Unlock your True Calling: 7 Steps to Discover Your Passion
Being successful in life is what everyone dreams of. Everyone wants to be successful, and everyone interprets being successful in a different way. Some feel that being successful means having a lot of money. Others feel like being healthy means being successful. Most agree on one thing: someone who is really successful is someone who is following their passion. Finding our passion sounds much easier than it actually is. So, here are 7 steps to discovering our passion.
Today, we’ll discuss the following topics:
- Self-Reflection
- Experimenting
- Listen to Your Inner Voice
- Identify Patterns
- Seek Feedback
- Embrace Challenges
- Take Action
- Key Takeaways
1: Self-Reflection
To understand what our passions are, we must understand who we are. We must know what our personal values are and what makes us feel certain ways. What makes us happy? What makes us sad? We must know ourselves. A great way to practice self-reflection is to write in a journal. Expressing our feelings on paper helps us understand them. If we understand what causes these emotions, we can find our passions easier. In a previous post, we discussed journaling more in depth. Take a look at it: Pages of Self-Discovery: The Magic of Journaling (maxwagenaar.net)
2: Experimenting
Once we understand what our emotions are, how we express them, and what causes them, we can try new things. Just try it out. If we are the type of person who likes to exercise, try out different sports. Many sports clubs have free trials; try them. Afterwards, we can reflect on it and decide if it is something that we like or not, if it made us happy or not. If we want to learn new things but don’t know what to do, just try a few things. There are plenty of free courses online, either on the internet or on YouTube. It has never been so easy to learn for free.
3: Listen to Your Inner Voice
We should not only base our decisions on reflecting, but we must also base them on intuition and our gut feelings. We all had moments where we were hesitant and missed a great opportunity. If we followed our intuition, we might already have found our passion. At the moment we are doing things, ask ourselves if it is fun and if it is something we can do many times. In the moment, our feelings are stronger than afterwards. So, why not do both? Follow your intuition, and reflect afterwards.
4: Identify Patterns
Most people have some structure in their daily lives. However, everyone has some kind of structure that is often overlooked. We did things in our youth that we still do today because, as kids, we just really liked them. Now we do it without even thinking. Or we stopped doing it, but we still like to do it. For example, when I was 8 years old, I wrote small stories about my day or about whatever came into my mind. I liked writing and did it quite often. When I was in high school, I stopped writing for some reason, even though I did not hate it. Now I started writing again because I still liked it. I found out that it's something I’m passionate about and something I could do every day. So, looking back and seeing that I really liked writing, even though I did not associate writing with something I liked or hated, got me back to something I’m passionate about. Identifying patterns can really help us find our former passions or new passions.
5: Seek Feedback
If we cannot find our passions on our own, why not ask others? Other people think in a different way than we do. Maybe they see something in us that we did not find ourselves. Ask others what they think our passion is and what they think we excel at. Ask people close to us who know us well, and it is likely they will mention something that we did not think of.
6: Embrace Challenges
Even in things we are passionate about, we will face certain challenges, failures, and setbacks. These are things we must not be afraid of because we know that they will happen at some point. And not even once will we face dozens of challenges, failures, and setbacks. We must embrace them and learn from them. In previous posts, we talked about overcoming failures. So, if that is something that you struggle with, definitely read more about it here: Max Wagenaar: Failure and Emotional Resilience
7: Take Action
The last step in our journey towards finding our passions is to act. We can’t find and follow our passion if we do nothing. We can’t find and follow our passion if we just continuously look at how we must find it. 10% is planning, and 90% is action. So, build a strong foundation of knowledge, but don’t waste too much time on it; try things. The best thing that can happen is that we fail, because if we learn more from that, then we can learn from anything else. Act.
Key Takeaways
By following these seven steps, we most likely will find our passion. First, we need to understand ourselves and try new things. Then we must reflect on these new things, but do not reflect too much. We must also follow our intuition; it can give us a lot of opportunities we would otherwise miss. We can identify patterns to find our passion, for example, by looking back at things we did as children. When we do not find it ourselves, just ask others what they think of our passions and qualities. Finally, we must prepare ourselves for the challenges we will face in following our passion, and we must act. By doing these, we are going to find our passion.
Links
If you want to read more about this topic, you can follow these links:
Effective Relaxation Techniques for a Calmer Mind and Body (maxwagenaar.net)
37 Questions to Help You Identify Your Passions | Psychology Today
Finding Success Starts with Finding Your Purpose (hbr.org)
Here's Why Passion Is the Key To Success - Goalcast
19 Quotes About Following Your Passion | SUCCESS
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