How to Find Your Passions - Your Skills and Talents

How do you find your passion - Part 4

Who are you? What do you do well?

Searching for your passion does not have to be hard or complicated. Your passion will be something that is aligned with who you are at heart. It's who you already are. It will unfold from what you know, what comes easily to you, what skills you have gained.

Its much easier to build on where you are now, rather than reinvent yourself in some new territory. Where you are now is exactly OK for now. Well, it has to be, doesn't it? Doesn't mean you can't change things and move forward. But moving forward always happens from Here.

The next step forward is what we are searching for. And it's much quicker to take a step from Here, than to wish we were elsewhere, and try and get there before we go anywhere.

We've been looking at what your past highlights - where you were successful already, and what you chose to do as a child, and your experience. Now we are going to investigate who you are. What do you do well?

What are your talents?

Life is short and you already have a bunch of experiences, inherent talents, skills and aptitudes. Chances are many of these are ones you have developed or followed because you are interested or passionate in them in some way.

So, start by making a list, or a mind map (see the diagram below for an example) of YOU.

Who are you at heart?
What are your personality attributes?
What are your skills?

Don't worry if the things that pop up don't seem to be career focused. If you are good at crafts say, but can't see how to make money out of that, or absolutely don't want to. What we're aiming for here is a bit of a brainstorm to bring to light things that are so YOU that they seem natural, and therefore possibly not obvious.

- Are you logical?
- Feeling based?
- What are your values?
- Are you crafty? Love making things?
- Sporty?
- Do you love teaching people?
- Are you a natural leader?
- Are you inquisitive?
- Do you love learning?
- Intuitive? concrete and realism based?
- Interested in giving to others or the world?
- Do you have specific skills e.g. good at gardening, or preserving

An easy way to uncover your passions

What to Do Now

Make your list as long as you can, include everything you can think of, no answer is wrong. Remember - don't limit yourself to just those things that could be income earning or career creating.

To help you fill this out, use this free worksheet

DOWNLOAD WORKSHEET

One good way to organize all this information is to make a mind map. It might look a bit like this:

You can down load this free outline mind map

DOWNLOAD MINDMAP WORKSHEET

Then take your list and group things e.g. in the example I've grouped spinning and preserving into 'Survival Skills' because that is important to me. But you might group things differently, this is about YOU and what you value and how you see the world.

Any common themes? Group these together too then.

Break each part down into smaller parts - so in my example 'Logical' breaks down into 'Persistent thinking' and 'Deep thinking' and 'Analytical' and 'Step by step'. These things have meaning to me, so I put them in. You are creating things that have meaning for you.

Review

Anything surprising?

Anything leap out as new information?

Anything that lights you up?

Good, these are some of the things you are trying to uncover here.