Living life in tune with your passion is one of the most effective ways to ensure you are happy, motivated, productive, and get the most out of your life.
For those of us who are less practical (you know who you are…you tend to be called “dreamers” or “artistic” or even “unbalanced” or “crazy”) identifying and following your passion is often much easier, the challenge becomes determining how to live your life of passion and pay the bills.
For everyone else who fits into the more practical category, there are many reasons you find to either ignore or delay identifying and living in alignment with your passion.
The practical side of you forces you toward conventional paths, sacrificing the longer-term for shorter-term opportunities even though they may not in any way relate to your passion.
And for those of you out there like me, you have both of these at almost equal measure, your daily life is quite conflicted between massive desire to live your passion but an engrained practicality to tactically make the safest, most secure (seemingly) route in the short term. For those of you who relate to me with this category, you are often dreaming, but defer those dreams until “someday” when your practical needs are fulfilled.
Making Your Passion Practical…Here’s How
For these last two categories (those who have not yet identified their passion in life and those that have identified it, but can’t seem to direct their life to live in alignment with those passions), one of the main obstacles is understanding how to turn your passion for some “thing” into a broader passion that you can relate to more opportunities in your life.
For example, taking your passion to be an artist and turning that into a passion to live in alignment with the passion to be artistic means that you can stretch your passion from strictly being a self-employed artist to someone who commissions their work to companies (for designs), murals for residential or commercial properties, to teach others the skill of art, etc… Suddenly you have more practical applications that give you more options while still allowing you to live in tune with your life passions.
I often have worked with people that have identified their passion very specifically (Ex. produce video games, to paint, to play the guitar, etc…) and taken that real passion expanding options that still allow someone to live aligned with those passions…
- The artist can become an art teacher, freelance or employed designer, website designer, teacher, etc…
- The person wanting to become a guitar player can expand their roles into talent scout, guitar teacher, produce guitar training programs, studio work or Royalty Free music files that are sold, etc…
- The person who wants to escape their controlling employer but feels they have no entrepreneurial spirit or talent often has a passion for selling, writing, communicating, or some aspect that allows them to strike out on their own
So, if you struggle to either identify your passion in life OR if you have identified a passion which you find too limiting to act on (given your practical way of thinking), dig deeper and discover what the root of that passion really is…often you can make it more broad and identify further opportunities that make living your passions much more feasible than first thought.
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