nurturing when you were playing with dolls? Or creating stories? Or crafting dolls houses?

4 Quick steps to do right now to find your passions

What to do now

1. Make a list of things you did as a child by choice

2. For each item, why did you choose that? What was enjoyable to you about that?

3. For each item, who were you being as you did it? - alone and quiet? a leader? in the limelight? analytical? physical?

4. For each item, what skills were you using?

To help you fill this out, use this free form (no email sign up required)

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And then, for extra points, Which of these activities do you still do now?

How to Find Your Passion - Remember Your Successes

How do you find your passions easily?

What do you do that is so natural to you, you hardly notice? What is easy, and just 'you'? Well, if you could find these things, they are an excellent place to start with finding your passions.

"Let the beauty of what you love be what you do"

                                                                Rumi

What are your successes?

How do you bring the obvious into view then? One way is to start by remembering your success already. Where have you already succeeded? Maybe its fitness, or you own your own home, or you have a thriving garden, or you got that qualification, or you have an amazing stamp collection.

Make a list of all the areas that are already a success. It doesn't matter if they seem irrelevant, or not something that will make you a career. In fact, those 'irrelevant' things may well be the very things that are hiding in plain sight, that point to your true passions.

What we are looking for here are the attitudes and things you did to make these areas a success, as well as things that you may have over looked as being important.

Why are these successful?

And then, why are these areas a success? You did some things to make them happen, right? They came about with effort and attitude and perseverance.

Here are some ideas from my own lists of successes, things that I (surprisingly to myself) did to make my areas successful.

- Know you will succeed
- Believe that you can
- Look at the positives
- Know the positive benefits of success and keep them in mind
- Give it your dominant attention
- It is a habit
- Do it every day
- Schedule it
- Keep doing it even when things get hard or boring
- Re-evaluate occasionally and make changes and tweaks to improve things
- Constantly learn
- Read books
- Research
- Improve constantly
- Enjoy doing it
- Be excited by it
- Get advice from experts
- Have a mentor
- Watch others
- Share it with others
- Find others doing the same thing
- Do it to a method
- Make easy small steps so you can accomplish small milestones (tick boxes are a favourite for me!)
- Don't give up
- Go with the flow

3 Easy steps to do right now to Find your Passions

What to do now

Now you need to make your own list.

1. Find an area where you already have success.

2. Why is this area a success? Use the list above for inspiration, and add any others that apply.

3. List all the things that you have done that make this area a success, as many as you can. Try for at least 10 reasons for each area of success.

Repeat for another area of success.

DOWNLOAD this worksheet to help you with this exercise

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Any common themes? Any things that took you by surprise? Any aha! moments? Excellent! We'll try a few other ways of tackling this problem, then put them all together and see what is revealed.

4 Critical Keys to Finding Your Passion

How do you find your Passion? 

Do you even have a passion? How do you find that one thing that will make all the difference to your life, make everything easy, and oh, make you a million dollars?

Well, I have said before that maybe we don't have One Thing that is our destiny. But what say we had some things that we just love to do? What say we have things that are as natural as breathing to us. And the trick with these things is that they are as natural to us as breathing, so we just don't notice them. Who actually notices breathing? Only people who can't do it well and have a problem, the rest of us do it on auto pilot.

I remember my talented sister when she was young, she can draw amazingly. Its just a thing she does. Not something that rates as extraordinary to her. A bit like people who can sing. Is it a valued thing? Well, probably not so much, its just what happens, right? But for the rest of us who can't draw / sing this seems like an incredible super power. The same with your passions. They're the things we do when we are doing 'stuff' and not noticing. So, how do we bring them to light, so we can see the things that are easy and natural and truly 'us'?

One way to start is to look at our lives and find the common themes. Start with this list and fill in some of these areas, and see if you can see the things that are hiding in plain sight.

4 Key Areas to Find your Passion

1. Look at your past

- Where have you been successful already? What areas of your life are good? It might be study, or your home, or relationships, or your fitness, or that excellent sport you play, or the cross stitch you can't wait to get home to and do. List them out.
- Why were you successful in these areas? What did you do to make them a success?
- Remember what you chose to do as a child when you had free time.
- What experience and life skills have you acquired?

2. Who are you?

- What are your unique attributes? Are you logical? Inquisitive? Caring?
- What are your values?
- What are your skills and talents?
- Complete this sentence "I am someone who..." and this one "I am a ....person".
- What do you believe?

3. What are you interested and drawn to?

- What do you love to do?
- What do you spend your time on?
- What do you spend your free time on?
- What are you doing when time flies?
- What are you doing when you feel most beautiful?
- What do you look forward to doing after work?

4. What would you like?

- What would be ideal in your life?

- If you could do anything for a job, what would it be?

- What is your dream?

- What would an ideal world be like?

I'll break these down a bit more in posts to follow.