If I hear one more person tell me to follow my passion, I am going to lose it. I feel like I am experiencing a personal passion pummeling on a regular basis.

Can you readily identify your passion in a business context? If so, I am happy for you, but I find I struggle with this.

I am the type of person who thrives in a situation where I need to do several different things, and if you are also an entrepreneur, you may as well. Sometimes I am doing business planning and sometimes I am coaching. Sometimes I am building a landing page. Sometimes I am editing this blog. And while I am passionately committed to my clients’ success, I can’t say I am following my personal passion per se.

To me, following your passion, as in one passion, sounds very narrow and confining. If I was focused on finding a cure for Alzheimer’s or something, that would more fit following your passion to me than what I do.

There are always cultural trends and words that become trite from overuse. I guess passion is having its turn.

But what do you do, if like me, you can’t identify your one passion?

Get curious

Passion is all big and fancy, but curiosity is small and unassuming. If you can’t identify your passion, maybe you can get curious. Be an observer in your own life and business. Look for times you find yourself thinking something is interesting. Or when you have a question about why something works a certain way, or why someone hasn’t fixed a problem yet.

Getting curious keeps you in childlike wonder, which is a great starting point for ideation and innovation.

Have fun

Asking yourself what would be fun or how something could become fun is a useful tool for getting out of a stuck mindset or a cranky mood. Fun lightens things up and creates energy. They say that following your passion unleashes energy, but if you can’t get to passion, fun might be the jumpstart you need.

Run experiments

Few decisions are ever end game. We can go round and round in our heads for years, instead of just going and trying something to see how we feel about it. Often, there is a way to try a small thing that won’t require a ton of time or resources.

If your experiment works and you enjoy it, great. You can go do more of that.

If you don’t enjoy it or it doesn’t work, that’s fine too. You learned something and know you don’t want to do that again.

Remember that people tend to regret what they didn’t try more than what they did do and failed.

From my point of view, passion is a nice to have, not a need to have. I would love to identify something that makes me jump out of bed in the morning ready to launch into my day without the caffeine boost of my usual two cups of coffee. But instead, I will get curious, have some fun, and try some things. It’s worked pretty well so far for me.

 

Photo by Randalyn Hill on Unsplash